I’m not sure Microsoft did this generation of consoles any favours by launching the Series S.
For those curious Swen spoke a little about the issues with Xbox they’ve been having and why they haven’t officially announced the game for Xbox yet in this interview on SkillUp a few days ago.
Basically, the gist is that it’s just not ready yet. They are currently trying to optimize it well enough so it runs 60fps even with 4 player co-op split screen which is a tall ask for the series S. Rather than hold PC and PS5 back they are instead focusing on their release and then will continue to work on Xbox after much like they did with Switch for DOS2.
The Series S specs exceed all the listed minimum specs on the BG3 Steam page for PC. How is the Series S holding anything back when they apparently support their game on shittier PCs?
The problem is that they have couch coop play. They struggle making it work with Series S. From what I understand, they cannot just make a separate version without coop just for Series S. All game features in Series X must also be available on Series S. I guess that’s a limitation imposed by Microsoft.
With PC you don’t have that limitation. If your computer can’t do couch coop then too bad for you. Minimum specs probably doesn’t account for coop.
I’m not sure why they don’t remove couch coop completely from the Xbox versions. Probably because they think it’s removing too much of their vision of the game.
So because 5 people on the face of the planet don’t want to use the internet like modern humans the rest of us have to suffer? When was the last time anyone actually used couch coop? It was Halo 2 for me.
A lot of people would love to have more split screen co-op (or Vs) games.
Its stupid that if I have a friend round I cant play a multiplayer game with them.
It’s an “if you build it they will come” issue. People stopped with couch parties because no games supported it anymore. When I’ve done it, most games in question had the option for internet play but it just wasn’t as social.
4 player co-op in Minecraft Dungeons, with the whole family, this year. I fucking love same device co-op games, but there are hardly any good options anymore, because apparently most people are either single or don’t like being in the same room as their partner or friends.
Me, with a mate a week ago on Resident Evil 5.
I constantly use it. I play with my partner, not with randos on the internet, not with friends. We live in the same house. We already bought 2 copies on PC to support the devs, but being forced to do so would be a shitty move. Also, when we have friends over, we do not expect them to bring their own PCs and shit if we want to game. Couch coop is where it’s at.
It may be due to Microsoft demanding certain minimum configurations: at the very least minimum resolution and minimum frame rate. On PC you can always go down to 240p and/or live with 10fps in very high density scenes. Microsoft can (and will) just say “no” if they try that on the Xbox S
I understand that but surely the articles should be “developers lie about minimum specs on PC” surely. I believe the concept of a lower priced and accessible console should be encouraged. If that means developers have to try a little harder to support people who buy a cheaper console then so be it.
I guess that’s debatable, depends on how you define what “it runs” means. PC gamers with dated hardware may be fine with playing on 1080p, while on the Xbox Microsoft might veto if it doesn’t run on 1440p and 30fps. Of course weaker hardware won’t run everything faster hardware can, you can’t just sprinkle infinite magic optimization dust on a game, there are simply limits what’s possible with weaker hardware, and once you’ve reached them you can’t just shout “enhance” like in CSI Miami.
So MS enforcing a level of quality is a good thing then. The alternative is 12 fps at 720p.
Not in my opinion: if you read the article, it clearly says that Microsoft enforcing a level of quality for dated hardware leads to devs abolishing features that the hardware series S hardware won’t be able to support. They also can’t decide to not support the S unless they abandon the Xbox series X as well. It leads to lower quality games for everyone, not just series S owners.
Probably because MS wants feature parity for both consoles where every feature runs at acceptable frame rates. Like the minimum PC spec most likely runs split screen like dog shit. But MS will not accept that for the Series S. While PC gamers with weak hardware accept that the game will not always run optimal
I have a feeling all of these complaints about supporting the Series S will disappear once the Switch successor releases and devs have a new console with weaker specs to complain about
But devs already have the Switch which has weaker specs.
Yes but most devs leave it out since publishers originally let them. Activision recently said ignoring the switch was a mistake so I doubt publishers will be making the same mistake again when we have a new switch
With how little power the switch 2 likely will still have, developers will still ignore it.
Yeah, I imagine it won’t be much stronger than the Steam Deck, and I’m dubious that that will serve 4-player splitscreen 60fps.
There’s a kind of upper limit we’re hitting with tech in regards to what can be delivered conveniently in a handheld format with a reasonable battery life. It might even explain why the Xbox S|X and PS5 are quite a bit bigger than predecessors.
Developers can shit on series S as much as they want, but if Microsoft relax the feature parity it would be a death sentence for the series S.
More of a death sentence than games just not coming to Xbox?
They could just run the game on xCloud for certain titles.
They could just run the game on xCloud for certain titles.
Not a bad idea honestly.
For those interested, a certain analytics company claimed on vague terms that certain markets sell more Series S than X consoles.
So that suggests, if Microsoft had never released that lower-power console, they’d be selling fewer of the pair this generation.
Ultimately, this issue seems specific to the devs’ wish for a 60fps 4-player split screen mode, something that certainly does seem computationally expensive even if resolution is lowered.
That article is from 2021 and doesn’t provide links or details to any data. The claim in the article says it’s 50/50. But again, no data is provided.
They had to optimise for a shitload of PC configurations, yet two Xbox ones are somehow difficult?
Not the same thing. Games aren’t built for every specific PC configuration. You’ve always adjusted graphics settings on PC depending on what your machine can run.
Ok eli5 how that’s not the same. If you had said “the Series Shit™ is weak sauce” I would have understood. But if that’s not the case, what stops the devs from turning the graphics dial all the way down to “washed out pixel mess” to accommodate the very much PC-like hardware. For which you don’t have to worry about players messing with the config because you simply don’t let them.
I literally posted an article where developers are yet again complaining about having to develop for the Series S and that it isn’t as easy as just “optimisation”. So maybe you can ELI5 how developing for consoles is exactly the same as developing for PC?
The article doesn’t explicitly state it but heavily implies “the Xbox series S is too weak for modern titles”. The optimization is necessary because it’s weak as fuck. It’s very much the same as optimizing for a PC, with the additional constraint that they need to artificially dial down the experience on other consoles, too, due to contract stipulations that prevents them from “giving an edge” to a competing product. The problem is not that it’s different from optimizing for PC, the problem is that it’s “optimizing for a PC that is in principle too weak to handle the load”.
They are the same. For some reason it is acceptable for developers to lie about PC minimum specs but Xbox trying to enforce a quality experience is just unacceptable.
And the same can happen for the Xboxen; best thing is there are only two configs.
Of course. Why didn’t those stupid developers think of that.
Think of what?
Because low spec PC owners usually accept bad frame rate or graphics when playing high demand games. They can’t afford to do that for console players, because MS/Sony will demands a minimum acceptable performance