If you’ve been on the gaming side of Twitter or any social media platform in the last few days you’ll likely have stumbled across the controversy surrounding Arkane Studio’s upcoming vampire-centric First Person Shooter title Redfall. With the title set to launch on May 2nd, 2023 the game’s Twitter account notified players that the game would be launching with a locked framerate of 30 FPS on launch with a 60 FPS performance mode scheduled to be released after launch as an update.
Xbox fans of the upcoming title were disappointed to put it lightly as most of the footage shared with the press and through Redfall’s social accounts had been posted in 60 FPS so the recent news came entirely out of nowhere for a lot of fans eagerly anticipating the game’s launch. However, it appears that the decision to launch Redfall at 30 FPS wasn’t always the case as up until recently, the game advertised that it would run at 60 FPS+ on the Xbox Store.
The above screenshot comes from an archived web page of the Xbox Store stating the listing of 60 FPS+. However, after Arkane’s recent announcement this has since been removed. For fans wondering if this addition along with the ‘PC Game Pad’ note is present due to the PC release of the game it should also be noted that the PC version of the application has also removed the 60 FPS+ tag now.
Alongside this, it’s extremely unlikely that the PC version of Redfall will not include 60 FPS+ at launch given PC gaming has always supported greater than 60 FPS long before it was considered the new standard for consoles such as PlayStation ad Xbox. This may suggest that it was always Arkane Studios’ intention to release the game at 60 FPS on consoles but possibly due to a few issues later down the line they opted to stick with 30 FPS at launch.
Regardless, this new information is sure to be disappointing for a number of Xbox players and possibly very frustrating for players who pre-ordered the title with the promise of 60 FPS+ in all of the game’s marketing and preview content.
Will Redfall still attract a large number of players at launch? Do they risk losing potential players due to this issue and what effect will this have on future Bethesda and Xbox titles? We’ll just have to wait and see.
