Josh Sawyer has cleared the air over a performance bug on Pentiment for Xbox consoles.
Josh, of course, was the person who came up with Pentiment, and is credited as its main director. As new communications on the title revealed that it would run on 120 FPS on PlayStation 5, Xbox owners were surprised, to say the least. Pentiment is locked at 60 FPS on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.
Replying to a fan who was asking about this on Twitter, Josh made this straightforward response:
“120fps will be enabled for XBOX in the next patch. It being disabled is just a bug.”
Some fans, of course, aren’t going to trust such a simple message. Microsoft was similarly straightforward when they announced that they would be rereleasing four of the games they produced to their competitor’s platforms, including Pentiment itself. However, a swirl of rumors that grew in the days leading to Microsoft’s announcement ruined Xbox’s reputation in the eyes of their own fans.
It initially seemed like Microsoft’s Xbox podcast where they made the announcement was sufficient to address these concerns. However, as has now become clearer, those Xbox fans who broke with Microsoft were not, in fact, swayed by Microsoft’s response.
So now, there is a general sense of mistrust against Microsoft and their messaging. But this mistrust may not be warranted, as these fans put too much trust on rumors and innuendo, that was never proven true anyway.
So, this is the unreasonable and delicate place Pentiment’s own main creator is placed in. The fans who are sending him noise over the performance bugs are the people who were fans of Pentiment and what Josh Sawyer achieved with it.
Obviously, this issue threatens to overshadow Pentiment itself, as one of the little games that could showed that AAA game companies can make interesting small budget games if they had the opportunity. Pentiment is literally a game idea that no one else has come up with before, even if there are titles that are in the same territory, such as The Road to Cavalry and Inkulinati.
As anyone who has actually played Pentiment can tell you, the framerate really isn’t even that important to it, as a 2D narrative adventure game, and not an action or arcade game. But of course, this is about fanboy narratives, and has nothing to do with caring about video games or the people who make them. Hopefully, somehow, there are people on PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch, who discover this game and enjoy it anyway.
