With just a number of weeks to go until Atomic Heart releases on February 21st, 2023 the developers have been showing more and more of the game off. There has been an abundance of gameplay and story trailers shown off both online and at major gaming shows and award ceremonies with many players excited to finally play the project early this year.
The game is set to launch on both current and last-generation consoles. Given how great the game looks the question of how the game will run on previous-generation consoles has been a major topic of discussion over the last week. The game’s developers, Studio Mundfish, previously noted that they wouldn’t have any Cyberpunk 2077 issues at launch, and in a recent interview with Wccftech portal, studio founder and Game Director on Atomic Heart, Robert Bagratuni elaborated on this further.
They say they’re confident the game will run well on all consoles at launch including the previous generation of consoles such as the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. In order to achieve this the Bagratuni noted that they had to rip up “the engine with a can opener to make it possible for the game to use all possible CPU cores on all platforms, to the fullest.”
Absolutely, we have made a mind-blowing optimization and literally ripped up the engine with a can opener to make it possible for the game to use all possible CPU cores on all platforms, to the fullest. We’ve moved a lot of critical code to async threads. The code traditionally runs only on the game thread in Unreal Engine. It was a challenge and not an easy thing. But it was worth it. I’m not hinting at anything, but we were even able to run the game on a device with 3 cores.
Mundfish Founder and Game Director – Robert Bagratuni
Speaking further on the project Bagratuni was asked how the current game compared to the Tech Demo that was released a few years prior. He said:
It’s impossible to compare where we were a few years ago to today. Creatively and technologically, it feels like a lifetime. Maybe one day we’ll show you that first demo to see the whole development journey we went through.
Mundfish Founder and Game Director – Robert Bagratuni
Atomic Heart is set to release on February 21st, 2023 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, Xbox Game Pass, and PC