We have news of a surprising performance cap on a game that we really expected to do better.
As shared on Twitter by PC Focus, an IGN Japan preview claims that Dragon’s Dogma 2, a game Capcom spent a full five years of development on, will only be targeting 30 FPS on consoles. That means the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, platforms which consumers expected to have games run at a minimum of 60 FPS, are about to receive another new release that doesn’t meet that standard.
We know firsthand that both platforms can reach this performance metric. First party titles, such as Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Forza Motorsport, do hit 60 FPS for their respective platforms. We also know that both consoles have certain features, like PlayStation 4 backward compatibility to PlayStation 5, and Xbox FPS Boost, that can raise the performance of titles from the last generation to 60 FPS on the newest consoles. And even third party games, like the recently released Alan Wake 2, has 60 FPS on both consoles.
Now, some of you may be wanting to say that there is a catch to these assertions, and that is true. In all the cases I mentioned, and in many other new titles, there has been some compromise or shortcoming to enable 60 FPS. For example, Insomniac Games does not feature 60 FPS as the minimum performance metric, but as one of several graphical options. In most games that do this, like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, there will be a drop in graphical quality when you choose 60 FPS, over a higher resolution at lower framerates. The use cases where this does not happen, is when a game is older to begin with, and so the graphics were already at a lower standard, and can only be made better on newer platforms.
It may still be possible for Dragon’s Dogma 2 to have a performance mode on one or both platforms, if not at launch, a few months down the line. But it seems that gamers don’t have much say on the matter of games not maxing out the potential of these newer platforms.
Whether 60 FPS is really necessary for all games is one thing, but this is about an entirely different issue. Gamers were sold on the idea that this console generation jump was necessary because they were going to raise standards to this and that level. If gamers feel that they were lied to, or at least that this was misleading, they have every right to feel so. Many gamers are still playing on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles, and they may have been proven right.
With all of these in mind, it seems almost minor to bring up that Dragon’s Dogma 2 will also only have one save slot. That may simply be an unavoidable technical obstacle because of the way the Pawn system works. It may be too much work for Capcom’s systems to have to track multiple Pawns from a single player, multiplied by the number of players that could be holding multiple save files.
