Dragon’s Dogma II director Hideaki Itsuno has announced that the game will have uncapped framerates.
The development lead simply made the announcement on Twitter earlier today. Presumably, we will see this confirmed in the game’s marketing and promotion in the coming days and weeks.
The sudden announcement seems to be intended to stem a growing controversy for the game, which is about a week away from its official release. And that would be the issues about its 30 FPS target.
We reported last January that IGN Japan claimed they had confirmation that Dragon’s Dogma II will only be targeting 30 FPS on consoles. This created an atmosphere where rumors and innuendo spread about this issue. Outside of our reporting, it seems there was a faked image that was going around, claiming that the title would run on 4K 30 FPS for both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Subsequently, it claimed that the Xbox Series S version would run on 1080p, 30 FPS.
While Capcom did not lead fans on on this part, some fans did also create speculation by themselves when they looked at the titles minimum and recommended system requirements. Those system requirements came with these additional notes:
“Estimated performance: ____/30fps. Framerate might drop in graphics-intensive scenes. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 6800 required to support ray tracing.”
What is clear from those notes is that Capcom has targeted high specs with Dragon’s Dogma II, and PC players who want to go for 60 FPS will have to do their own testing on even more high end hardware configurations on their own. But it says nothing about possible customization made to make the game run on consoles.
Itsuno’s announcement drives straight into the heart of the issue, and may create even more speculation instead of reducing it. Fans investigating Capcom’s trailers believe they found parts of the trailer where gameplay drops to 20 FPS or lower.
Of course, a trailer a few months old is not the same thing as the final title that players will get in a week’s time. But the suspicions fans have is that the game’s framerate isn’t going to do very well, even with that uncapped framerate.
This is a technical issue, in terms of optimization, but it may be the case that Capcom wasn’t able to resolve all these issues because of the sheer ambition of Dragon’s Dogma II. It may be the case that we see a repeat of the first Dragon’s Dogma, where gamers can’t look past performance issues and shun the game in favor of other titles. Hopefully, the game does turn out better than fans hope and Capcom is able to avert this.
Dragon’s Dogma II will be released on March 22, 2024 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows on Steam.
