S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl studio GSC Game World certainly showed they had extraordinary determination getting the game this far into release. But they seem to be even better developers than we thought based on that.
In an interview with Windows Central, GSC’s representatives made this interesting insight:
“On the Xbox Series S, we stick to 30 FPS. However, in many cases, we have managed to hit 60 FPS, but it’s not as consistent as the Series X. But we’re looking to get a performance mode for Xbox Series S, to get it to 60 FPS. We think it’s possible.”
Of course, this is the latest chapter in the ongoing discourse about the Xbox Series S. Many devs have complained about having to make their games around the Xbox Series S, alongside the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.
GSC went on to describe their process of discovering the Xbox Series S’ capabilities:
“At first, we thought bringing Stalker 2 to the Xbox Series S might be impossible. We have such a big game with so many mechanics, a huge amount of things. It felt like this must be impossible to do. But then we start optimizing, adding new features for streaming information. Unreal Engine has a lot of features for this, but for our game, we really had to squeeze up every megabyte from every piece of system content we could, and now we did it.
After this experience, I believe it’s possible for any game to reach the Xbox Series S’ memory limits. And yes, not every developer, every studio has the opportunity, or the additional time to optimize for the Xbox Series S. We had to boost our expertise on the optimization side, which also helped the PC build, making it a lot more performant. We have quite low minimum PC requirements for a modern game.”
To this we would add, the Nintendo Switch is famous for receiving ports of games that punch above their weight, that also released on the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5. On a performance level, not all of those ports turn out well. But these ports kept happening anyway, because Nintendo successfully created a player base for the platform, thanks to the success of its pitch of a hybrid console.
We are well deep into the generation, so it isn’t clear if it would even still be worth the effort to keep pitching the Xbox Series S in this way. However, GSC’s observations suggest that Xbox Series S owners will continue to get a healthy library of first party games. And more may be on the way, as Microsoft has made inroads in connecting with Japanese game companies.
