Dragon Age: The Veilguard 'Quite Solid' On Xbox Series X And S, Says Digital Foundry

So it's 1440p after upscaling and 60fps that mostly does the job in the performance modes.

Sounds good to me.

They also said that the PC port is one of the most polished versions they've tested in a very long time! October 31st can't come sooner!

I’m most impressed by the hair rendering and physics. It looks very good.

I keep getting shocked by how well this game is being received. Everything in the run up has seemed like a pending disaster in motion, so it's really amazing that it seems like it's doing everything right.

Though lack of choice in a Bioware RPG doesn't sound right, but FFXVI turned out alright despite not being a real FF entry, is still a good game if you don't try to think of it as one.

@NEStalgia
You will know this.
Why as we get further into this generation are base resolutions getting lower and lower.
Especially at 60fps.
I’m guessing overall the higher the graphics and level of detail, flash stuff etc taking its toll on the consoles the lower the base resolution has to be.

Then good ole FSR comes in and does some upscaling to but of late not even upscaling to 4K.

We seem to have got very weak consoles wise 4 years in.

Also guess games for multi platform consoles and PC etc leave less time to optimise and learn the consoles to better base resolutions and overall performance.

@OldGamer999 Because they DGAF, that's why.

Yeah, it's a mixture of two, or three things. First they're focusing SO much on adding so much DETAIL at the expense of extreme processing cost. More particles, more detailed meshes, larger higher res textures, more shaders, more complicated shaders, longer draw distance, higher LOD, more detailed shadowing, more objects on screen, etc. etc. etc. They're building the world they WANT to build, rather than the world that works on the hardware it's running on. A focus on cramming as many visual details as possible over performance or resolution.

Second, optimization doesn't make them any money, so why waste money on it? Build it, it runs, slap lowest quality settings to make it functional, market doesn't care, won't affect pre-order sales, so who cares? As always, stills are what sells the game, so as long as it renders one frame a day for stills, good enough.

And then the third reason is, on PC they have DLSS, on PS5 Pro, and thus PS6 they'll have PSSR. We can safely assume Switch 2 will get DLSS in some flavor. And it's safe to assume NeXtBox has whatever it gets that's similar. Further with the time of development, I susupect these studios are no longer making games for PS5's or XSX's, and frankly they're not even making games for NV40xx anymore. They're making games for the hardware of NEXT decade with the intention of getting initial sales today from FOMO, then selling the "remaster" that runs the way it should have 5-10 years from now. Current games are for playing tomorrow's games today (jankily.) now.

To be honest, I'm not even sure it's about mulitplatform taking away from optimization. We have platform exclusives on both platforms that are optimized very poorly. While we also have PC focused games that don't even work great on top end PC hardware. I don't think "multiplatform" is depriving optimization. I think "cost-benefit" on any platform is depriving optimization. They know the sales come from the launch preorders and most of that market doesn't care, so, it's an unnecessary expense.

Business took over gaming, and figured out you can make more money selling shoddy products with lots of marketing. And the creatives just can't help themselves by throwing in the kitchen sink because they can. Bad combination.

@NEStalgia
So basically what I thought it was, but you put the business reasons behind the outcome.

It’s a shame I much preferred when they stayed in the limits of the console at 60fps and 4K or near to.
This sort of happened last generation when we weren’t playing farcry 4 at 4K native resolution at 60fps until series x arrived.

I guess though if they don’t show still images with more flashy graphics then people won’t buy into a new generation, even if at the cost of low native resolution and a 60fps struggle.

@OldGamer999 Yeah, I don't know what the right fix is for it. It feels like the best way to game is to always stay a generation behind on games but on current hardware. If they're making the games for the next generation hardware all the time the only way to play is to buy the hardware and then only play the previous generations games on it. And then you get them all cheaper too. Even on PC. The only way to really get current Gen games to run like it's meant to run is too have the $1k+ GPUs. Otherwise, better to play older games great than new games poorly. And to be fair on PC people tend to do that more anyway, there's not much fomo , people just play good games forever.

I think the other problem we've hit is like Hollywood, everything has already been done before. There's not as much room to innovate, what works and doesn't in the market has already been worked out. And new stuff costs too much to make. So like Hollywood, and music, if everything good already exists, just keep selling that in New packages. We don't need a new Frank Sinatra or Louis Armstrong. We already have their recordings forever and ever. I think when a media industry matures, it hits a point where it's hard for the new to hold a candle to the huge collection of the very best collected in all history. That's also a business problem gaming is facing.

I'm someone who is overall positive on what I'm seeing. A friend was kind enough to buy the game for me so I will be playing that on PC.

So native resolutions at around 1080p 30fps or 540p 60fps, and Series S at around 480p?
That's pretty rough.

@Steel76 Sounds pretty bad, but the majority of AAA games now use aggressive upscaling to hit an output resolution and frame rate that is acceptable. You won't actually see 540p. The image won't look great on a 4k TV but native 540p would look blurry on a switch let alone a screen any bigger.