Xbox Series S 'Greatly Helped' With Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 Development

Series S is the gift that keeps on giving!

Interesting take.

I guess like all things there is no black and white here and lots will depend on how the devs focus their efforts and the way they work.

But it is awesome that someone has found a way to use the Series S as a base level to bench from and work up making all other versions better rather than worse.

@Darylb88 I believe it'll do for the Switch 2 what the Wii did for the PS2 and make sure plently of games end up there

I think we are at a plateau for game development as series s, switch/switch 2, and pc handhelds keep most developers in the low spec zone.

So, the opposite story of what some said. This is what a good developer would do, optimise. With the PC handhelds and Xbox handheld, optimising will become even more common. Very few people play on the most expensive PC configurations.

But, since you have to 'dial down' in a few things and have to be clever where you can in the programming and in the code and so on, and be able to save memory here and there - some of these optimizations for [Xbox Series] S benefit the other consoles as well

We've been told time and again by the Series S bashing bandwagon, that the console is the reason of all the bad things with games development this gen by holding things back, blah, blah, etc, etc.
These developers (here) have no idea what they are talking about. 😅😅

Edit: Someone should share this novel development approach with the developer of Black Myth....

Good work warhorse studios 🫡 now got yourselves over to square Enix to make sure they can fit the final fantasy stuff onto the series s RAM this year 🙏🙏

It's nice to see a competent developer being open, honest, and showing some praise for the technical feats.

So what you are saying is, if developers get the time to optimize, the games turn out well?

Wild.

@BacklogBrad Yeah, not to mention when you look at PCs, Steam hardware survey shows how much older hardware is so prevalent.

I have both a Series S (basement) & X (family room). I don't really notice a difference jumping between the two. There are diminishing returns from here out, our eyeballs & brain are only going to detect so much detail/information. Plus I don't have 20/20 vision, like many others as well.

I suspect Series S is to thank for quite a few 60fps games on Series X. Take the standard Series S 30fps mode and slap it on Series X and you’ve immediately got yourself a solid starting foundation for a performance mode right there (exception being for primarily CPU limited games). If Series S didn’t exist I think many more developers would’ve quickly devolved back into only providing ’cinematic’ framerates.

Much screaming over at DF after reading this.

Series s doesn't deserve the hate it gets at all it's a grand little machine me daughter loves hers and I loved it before I gave it to her!!
It's got around a bit haha 😂

Not sure I agree with you, @Sol4ris, as what I read from this statement is that they dumbed down the experience for everyone in order to get it to run on the S. I'm not so sure it is a positive.

This is like saying that instead of needing an A in your exams in order to go to university, that only a D is required! Thus, instead of having only the best students attend, you have everyone from D to A.

I mean, yes, it is commendable that they got it to run on the S, but in what negative way did this impact the superior consoles.

Totally agree about Black Myth though...

@Fiendish-Beaver

With outmost respect, I think we'll have to agree to disagree with your deduction on what the developer is saying 😉.

I mean, yes, it is commendable that they got it to run on the S, but in what negative way did this impact the superior consoles

The dev is saying that it in fact, it helped the superior consoles in this particular case. And if we are using a particular line of questioning, how were the monster gaming PC rigs affected by the significantly less powerful superior consoles?

It’s all a business and also human nature with the path of least resistance.
If the series s is not letting you get away with certain things and you have to optimise to get it work then of course it helps the more powerful consoles and you might be able to get better performance from them.
But one thing for sure the business model would rather not be optimising on the series s and taking time to do so.

I think it sometimes depends on what they used as the lead platform during develoment. If it was PC then scaling perhaps was a little easier between the formats.

IMO in a few years the Series S will be reflected on very positively for helping pave the way for the Steam Deck, Switch 2 and all the other disparate handhelds to have very playable games.

Optimization is always welcome, makes a better game experience

As a Series S owner Inwould love for more developers to use that as their base when developing if they can add enough bells and whistles and such for the more powerful consoles. Too many examples of games not optimized for the weaker consoles they’re released on.

I think when next gen starts the series s and x parity drops however with the rise of switch 2 and portable PCs I actually think series s will have a very long life span. Data shows that people hesitantly buy next gen software especially as we have too many cross gen games.
This hints on series s playerbase will be pretty big to pass on.

I think people need to think more outside of box as industry is changing and how we play games.

It helps optimization, it hurts game design. It's easy to conflate these things. Games will run better on Series X. Games have to be less ambitious.

I'm not a Series S hater, it's one of my 3 series consoles. It's just the undeniable truth.

@Jenkinss is it though? Says who?

I haven't heard a single developer say they have had to cut an idea from a game this gen due to hardware limitations.

Happy to be proven wrong if you have examples.

@Medic_alert Didn't Balders Gate 3 have to cut multi player as it wouldn't work on Series S? Maybe its there now, I can't be sure anymore. Obviously the developers would never say it but wonder if this is the reason Local multiplayer was dropped from Halo Infinite? No chance its because the Series X can't handle it, but maybe not worth the effort to get it onto Series S? Real disappointment as I had planned playing that game with my son but in the end we just have to play different games instead.

@Jenkinss I sort of agree with what you are saying. I read this as developing a game that will work at the lowest level then scale up. Doesn't sound great for pushing game development. Although saying that I have a Series S so can't really complain too much as I'm one of those to blame!

Well. I guess it's almost like porting the game to Switch.

@StonyKL but the game still came out complete on every other platform. Nothing was cut from the design and nothing was held back from anyone else because of the series S - which was the point the other person was making.

There may be instances we don't know about but I don't think we have any evidence that the series S has changed developers' plans/designs and given that the Steam deck is also now a target platform the Series S fares pretty well performance wise.

Strange though I heard on PS5 it was a nightmare screen flickering
But yeah you know congratulations on optimising your games

You may well be right, @Sol4ris, but is it not possible that certain things were cut from the game in order to enable it to run on the S? Things that would otherwise have been in the game were it just for the more powerful consoles? So something like the situation with the exclusion of couch co-op in BG3 (which I accept has now been sorted). Is it possible that something was cut, even though we may never know what?

As for PCs, the exact same applies. If you are making a game only capable of running on the very best rigs, then you cut the content that is preventing it from running on lesser machines so as to make it possible to sell the most copies of your game. We just don't ever get to hear about it, but just because we don't doesn't mean that it does not happen...

@StonyKL “ Obviously the developers would never say it but wonder if this is the reason Local multiplayer was dropped from Halo Infinite? No chance its because the Series X can't handle it, but maybe not worth the effort to get it onto Series S? ”

Halo infinite not having local multiplayer would have nothing to do with the Series S in the first place. Since that game was also on One/One X. Local multiplayer in Halo should have been built with consoles in mind unlike BG3 that initially never planned to have consoles ports.

@Medic_alert just use common sense? Draw it out to the extreme if that's what it takes for you to get it. What if the lowest common denominator was a colecovision? The GPU being underpowered isnt as big of a deal because games scale very well nowadays, but the lack of memory absolutely is.

@AverageGamer Larian has been porting their games to consoles for a very long time. The idea that they weren't planning to put BG3 on consoles is absurd.

@Medic_alert
It is just logic really. If you target the lowest platform with your development then the rest of the platforms should be a breeze.

Developers who target the strongest platform first are just really dumb. It is like saying "Let's build a Ferrari spec and put it in a Toyota Corolla". Hmmmmmm why didn't that work?

@Jenkinss so no you don't have any examples or actual evidence. It is just your opinion.

The 'logic' you speak of fails because you still need to know that a developer somewhere had a vision that couldn't be accomplished because of the series S and again as far as I have seen no such comments have been made.

This is just another one of those tired d gamer narratives that have nothing but feelings to back them.

Weren't these the same guys saying they had to drastically cut the planned size of this game to get it to run on the S as well last year?

@Medic_alert Are you serious? lmao

I gave you an example even a child could follow.

@Medic_alert How about the very game this article is about?

https://wccftech.com/kingdom-come-deliverance-2-scope-impacted-xbox-series-s-4k-30-fps/

It's common sense. Any ambitious game is going to have to design around the limited memory. At the same time it helps optimization (what this article is about). Just use your brain for 3 seconds, it's so absurdly obvious.

@Jenkinss you gave me nothing in your previous post that made no logical sense. You can't run this back to an absurdity and expect it to make sense.

Your last post however is evidence of a game that appears to have had its potential scope reduced to make the Series S viable.

History is littered with the 'absurdly obvious' being proven wrong and so i work with evidence not some guy on the Internet's opinion.

@Medic_alert Sorry man but you're so incredibly wrong here, this is common sense. "Nuh uh but no evidence" is so juvenile, refusing to put any thought in at all. Work it out. What would happen if they had to design games around Colecovision. How would they run on Series X? How would the game design be affected?

A huge deficit in both amount of RAM and speed of that RAM is going to limit the scope of games. You don't need examples. DF said this before the consoles even launched. Imagine saying "nuh uh DF show me examples" like an annoying child.