by
William D’Angelo
, posted 1 day ago / 4,990 Views
Remedy Entertainment recently revealed the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions of Alan Wake 2 will have a Performance mode, however, the Xbox Series S version will not.
The communications director Thomas Puha at the studio speaking with IGN has explained some of the issues they have had developing Alan Wake 2 for the Xbox Series S.
“Series S, the CPU is pretty much the same as on Series X,” Puha said. “But the GPU is an issue. It really is. And then, having less memory is a pretty big problem. And we often get, ‘okay, you make PC games, surely you know how to scale.’ Well, memory is not a problem on PC. It really isn’t. And that’s one of the struggles when you talk about resolution and framerate. It’s just not enough to drop the resolution heavily. That’s what we’re doing on the S and we’re really, really working hard to make sure the visual quality still holds up.
“People accept that on a weaker PC the visuals are not going to be as good and your framerate’s not going to be as good. There’s a massive difference on Series S and Series X GPU. And sure, people can mention this game did this so well and all that, and every game is different, and every developer is different. But you can’t have the best of both worlds. You gotta choose where you’re gonna focus.
“The Series S is $250 and X and PS5 are $500-600. Obviously there’s a massive difference between the power you are getting, right? It’s a lot easier to scale on the PC because of memory, and it’s not like there’s one super PC and one weaker PC. There are like 300 PC configurations in-between, and trust me that’s a massive struggle, but we’ve shipped a lot of PC games so we’re a bit better about that.
“We’ve really worked hard on getting S to run at a solid 30 and tried to maintain a good visual quality. But if you want to see the game at its best in full next-gen glory, it’s going to be on the machines that have the hardware grunt to enable that.”
Alan Wake 2 will launch for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Epic Games Store on October 27.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D’Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.