"Early on in development, we realized that often the Xbox Series X performs better than the PC" — Playing Avowed for the first time while discussing the delay, Xbox performance, and ray tracing
Hansen did justify the potential 30 FPS cap during that other interview by saying, "You know, it's a first-person [and third-person] single-player game, you don't necessarily need that 60 frames."
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We've been developing [for Xbox and PC] in tandem the whole time," Hansen reassured me. "But, honestly, one of the things that surprised me most was that, early on in development, we realized that often the Xbox Series X performs better than the PC."
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"I'm a weird Art Director in that art is actually my third priority behind 'Does it run well?' and 'Is it fun?'" Hansen told me.
Something doesn't add up. They say they've been developing for PC and console in tandem, yet somehow the PC has worse performance, and they're considering a 30fps cap? Yet their top priority is "Does it run well?"
Sounds like complete BS to me. I think they're targeting console first and merely making sure it runs on PC, but doing very little to optimize things for PC. That's the only way I can think of for the console to run better than the PC, because the XBox Series X is basically a mid-tier PC, if that.
This makes it sound like it's going to be a horrible pc port. They game only runs at 30fps on console and it sounds like they are saying that they can't even match that on a pc.
Not necessarily, when you target one very specific setup you can use performance tricks you can't use otherwise. When developing for PC you are forced to play by the rules because you can't rely on a quirk of a particular combination of components because everyone has a different one.