During Gamescom 2024, Avowed Art Director Matt Hansen revealed that the studio targeted 30 FPS for Xbox consoles while developing the game, adding that 60 frames per second aren’t required for a single player RPG. That statement turned out to be rather controversial among fans, and now there’s another of a similar kind from a separate interview published by Windows Central.
Here, Hansen said that Obsidian noticed Xbox Series X often running Avowed better than PC.
We’ve been developing for Xbox and PC in tandem the whole time. 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.
The console is running Avowed really, really well. We haven’t had to have that many specific affordances for Xbox. We’re still figuring out the specs for Xbox Series S, just because it doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles on the backend, but we have got an amazingly skilled engineering team. We’re so focused right now on polishing the content we have while simultaneously doing all the performance stuff, because that always comes at the end… So, a lot of that stuff is hard to pin down now.
Hansen was probably referring to an average PC rather than a high-end configuration. Still, the statement remains puzzling, especially in light of the previous comment on targeting 30 FPS for the console version. On another note, Hansen also confirmed that ray tracing will be implemented in some way on Xbox, too.
We’re figuring out what all components of ray tracing we want to utilize on Xbox, but, absolutely, there will be elements of it. Using ray tracing is one of those things where there are 12 different components of it that you can choose to utilize or not.
NVIDIA announced at Gamescom that Avowed would support DLSS 3 and ray tracing on PC. The official blog post only mentions ray traced reflections, though, so that’s likely what Xbox is getting as well, likely with lower resolution for performance reasons. As a reminder, Obsidian’s fantasy action RPG set in the world of Eora is now scheduled to launch on February 18, 2025.
