Summary
If we had a quarter for any time a developer said that getting a game optimized forMicrosoft’sXbox Series Sconsole was a challenge, well, we’d have a lot of quarters. The team behind the upcomingDune: AwakeningMMO certainly have added another quarter to the jar with their latest comments about Microsoft’s budget beast.
In particular, Funcom chief product officer Scott Junior called it a “challenge"in an interview with VG247. As part of Gamescom coverage, Junior discussed the team’s work on bringing Frank Herbert’s iconic science-fiction novel to the gaming sphere, with additional detail about getting that vision to run on a Series S.
“So, it’s one of the reasons we’re coming out on PC first,” Junior said. “There’s a lot of optimisations we need to do before we release on the Xbox. But yeah, Xbox Series S is a challenge.”
Those comments shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, given how intensive Dune: Awakening appears to be on hardware. It’s a high-level MMO, complete with gorgeous graphics and large-scale battles. Still, it’s another instance in which a developer has openly discussed the pitfalls when it comes to development on the Series S.
The Series S Has Been A Hot Topic Among Game Devs
A little over a week ago,an ex-Naughty Dog and Rocksteady dev spoke out openly against the console, going as far as to say that they wished the Series S “never existed.“Del Walker’s comments caused a stir in the gaming community, but the developer wasn’t necessarily incorrect in his opinion.
He later added, “It’s just annoying to make a high-end game with complex Ai, VFX, Advanced Physics, Multi-threading Optimization, Particle Systems, Dynamic Memory Demands, etc etc, then chop all that out so it also plays the SAME on an Xbox S.”
Previously, Thomas Puha of Remedy noted that the optimization process for the Series S isn’t nowhere near as easy as it sounds. And, of course, who could forget the many strugglesthat Larian went through in its efforts to get Baldur’s Gate 3 running on the machine. Those efforts evenpushed Microsoft to dispatch its own team of engineers to try and solve the issues.
It’s highly unlikely that Series S support will end anytime soon, but Funcom’s comments represent another wrinkle in what has been a challenging period for devs. That period certainly won’t become any easier as games become more and more complex in the coming years. Only time will tell if there is any sort of breakthrough.
