The developer for one of the biggest game releases of 2015 is worried about the resolution output of the Xbox One.
The Witcher 3 designer Damien Monnier of studio CD Projekt Red took to Twitter yesterday to answer some questions about his upcoming game. One fan asked if he should play on a PC that only just meets the minimum specifications or on an Xbox One, and Monnier’s responded that he’d go with the PC. He noted that the Xbox One release of The Witcher 3 will only render 900 horizontal lines of resolution where the PC and PlayStation 4 versions have 1,080. Monnier feels like this is a substantial difference.
https://twitter.com/Bacon_is_life/status/582275549114032128
While this might scare some people away from the Xbox One release, Monnier elaborated that people who get The Witcher 3 on Microsoft’s console will still get the whole experience.
“It’s fine [on Xbox One],” he wrote on Twitter. “[It] is just the resolution really. [It’s] 900p versus 1080p for PS4. The game is the same.”
This led several Xbox One owners to ask Monnier if the studio would try to get The Witcher 3 up to 1080p on Microsoft’s box after it updates the system’s development kit to take advantage of DirectX12. This is the programming interface that enables games to talk to the GPU, and Microsoft is promising a significant improvement to things like framerate for games that take advantage of DX12. But Monnier was not optimistic that this will make enough of a difference.
“I think any resolution changes would require a much bigger change from Microsoft than the DX12 upgrade, to be honest,” he tweeted.
But the designer did say his team will give it a shot.
“Of course we’ll try,” he tweeted to some fans. “I just don’t want to promise anything unless I can deliver. That’s all.”
Resolution was a hot topic when the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles launched in November 2013. Releases that debuted on both systems regularly had a better resolution or higher frame rate than on the Sony box.
The furor over this has died down somewhat as more publishers and developers have found parity on both devices. And even the games that have a difference on paper don’t really look all that different to the naked eye when you’re playing.
But when a developer flat out says that the resolution is the reason he’d pick one version over the other, that will probably factor into the decision-making process of people wondering which version to buy.