60 FPS Might Not Become the Standard on PS5 and Xbox Series X, Suggests The Sinking City Dev

The PS5 and the Xbox Series X are both looking like impressive, exciting pieces of machinery based on all that we’ve seen so far, and it certainly seems like their much more powerful hardware is going to allow developers across the industry to make significant leaps. Amidst all that talk, many have assumed that something like games running at 60 frames per second becoming standardized will be the least of what happens- but others are not so sure of that, it seems.

In a recent interview with Wccftech, Frogwares’ community manager Sergey Oganesyan talked about the upcoming PS5 and Xbox Series X, and after commenting on the SSDs of both consoles – which he calls “a life (and time) saver,” especially for open world games – moved on to the topic of performance, which he feels might not get to the point where 60 FPS is the industry-wide standard.

“I think more and more devs will offer you a choice between resolution and framerate,” said Oganesyan. “I personally hope 60 FPS will become the standard, but optimization is not that easy, especially for smaller studios.”

Oganesyan also made the point that we probably won’t see any huge, significant jumps in games in the earlier years of the next generation, especially as most developers and publishers will be going down the cross-gen route- which, of course, is quite typical for generational transitions.

“Looking at what happened when the current-gen was first introduced, we probably shouldn’t expect an absolutely mind-blowing jump in terms of game quality being the standard, because cross-gen titles will be a thing for some time,” he said. “I just don’t think developers can momentarily drop their support of an enormous fanbase that has grown during the current-gen life cycle unless they have the financial incentive of the console makers to make up for the potential missed out sales.

“But we should all definitely look forward to things like better textures, better framerate, better lighting, better loading time, bigger maps, more detailed environment, etc. Which is a lot and the improvements will be more than noticeable.

“We already have absolutely gorgeous games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Horizon: Zero Dawn, and I can’t even begin to imagine how good these games would look on the next-gen hardware.”

It should be interesting to see whether this ends up being the case, especially by the time both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X have been around for a while and developers have become acclimated to their hardware. It does make sense that indies, due to having fewer resources, might find it harder to optimize their content for next-gen hardware than larger studios, but then again, we don’t know yet just what exactly the individual quirks of both these consoles are going to be behind-the-scenes.

Recent reports have suggested that both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X might be getting reveal events in May, so it’s likely that we’ll be hearing a lot more about the next-gen consoles in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, Frogwares recently stated that The Sinking City was a success for the studio, and that their next game is also going to be “a story-focused detective adventure with minimum hand-holding.” Read more on that through here.