“Xbox Series S Won’t Significantly Limit Game Development” – Warhammer 40K: Darktide Dev

Back when Microsoft first unveiled the Xbox Series S, while many praised the console for being a significantly cheaper entry point into the new generation of gaming hardware, there were more than a few who criticized its lower specs. Since then, many have praised the Xbox Series S as a piece of machinery, while Microsoft themselves have proudly stated that the console isn’t going to hold back next-gen (or current-gen now), but instead advance it.

While it remains to be seen how much of that will be true, one developer who definitely doesn’t feel the console will hold the Xbox Series X or PS5 back is Fatshark, developer of the first person action title Warhammer: Vermintide 2 and its upcoming successor, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide.

We recently had the chance to shoot several questions at members of the development team, including CEO Martin Wahlund, technical producer Mikael Hansson, and Darktide’s game director Anders De Geer. When asked about the Xbox Series S’ capabilities and whether or not they feel the console will limit game development going forward, they said that while it is certainly another added machine for developers to contend with, by and large, it is much easier than, say, adapting to wide ranges of PC specs, and should not hold back development in any significant way.

“While the Series S will be yet another platform to contend with that will take some time in testing and quality assurance, many developers nowadays are used to a much more dynamic ecosystem of hardware,” the developer said “Even in the console space we have had different tiers of the same consoles for many years. The way Series S differs from Series X (memory amount and GPU horsepower, mostly) is for us much easier to adapt to than to for example the wide variety of PCs out in the wild or the way that the previous generation of consoles differed. Less memory and slower GPU are things that most game developers can dynamically scale for by scaling resolutions and graphics effects, while different storage solutions or widely varying CPU performance are much harder to adapt to. All in all we don’t think that the Series S will significantly limit the game development progress as a whole in any way.”

Recently, The Medium developers Bloober Team also spoke about the Xbox Series S, talking about their satisfaction with their game’s performance on the machine, and recommending that players take a “wait and see” approach to see how the console fares against its more powerful sibling.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is due out for the Xbox Series X/S and PC some time in 2021. Our full interview with the developers will be live soon, so stay tuned for that.