The reveal of Dragon's Dogma 2 last week has conjured up a few requests for the first game, Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, to get an FPS Boost on Xbox Series X and Series S, but unfortunately that won't be happening.
In a reply to one fan, Xbox Director of Project Management Jason Ronald explained that the team actually tried to apply an FPS Boost to Dragon's Dogma once upon a time, but "unfortunate side effects" prevented it from working:
"The team investigated Dragon's Dogma when we were working on FPS Boost. There were some unfortunate side effects which meant it couldn't qualify for the program."
Xbox's FPS Boost program was wrapped up in late 2021 with the arrival of a huge batch of games on November 15th, with Ronald explaining at the time that there were no more immediate plans to do anything with FPS Boost.
That said, we've seen Ubisoft apply their own style of FPS Boost to Assassin's Creed Origins, so while Xbox's program might not be active anymore, perhaps Capcom will do something for Dragon's Dogma eventually? Let's hope so.
If you're interested in checking out Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen regardless of all this, it's currently down to just £2.99 / $4.49 as part of the Xbox Deals Unlocked 2022 sale, so grab it while you can. That's a bargain for sure!
Let us know your thoughts on this FPS Boost story down in the comments section below.
[source twitter.com]
Comments 15
Great that they confirmed this.
Honestly they must have an internal document/spreadsheet to track all these. It would be great if they shared a version of this, perhaps without some columns, with the community. Then we could confirm that some games aren't compatible coming but also petition candidates without wasting time on games that aren't compatible or were tried already.
E.g. Dishonored 2 is the one that keeps cropping up all over, people keep requesting it as the rest of the series is now 60fps. It seems obvious to me that they tried this and it had side effects but it would be nice to have this confirmed and give us somewhere to point to every time some does request it again.
Well that is unfortunate but at least its playable on the XsX if people are interested. My bigger worry though is that the sequel has no confirmed platforms releases, and that should start ringing moneyhat alarm bells for fans of the game... 🤞
This means Microsoft is still working on FPS Boost and Backwards Compatibility updates for some games.
I am hoping and praying that Sonic '06 gets updated to be Backwards Compatible, as well as Sonic Heroes, Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic Riders. Alongside Xbox One/Series X Enhancements for Fallout: New Vegas. (It has FPS Boost but not 4K on the Xbox Series X)
@Hydra_Spectre Don't get your hopes up as the article says they've wrapped up working on FPS boost & there's no plans to do any more. It's possible they looked at Dragon's Dogma a couple of years ago.
Kinda always assumed the ps4/Xbox one re release already ran at 60fps… guess it just got a resolution bump. I had totally forgot I own this on Xbox one. I remember overlooking it on 360 and it getting a great reception. When I played the remaster I found i just couldn’t get in to it. Something just didn’t click.
Might try again one day
There is a limit to what MS can do with FPS and/or Res boosts at a system level without any access to the actual game code. It really does depend on how the game was made and 'optimised' for the specifications of the Hardware it was designed to run on. You don't want to 'double' the frame rate and have things running 'twice' as fast because they are 'tied' to frame rate.
All this means is that if this game is going to get any 'frame rate' boost, it requires the Devs to patch them in. Whether they do or not is a different matter - although doing so several months before the release of their new game could provide a great opportunity for Capcom as that would create more publicity, encourage new comers to play that go on to buy the new game - something they hadn't planned on because they weren't familiar with its predecessor(s). It can be 'off-putting' to some to jump into a franchise without playing the early games.
That's something that I also think Game Pass benefits. Its not 'just' the Day 1 'new' releases, but you often have the older games too. Don't want to jump into Halo:Infinite, Gears 5, Psychonauts 2 etc or unsure about Hellblade 2, Outer Worlds 2 etc, well you can play the older games first if you want...
Such a bummer. Especially since the game can run at 144fps on PC, natively.
Still blown away the remaster wasn't 60fps. Especially for a game like this.
I picked it up on the switch, awhile back. So I didn't know if the resolution and framerate woes were the limitations of the switch or the game itself😆 regardless, it is a very fun game.
@SplooshDmg I wanted to love Dragon's Dogma. It's so unique, and yet I just can't get into it. It channels some Souls which means "not for me" but it's not truly Souls either. Mostly I just couldn't figure out where to go, and would end up in areas where I was clearly very underleveled and equipped, but yet couldn't tell where to go otherwise. It has its fans, but it feels kind of rough and unpolished to me, which is probably part of what fans love about it. The "vibe" is very cool though.
@themightyant One thing with dishonored 2 is that it's now their own game, so they could actually fix the game rather than have to rely on frame boosting. Of course it's a very low selling game so it may not be worth it, but as a part of the permanent Game Pass catalog, it's not a meaningless use of their time. And I don't think MS is into selling full price "remakes" of games that are a few years old....
@SplooshDmg Taro should buy Square!!!
@themightyant
Edit pay no attention to my comment on arkhane, I dont know why I had Activision brain. I blame the the tuna I had for lunch but ms definitely already owns them.
End edit
dishonored 2 is one I can absolutely understand. The thing with that game is it's even weird on PC. I hate posting specs because people either don't believe me or think it's some kinda flex but it's not so trust me on this...
Even with a high end cpu like a 5800x (6ghz all core), 32 gigs 4000mhz DDR4 CL14-14-14-34 dual rank dual channel... That's insane timings for 4ghz, it's insane timings period. Super low latency. A the game on a fast m.2 SSD and a 3080ti FTW3 Ultra Gaming @ 2200mhz core and 20Gbps of memory bandwidth the has some odd performance issues.
I haven't played it on series x in a while so I don't remember if this was an issue but I'm PC it has frame pacing problems so even a locked 60fps doesn't look smooth. I think there's 2 or 3 duplicate frames for every 60 so it never looks smooth. It also freaks out over 60fps. So you have to lock it to 60.
When they do the emulation all they essentially do is double the rate direct x is running. For some reason they breaks some games. Usually it's because they tied physics to frame rate. Sometimes it's ai or even both. Dark Souls had an issue on PC where when the frame rate was higher than 30 weapons would break significantly faster.
So they probably tried and it did something freaky to the game. The good news about dishonored 2 is that once the buyout of Activision is finished they will have access to the source and can probably get dishonored 2 running at 60 and by the same token maybe Capcom will do something with it.
A remaster a few months before launch would possibly drum up some hype and help them find people who missed the game the first time around.
Which makes me wanna play the game lol. I have it on PC...I wonder if there are any good mods for it.
@d0x3601 Yes Dishonored 2 definitely has issues on all platforms. It's similar to Bloodborne in that even when it runs at 30fps it doesn't seem like it does due to poor frame pacing.
Though it has nothing to do with Activision. As @NEStalgia said Arkane is already one of their studios. They were/are a Bethesda studio so they're a Microsoft Studio already and they could fix it. That said as a (non-gaming) programmer I know this is the last thing developers want to do, go back and fix old legacy broken code that someone else probably wrote. It's a massive hassle, never fun, and disproportionally time consuming. It would definitely be a labour of love, not will.
@NEStalgia Nice barb! Though personally I'll take more full priced Bluepoint style remakes like Shadow of the Colossus or Demon's Souls please. Bloodborne and i'll die happy. We need less like 90% of the other remasters though i'm 50-50 on some, and none like TLOU pt1. That is a bloody waste of good development time
I wish the remaster wasn't so initially underwhelming. Makes me wonder why it wasn't 60 fps for last gen systems. Even a resolution boost for this would have been nice
@themightyant yup. Long day. Loooong day.
I was was thinking back to when Activision published some id up..
Gotta stop falling asleep in the sun lol.
Yeah if they have access to the code then I wonder what it is preventing them from being able to do it.
Could just be a matter of cost or perhaps they don't have a certain part of the codebase that frame cadence is part of. I've tried to fix it on PC and failed. The best you can do is set vsync to fast but even then you can tell it's busted.
@d0x3601 No worries. Easily done.
Also hoping they fix it but don't think it's likely.
Praise the sun!
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