Hi-Fi RUSH was a smash hit when it arrived on Xbox Game Pass out of nowhere back in January, but as is becoming increasingly less-common these days, the title shipped with just one performance mode on Xbox Series X|S. The game plays out at a rock-solid 60FPS on both systems, but at one stage, 120FPS was considered.
Speaking in an interview with toucharcade, Hi-Fi RUSH director John Johanas discussed 120FPS, and why the team opted for a solid 60 instead.
"We were at a point like early on where we were kind of figuring out what we would need to do to make it run at 120fps, and if we wanted it to do that, it would have to be solid for us. If it isn’t, what happens is audio desync occurs which would affect the gameplay experience.
We kind of saw what we need to do to maybe reduce fidelity to get it to run at 120fps. It wasn’t just for example, just lowering the resolution. It would be like turning off various shaders, like changing the graph, like the polygon counts on lots of things. A lot of work to do that, and we weren’t sure that it would hit 120fps solid the whole game as well.
So that would be an incredible amount of work to hit that. I think it would be great to have, but from a limited dev aspect we needed to sort of like draw the line and for us 60fps was a very clear goal that was achievable."
This is certainly understandable - rock-solid performance seems super important in a rhythm game and locking down 60FPS sounds like it was the right move for Hi-Fi RUSH in the end. We'd have loved 120 for that extra fluidity, but alas, the game was great at 60 anyway!
Speaking of which, it's somehow been almost a year since this Xbox exclusive was shadow dropped by Microsoft back in January. We'll drop our initial review from back then below - this ended up being one of the best surprises of 2023!