Lords of the Fallen devs explain console performance targets, meaty PC spec requirements
"Our minimum specs is also our statement of our minimum quality bar."
The new Lords of the Fallen is shaping up pretty nicely, and it's certainly a looker in terms of pure detail. Some followers of the upcoming Soulslike, however, have been curious about how it'll run on their hardware, ever since developer Hexworks revealed some relatively high PC spec requirements without much of an idea for target performance.
Speaking to Eurogamer at a recent preview event, executive prodcer Saul Gascon and creative director Cezar Virtosu gave us some more detail, and confirmed console versions will have a quality and performance mode to choose between.
"What is important for us is that whenever we put [out] minimum specs, like [Nvidia] 10 series, basically, the game runs well and looks good," Gascon said. "So we play of course with that, we do 720p and then upscale."
If you have a "super crap GPU", Gascon continued, you're likely to have a bad experience - and that isn't something the team wants. "Yes, you can try, but we don't recommend."
"Basically our minimum specs is also our statement of our minimum quality bar," he added.
One of the issues we picked up on in our lengthy hands-on with Lords of the Fallen is a slight difficulty with environmental readability, such as a specific ladder in a section of the game's parallel Umbral world that players unanimously struggled to find - something the Hexworks team plans to fix and was already aware of during the event, and that Virtosu joked about with us.
"It's still playable, but the main issue is that the FPS is not where you're gonna want it to be, when it matters," Virtosu said. "And you might miss our Umbral ladders," he chuckled.
Minimum specs, meanwhile, will provide you 720p and 30fps, Gascon stated.
"Minimum specs is 30[fps], 720[p]. It looks really good and it plays it plays nicely. [If you] want 60fps then you'd need better. Or you can just reduce your graphic settings."
"We're gonna be hovering around 45-50fps, is my experience," Virtosu chipped in.
On consoles, expect the game to ship with a quality mode at 30fps and a performance mode at 60fps. "Actually, visually, they are very close to each other. Sometimes it's hard to tell which screenshot comes from which version."
For much more detail, we spoke to Virtosu about Lords of the Fallen's big FromSoft inspirations earlier this year - or you can read that Lords of the Fallen hands-on of ours to see what we made of it from a couple of hours with the game earlier this month.