My Xbox One will be sleeping on the couch tonight.
Eurogamer has done a side by side comparison and an in-depth analysis of the performance of Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin on both consoles, and unsurprisingly (but sadly indeed) it runs slightly better on the PS4. You can check their article here for the technical details, but I'll sum it up here.
The good news is that the graphical quality, insofar as the anti-aliasing, texture quality, etc. is exactly the same on both consoles. That is great news for everyone, and as an Xbox fan it's especially great news for me. I'm glad to see that gap closing. But, not all is well in Drangleic.
The bad news is that the framerate just isn't as high or as stable in the Xbox version. It's still high; in the video, it averages in the low 50s. But the problem is that it has a much stronger tendency to drop than the PS4 version. It drops more often, and it drops a lot harder. The PS4 stays at 60 a good percentage of the time, and the lowest it ever dropped, according to Eurogamer's article, was 48fps. The Xbox One's lowest was 36fps. That's a pretty stark and upsetting difference.
But it's still important to note that the game looks great and appears to play very well on both consoles still. There's no denying there's a difference, but I don't believe it will really affect the gameplay in a terrible way. It certainly won't stop me from getting it for my Xbox One.
Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin releases next Tuesday, April 7th.
