A month ago I’ve installed Conan on my series X and loved the visuals. It looked slightly better than on One X, but was running in what looked like perfect 60 fps in most cases. Incredible draw distance for objects, even small decorations, great grass draw distance and sharp resolution (1440p, good enough!). I was expecting the visuals will be upgraded further when I heard about the Series X patch.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. The quality mode is capped at 30 fps with all the beautiful new settings and this is fine…I guess (still why the hell to cap it and force native 4k?). But the performance mode ( my preferred way to play the games) is a MASSIVE dissapointement. The graphics are hugely downgraded compared to pre-version visuals that ALREADY RAN AT 60 FPS. Why? The game looks so bad in performance mode now that it’s close to Original Xbox One. Now the grass draw distance is like 10 meters, the small object draw distance is not any better, the textures are incredibly blurry. it’s literally a potato mode and I doubt that Series X can’t pull off better visuals at high framerate. Actually, it did, before the recent patch.
Other games leave most of the bells and whistles at performance mode and just drop the resolution, maybe shadow quality/particles, but Conan drops more than the entire console generation. It looks worse than One X in performance mode and it’s unacceptable for a console a few times stronger.
Making a choice between Performance and Quality mode was never this hard. You either get great graphics with totally crap framerate or literal potato mode in acceptable framerate (because 60 fps is not that hard to achieve). I know devs probably tested a lot of scenarios with 100000000000000000000000 buildings on the screen and decided for potato mode to keep the framerate up but those gigantic bases are not that common and not worth the drop. I actually visited many gigantic bases pre-patch and it was super smooth with massively better graphics.
This is really awful and totally killed my hype for this patch. Can devs take a look into making improvements? I’ll happily take the “pre-patch” mode anyday.