Here’s something odd: Pentiment, a previously Xbox-exclusive narrative-focused game from Obsidian, currently runs better on PlayStation 5 than it does on Xbox Series X/S. It’s apparently a bug that will be fixed, but the whole situation has set off a firestorm in the never-ending console war.
For most of February, rumors have swirled in the Xbox community and online that Microsoft was planning to port big games to PS5 and Switch. This led to a whole meltdown and eventually—on February 15—a podcast from Xbox confirming that, yes, some games were getting ported to other platforms. But it also denied that big titles like Starfield would arrive on PS5 and confirmed that the company had plans for more Xbox consoles in the future. On February 21, during a Nintendo Direct, Pentiment was announced as one of the first Xbox-published games arriving on Switch and PS5. It launched the next day. And weirdly, on PS5 at least, the game runs at a higher framerate than it does on Microsoft’s console.
Pentiment on PS5 runs at 120FPS. Currently, on Xbox Series X/S, it runs at half that, or just 60FPS. Now, to be clear, this isn’t a game that needs to be running at 200+FPS or anything like that. It’s a narrative-focused, text-heavy 2D game. Still, a lot of already bent-out-of-shape Xbox diehards aren’t too keen on the game playing better on PS5.
According to Obsidian studio design director Josh Sawyer, the reason for this discrepancy is a bug. On February 26, he tweeted: “120fps will be enabled for XBOX in the next patch. It being disabled is just a bug.”
This didn’t help much though, as some Xbox fans asked why the game—which was released in November 2022—had never received this 120FPS-enabling patch sooner. It is a bit odd that Microsoft wouldn’t make sure the Xbox port of the game was running at 120FPS before launching the PS5 version.
Kotaku has contacted Xbox about the situation.
While this was just a strange little quirk involving a bug in a nearly two-year-old game, it will certainly not help alleviate fears among the most faithful of Xbox customers that Microsoft isn’t focused enough on the platform they love.
