The indie French developer recently became popular on Kickstarter, where it successfully funded the open world parkour game Hover: Revolt of Games (now available on Steam Early Access, with very positive user reviews so far) and the JRPG Edge of Eternity. I’ve talked with him about both games at length, however he confided to me that he’s worried about the Xbox One version of Edge of Eternity.

The game is much more demanding than Hover, in fact, and it’s also one of the best looking projects made with Unity; Jeremy explained that it’s because he has a lot of experience with the engine, going back ten years.

Then he added:

Actually, Edge of Eternity is running at FullHD on PlayStation 4 but only at 720P on Xbox One. I have a huge problem for running the game on Xbox One, but the PlayStation 4 version is really okay, at 30FPS (both versions).

I asked if there was any chance to bump the resolution on Xbox One to 900P at least, but he really couldn’t say for sure:

I really don’t know. I’m really dependent on Unity for things like that, because I already optimized the game as much as I could. My artists, I put enormous pressure on them to push the limits of the engine, I’ve been working with Unity for 10 years, like you said it’s one of the best looking games on Unity. The only part that’s not optimized is the trees, they look really well with SpeedTree but the implementation of SpeedTree in Unity is really bad actually. If you removed the trees it would actually run extremely well even on a poor computer; we have a good relationship with Unity, so I’m pretty confident it will be solved in the future but I cannot say when it will happen.

Then I inquired about the nature of the problem on Xbox One, wondering if it was about the ESRAM, but it’s actually about the GPU:

It’s the GPU. The graphics card is really a problem; more than that, the game runs at 720P but the map of the game is not complete yet. I think PlayStation 4 version will be okay, but I’m worried about the performance of the Xbox One version; I really hope Unity will make choices to change that, because it would be really sad to make changes like dropping details, I would be really sad in terms of creativity!

The console versions of Edge of Eternity might come at a later time, since the team is still negotiating publishing deals. As for the PC version, Jeremy confirmed that they are using HBAO+ (the console versions will have a custom implementation of HBAO which will not be as pretty, but close) and they want to support DirectX 12 as soon as Unity, Popcorn FX and trueSKY will be compatible with it.

Check back for our full interviews on both Edge of Eternity and Hover next week; in the mean, enjoy a gallery with the latest screenshots of Edge of Eternity.

If only Phil was there since the conception of the XB1.

There are so many unnecessary parts inside the XB1 that only bottlenecks the performance.

A true gamer could have made a better job engineering the console.

If you pretend for a moment  that he'd have anything to do with the architecture of the console. Features and vision etc yeah but they would've had a Mark Cerny (albeit less talented) like guy working on it 

you don't think the ceo of Xbox would have any say in the build of the console itself? I think he would.100%.

also if Panos Panay is still in charge of the hardware come next gen , I think we'll be looking a mighty fine console.just look at what's he achieved with the Surface and even more so the Surface Book.

Phil is not an engineer. I know people like to praise him for everything, but he would have had no part of the internals.

He can "say" anything he wants to, but he can only take strategic decisions. So no, he can't "make a better job engineering the console", because he wouldn't see what the console architecture looks like for months. And he wouldn't understand anything about what's going on in the box. You have lots of middle management between him and the guys engineering the console anyway. A CEO will almost never (except in small companies) do anything in the engineering process, except saying "Hey guys, make a console for gaming and not for TV or Kinecr, right? And make it powerful but not too expensive!". That's basically it. For the technical part, you have engineers doing the job. 

Phil Spencer is not God, I really find it funny to still read comments like this "If Phil was there..." (because Phil is here, and he's losing more and more...). 

OT: Too bad for the One, but we all know that it's harder to optimize games for it, nothing new here. A small indie developer can't put enough ressources on it. That's why we see a lot of indie developers releasing games on PC and one console only (the PS4 being the the most frequent apparently...). 

He probably wouldn't be involved in the specifics (unless he's qualified too), but he'd certainly have a voice in the general hardware design goals of the system.

Well that sucks. It would be better if the x1 had a better gpu. Maybe directx12 can help.

It's a JRPG on Xbox. I don't think he should be too concerned that anyone will see it.

Also, Hover is already on Steam??? Somebody should've told me earlier!

P.S. I missed these threads.

JRPG is a style, just like Dark Souls is made in Japan and is NOT in the JRPG style