Grim Dawn’s Xbox Port Has Problems
The excellent action RPG Grim Dawn finally launched on Xbox last month, several years after the initial announcement of the port and five years after its launch on the PC platform.
Unfortunately, it makes a bad first impression. The opening cutscene video is extremely compressed, with large blocky artifacts easily visible on screen and sound that warbles with distortion. It’s almost as if the video was re-encoded from the file included in the PC original, instead of just using the same asset.
That technical uncertainty echoes throughout the experience of playing the game on Xbox, in spite of it already receiving one big patch. The game was developed for the base Xbox One, and gets compatibility across all of the newer machines thanks to the way the Xbox ecosystem works. When it launched, it was stuck running at 1080p and capped to 30FPS. The big patch added an unlocked framerate option that you can take advantage of on Series consoles or One X for better performance…but there’s still a long way to go performance wise. Many technical issues remain, and a couple are so obvious that they’re hard not to see.
