Almost a month on from its release, Lords of the Fallen is a visually stunning Soulslike that’s still held back by ongoing technical issues on console – and that’s a shame. After all, this 2023 series reboot is a rare breed of next-gen project designed just for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, S and PC. Added to that, the game is built on Unreal Engine 5 with a heavy use of its Nanite and Lumen technologies. Developer Hexworks goes all-out here in its world-building and the UE5 features allow for intricately detailed gothic environments, lit by a hybrid ray-traced global illumination technique. Add in a realm-switching mechanic – in the tradition of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver – and it makes sense that the game’s ambition is perhaps beyond the scope of a last-gen console release.
In fact based on the evidence today, it’s a big ask even on today’s machines. Despite its technical achievements, Lords of the Fallen’s launch has not been a smooth one – and even after almost a month’s worth of patches on the console front, the game remains flawed as of version 1.1.293 (and even in our re-test of v1.1.310 as of publishing this article today) with clear frame-rate drops and issues in image quality.
With this in mind, it’s time to finally tackle the PS5, Series X and Series S versions in turn, each fully patched up. A heads up that there are two modes included on every console, as is the trend these days: a 60fps performance mode and 30fps quality mode – and we’ll be comparing both. In particular though, there’s much to be said for the game’s delivery of 60fps gameplay – with Series S especially coming out worse for wear.
Let’s start with the Xbox Series S, where Lords of the Fallen’s issues are truly hard to ignore in its current state. Even in the 60fps performance mode, the game fails to hit that top target most of the time – despite running at a dynamic 720p resolution with drops to 432p at lowest. I’ve seen 40-60fps readouts throughout the first tutorial portions of the game, before dropping to the mid-20s (!) in the first proper boss battle against Pieta. It’s here, notably once Pieta starts summoning swords from the heavens, that we see the resolution go to its lowest value of 432p on Series S, just 60 percent of 720p. With such a low base pixel count to work with, the upscaler struggles and picture quality in motion is often quite poor.