The upcoming 2D Prince of Persia reboot from Ubisoft not only looks good, but it also has excellent performance. According to Ubisoft, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown will run at 60fps on all platforms, including the Switch, and will also support 4K/120fps on some consoles, too. After a string of ugly, bad, and stuttery Switch ports, this is great news.
Announced in June 2023, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a colorful metroidvania-like platformer that takes the series back to its old-school 2D roots. Trailers and gameplay videos of Lost Crown have presented a slick-looking action platformer that had me excited to play when it releases on January 18. But now I’m even more interested in checking out Ubisoft’s latest game, as the publisher has confirmed that Lost Crown will run at 60fps (or more) on every platform under the sun.
In a recent blog post revealing the game’s PC specs—which are shockingly subdued—Ubisoft also provided more details about the various console ports of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. This is usually the part where you expect the Switch port to have a 30fps cap (and hope it hits that, even). But that’s not the case this time around. Instead, every single platform—even the older, base consoles like the Xbox One and PS4—will support a silky smooth 60fps.
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Even better, PS5 and Xbox Series X support 4K/120fps. While there are some games out there that support native 4K or 120fps, not many can do both. As someone who owns a giant, dumb 120HZ/4K TV, I’m very excited to see Lost Crown in action. Oh and PC players, good news: Ubisoft has confirmed that the game supports framerates above 120.
How did Ubisoft pull this off?
So what’s going on here? Did Ubisoft make some weird black magic deal with the devil to squeeze extra performance out of older platforms? Probably not.
Instead, Lost Crown’s impressive performance stats are likely a result of Ubisoft’s focus on Switch. Reporter James Galizio confirmed last year that Ubisoft told him that it was treating the Switch as its lead platform for the game. So focusing on a weaker and older platform possibly forced the devs to optimize more, and those optimizations in turn provided more headroom for the game on newer and more powerful machines, allowing the game to run even better at higher resolutions.
Regardless of why Lost Crown is able to run at 120fps at 4K on some platforms and 60fps on everything else, it’s nice to see developers making sure new games don’t run like garbage on Nintendo’s aging hybrid machine. That’s especially true after last year.
Plus, it distracts us all from the fact that Ubisoft’s other Prince of Persia game—a remake of Sands of Time–-is still stuck in development hell. Oops. I just remembered.
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