Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 exceeded everyone’s expectations on launch, selling 14 times faster than its predecessor and recouping its budget in just a day. The game has also become a critical darling, with fans giving high praise to its medieval world and a difficulty that is easier to navigate than Soulsborne titles.

The Warhorse title has also worked exceptionally well on all consoles and PC, which is a stark difference from its predecessor. And, according to a developer working on the game, the reason Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 runs this smoothly is none other than Xbox Series S.

Why it matters: Developers from all over the world have criticized the Xbox Series S due to challenges in optimizing games for it hence this is an interesting twist in the narrative.

While speaking on the Iron Lords Podcast, Warhorse’s international manager Tobias Stolz-Zwilling revealed that the RPG’s optimization on the Series S helped the other platforms greatly.

The optimizations also for the Xbox Series S helped greatly with the other platforms as well.

-Tobias Stolz-Zwilling

The developer said Xbox Series S is the weakest of the available platforms but the Xbox Series S helped the team come up with more clever ways to save memory and make Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 run on the platform.

As a result of this approach, the techniques applied to the Series S helped Warhorse save memory on other ports helping the game run smoother without sacrificing any visual fidelity. Hence, you can either go full force with the more powerful consoles or use the ideas from Series S to help you, as per Tobias.

This is an interesting piece of information as the current narrative suggests that the console hinders development and delays video games. Even Microsoft’s own first-party exclusive Avowed skipped the 60 FPS mode on the cheaper console. Black Myth Wukong Xbox Series SBlack Myth Wukong developers were among those who criticized the Xbox Series S.
But, as Phil Spencer has stated repeatedly, the Xbox Series S compatibility is here to stay and this is a small win in that narrative.