spatialcomputing.info

A Township Tale is soon to launch on Quest and developer Alta has now offered up a graphical comparison to show how things differ between the Quest and PC versions of the game.

A Township Tale’s stylized art direction might make it look like it wouldn’t be too demanding to run on Quest, but the game’s large open world exists as a nearly seamless space, with sightlines that sometimes allow players to see across vast distances—not to mention tons of physics-based objects, interactions, all happening with up to eight simultaneous players.

Even though the game was built for PC well before the original Quest was even announced, developer Alta has managed to get A Township Tale’s open world running on the low-powered device. It’s definitely a downgrade from PC, but the studio clearly took care to bring the essence of the game to Quest without simply crushing the resolution.

A common technique used to get games to run on lower-end hardware is to employ a dense fog wall around the player in an effort to drastically cut down how much of the game world must be drawn at any given time.

As A Township Tale game director Boramy Unn explains, this wasn’t an option for the game, because the studio wanted to preserve distant landmarks in the world which help players navigate. While the distant landscape is significantly cut down in its level of detail, the core function of guiding players remains intact. Fortunately nearby buildings and objects render in solid quality, as we saw in our recent preview of the Quest version of A Township Tale.

Boramy also notes that shadows and transparency had to be removed from the Quest version because they were too expensive to run on the headset’s low-powered processor while still reaching the goal of achieving a “perfect framerate” on the headset. For the game’s crucial torches, the studio says they’ve “done some wizardy to give the impression of lights on a shader-wider level.”

Going forward, the studio says it plans to focus on improving the game’s graphical presentation.

– – — – –

Priced at $10, A Township Tale launches on Quest July 15th, or on July 13th for those that pre-ordered the game. On PC the game is already available and free-to-play.