Many wondered why Ryse: Son of Rome is locked at a frame rate of 30 frames per second and not 60, like some seem to always expect from next generation games, and Crytek's CEO Cevat Yerli has no qualms on explaining the reason, as he did in an extensive interview on Eurogamer.

Developers always have to choose whether they go for 60 or 30fps, depending on the type of game and complexity of the project. With Ryse, we wanted to go for a very emotional experience with complex and dramatic lighting, high fidelity environments, and rich characters and character animations. So 30fps was our choice, and we believe that most developers will go for richer worlds at 30 frames per second rather than 60fps - which would call for compromises, as 60fps demands twice the amount of compute rendering speed. 30fps is a standard that is above, for example, what most cinemas use for showing films. Early demos with higher frame-rate experiences have shown that gamers and viewers have a mixed opinion about its perceived quality - for example, how 48fps cinema experiences were received. So it's both a production design choice as well as user research.

He also detailed how Crytek used the Xbox One's ESRAM to gain a "considerable speed-up."

We put our most accessed render targets like the G-Buffer targets into ESRAM. Writing to ESRAM yields a considerable speed-up. While 32MB may not be enough to use something like MSAA to the fullest, with a smart memory management strategy it is possible to deal with that.

How do you feel about it? Is 30 FPS good enough for you? Personally, I can definitely said it is, as Ryse: Son of Rome isn't a twitchy game that requires lightning fast reactions. After all, as I stated in a previous article, numbers don't always tell the whole story.