To help kick off Winter of Arcade last week, A44 and Annapurna Interactive finally released their Souls-like game Ashen for PC and Xbox One. As with most new Xbox One titles, Ashen features some notable enhancements when played on an Xbox One X. In a new article posted on Xbox Wire today, Character & Animation Lead Simon Dasan and Lead Designer Mike Vermeulen discussed the implementation of Xbox One X features.

Specifically, Ashen is displayed at a 4K resolution if you decide to play the game on an Xbox One X and has increased draw distance and particle effects. The developers believe that the higher resolution also makes the game's unique art style pop, letting A44 "truly realize" the game as they wanted to:

"The A44 team aimed to create a deeply immersive world for players to get sucked into. The Xbox One X’s ability to render at 4k, allowed us to truly realize this vision for Ashen... Our stylized world is one where the 4k enhancement really draws you in and breathes an entirely new layer of fidelity onto the world. Developing Ashen for Xbox One X meant that we didn’t need to make any compromises to the original vision and really enhance the overall experience...

At A44 we strive in every way to excel when it comes to quality. Getting access to the Xbox One X hardware allowed us to push forward on enhanced particle effects, view distances and of course, 4K."

On the development side of things, the A44 designers went as far as calling working on the Xbox One X version of the game "easy". They began working on the enhancements as soon as they received a Xbox One X developer kit, which ultimately helped them in the long run. A44 also says they have "ideas percolating" regarding future enhancements for other titles, so it will definitely be interesting to see what they do next:

"To put it simply; it was incredibly easy. We had the game running on the hardware the first week we received it, so we could see early on in development what the console is capable of. Because of this, we were able to start utilizing the power and potential very quickly to ensure players would experience Ashen at its best.

With the stylized nature of Ashen, we’re super excited to be able to double down on our ability to render beautiful art in true 4k. Whenever someone is playing the build on an Xbox One X, a crowd forms. We’ve already got ideas percolating for the future, so watch this space!"

Ashen is now available for PC and Xbox One. PC players should also be happy as the game's developers solved an issue today that caused connectivity issues with multiplayer on PC.