Julien Merceron, Technical Director at Konami on the Fox Engine, has stated that two of Konami’s biggest releases will be running at 1080p and 60 frames per second on Xbox One. At E3 2015, Merceron supposedly stated that ‘Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’ and ‘PES 2016’ will run at these high settings, as a result of tuning the Fox Engine. This is due to heavy development and evolutions of Konami’s engine, and optimisation for Xbox One. Reportedly, Merceron told Gamekyo that teams of developers at Konami were able to achieve this output due to the new Xbox One SDK.
Here is the quote from Gamekyo, directly translated from French.
“Today they could test Metal Gear Solid V Phantom Pain and PES 2016 on Xbox One, the surprising information is that both titles on Xbox One will be in 1080p / 60fps, all this was obtained from Julien Merceron who handles technology Fox Engine at Konami. With the new SDK, they could notably increase the low definition textures in high definition”
Previous releases for both franchises, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, and PES 2015, ran at 720p due to limitations of the engine and hardware. Further optimisations now have begun to show improved outputs for the upcoming releases. It may even be possible to see DirectX 12 influencing the performance of these titles.
We have contacted Hideo Kojima, Director of Kojima Productions for a confirmation. When we receive information directly from an official source, we will update this article. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain releases September 1 2015, with PES 2016 releasing only 16 days later.
Matt was a regular ICXM contributor in 2015, publishing 110 articles across game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One’s first full year of post-launch coverage, including the early days of Backwards Compatibility and Windows 10 gaming. They post on X as @RTEnvi.