Middle-earth: Shadow of War Runs at 4K on Xbox One X, PS4 Pro Still Catching Up

When it comes to the battle between the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro this holiday season, it might just come down to one thing – how the developers manage to optimize their games for the formats.

And one particular example that everyone may be keeping an eye on is Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, which drops early next week. This will no doubt be one of the most visceral-looking games of the holiday season, and one that will put Lord of the Rings fans into a tizzy.

With that, WCCFTech recently spoke with Monolith's design director Bob Roberts about how well the game runs on next-gen hardware, namely the Xbox One X. Good news, potential owners, it runs beautifully.

He noted that the game will run at native 4K resolution on the forthcoming console, with barely any problems to speak of. It will apparently have faster load times as well.

As for the PlayStation 4 Pro, however…that's a different story. He noted that the team is working on optimizing the game for it, and don't have exact specifications on what's final with the console – even though it's out – and that the team is doing everything it can to fit the experience it wants into the system. (It'll still look and run very well, though.)

While the PC version will have most of the goods with HDR support and a supposedly higher frame rate, Roberts reiterated that the console versions will run fine at 30 FPS. "We're not shooting for 60 FPS at the time, we are trying to milk more graphics out of it and just make sure it always stays above 30 smoothly," he noted.

And then he went back to discussing the Xbox One X version, which he can't get enough of. "Yeah, it's a crazy powerful box, it will be the prettiest possible version of the game among consoles. We have some devkits which also load a lot faster, while in development it's extra nice to load a giant world in a matter of seconds so we can iterate faster. But it will also have faster loading times for players, I think that one of the big things in this console generation is that we got a lot more memory, but in a lot of games I played loading times got longer rather than shorter.

"It's nice to see them push on this side of the technology," he concluded.

We'll see just how well the game comes together when Middle-Earth: Shadow of War arrives on October 10th for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.