Tales of Arise PC Performance Analysis & Port Report

Graphical Settings

Tales of Arise offers us a master class on where not to put the options menu of a PC game. You can’t enter it from the game’s main menu (only in-game), and to enter it, you need to navigate through three other menus. It should be much easier to change Tales of Arise’s graphical options…

To enter Tales of Arise’s graphical options, you will need to pause the game, enter the game’s settings menu, navigate to graphical settings (near the bottom), and enter the game’s graphics setting menu. 

The Unlocked Framerate that Isn’t

While Tales of Arise has options to unlock the game’s framerate, PC gamers should note that all cutscenes, including combat cutscenes and special attacks, are locked to 60 FPS. This means that high higher framerates are possible; the game will be limited to 60 FPS a lot of the time. 

This will be jarring for high refresh rate gamers during combat, as framerates can quickly turn from 100 FPS during combat to 60 FPS when a special attack is initiated. For some players, it may be best to limit the game to 60 FPS to ensure a consistent gameplay experience. 

Poor Resolution Scaling Options

Resolution scaling could have been a useful feature for this game, but sadly Tales of Arise has implemented it so poorly that it isn’t worth using (in most instances). Right now, the graphics option only has 50%, 100% and 200% settings. For 4K, this allows the game to be set to an internal resolution of 1080p at 50% and 8K at 200%. More granularity is required for this option to be useful to PC gamers. Beyond that, the 50% option has strange sharpening artefacts, which looks worse than setting the game to 1080p on a 4K screen. 

  
This issue needs to be fixed

When attempting to play Tales of Arise on a 4K TV, we noticed that we could not select the fullscreen resolution of our choice when playing the game. Strangely, the game set itself to 4096×2160 on our and refused to change to anything else. When looking on Steam’s forums, it looks like this issue is widespread amongst PC gamers who game on large screen TVs. Thankfully, this issue doesn’t appear to affect monitor users. 

This bug affected every GPU that we tested when playing the game on a 4K television, and Bandai Namco needs to address this issue as soon as possible. While most PC gamers are likely gaming on monitors, not TVs, there is a sizable playerbase of PC gamers that use TVs as their primary gaming screen. If other Unreal Engine 4 games can avoid this issue, surely you can address this issue with a patch.