No Rest for the Wicked finally gets its long-awaited release date on the stages of PlayStation's State of Play. The action RPG title will officially leave Early Access and launch Version 1.0 this October for PS5 and PC, but the Xbox release is delayed.

Moon Studios confirmed that Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2 versions are still planned. But these will arrive at a later date.

The reason behind this is the optimization issue on the Xbox Series S. Game director and studio co-founder Thomas Mahler explained the situation.

“Series S is making that rough," the director revealed. "We’ll ship it after in a good way once it’s optimized like crazy for Switch 2 and Xbox. Porting to Xbox means porting to Xbox Series X and Series S, and that’ll take more time to optimize compared to porting to PS5 and PS5 Pro. So we’re most likely going to do PS5/PS5 Pro first and launch there in order to make fans happy and supply other ports later."

When a game comes to the platform, the developer has to launch it simultaneously on both Xbox Series X and Series S. But Series S is still far behind Series X in terms of strong hardware specifications.

That's why landing a new game on Series X is not difficult, but on Series S, it can be. That's why Mahler even stated, "Series S and mobile specs aren’t too far apart at this point."

The developer also dismissed suggestions that Sony had secured any form of exclusivity agreement. Mahler explained that the memory limitation on the lower-powered console is proving particularly difficult for the game's streaming-heavy design.

As per him, the game constantly streams large amounts of data, and the team has not yet reached its desired performance targets on Series S.

He noted that porting to Xbox wouldn't have been a major issue if it weren't for the parity clause and if it were supposed to land only on Series X.

In fact, No Rest for the Wicked isn't the first title to face these issues with Xbox.

Black Myth: Wukong Faced Similar Xbox Series S Challenges

No Rest for the Wicked is not the first high-profile game to publicly cite Xbox Series S optimization issues. There was another popular game that got a delayed Xbox release for the same reason. And it was Black Myth: Wukong.

In early 2025, Game Science CEO Feng Ji discussed the challenges of bringing Black Myth: Wukong to Xbox. As per him, the Xbox Series S's 10GB shared memory pool created significant optimization hurdles.

He even stated that getting the desired result on this platform might take years of optimization work and experience. However, the game landed on Xbox in August last year.

There are other instances as well. Baldur's Gate 3 arrived on Xbox months after its PC and PS5 launch, following Series S-related development challenges. Hence, Moon Studios' path to launch No Rest for the Wicked on Xbox could be a slightly bumpier ride.

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Written by

Nilendu Brahma

Edited by

Aadesh Dhote