Yesterday, Ubisoft sent the internet into collective rage when it announced that it would be deliberately holding back the PlayStation 4 version of its upcoming, highly anticipated title Assassin’s Creed Unity, to ensure parity with the Xbox One version. The Xbox One, with its lower specc’d hardware, is going to get a version of the game running at 900p and 30 frames per second. The PS4 version could manage more, especially in terms of resolution, but Ubisoft is deliberately holding it back- and giving us a a shitty excuse while they are at it.
“We decided to lock them at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff,” Ubisoft’s Vincent Pontbriand told Videogamer.
“Technically we’re CPU-bound. The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it’s the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel.
“We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating,” he continued, “because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and we realised it was going to be pretty hard. It’s not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we’re still limited to 30 frames per second.”
Anyway, now they have come out and told Eurogamer that they may change the ‘final specs’ for both systems after all.
“Final specs for Assassin’s Creed Unity aren’t cemented yet,” a Ubisoft spokesperson explained, “but we can say we showed Assassin’s Creed Unity at 900p during our hands-on preview event last week. We’re confident that gamers will be thrilled with the gorgeous graphics and how Paris is brought to life in Assassin’s Creed Unity.
“The development team has been hard at work delivering the best Assassin’s Creed possible on next generation consoles. Regardless of which platform you’re playing on, Assassin’s Creed Unity will answer what an Assassin’s Creed game built from the ground up for the next generation of gaming looks like and will be the best looking Assassin’s Creed game ever developed.”
Yeah… just no.
