Rumours have been circulating for months now that Ubisoft Montreal’s Watch Dogs will be running at 900p resolution on the Xbox One and 1080p resolution on the PS4. While Ubisoft hasn’t confirmed the same, the trend with cross-generational games in the past few months has been that the Xbox One version is usually inferior. GamingBolt recently spoke to Watch Dogs senior producer Dominic Guay about Xbox One development.
Given that the console’s eSRAM is rumoured to be holding the console’s resolution back, what kind of challenges did Ubisoft Montreal face while developing for the Xbox One and how did they set about approaching them?
Guay stated that, “Any time you develop a multi-platform game you need to approach each platform individually, considering their own specificities. While Watch_Dogs offers the same game experience across platforms, we needed to scale some specific elements on each hardware. Our tech was built with this in mind from the start.”
As for the critcisms facings Watch Dogs’ visual downgrade – which have been debunked recently – how difficult was it for the studio to maintain a visual standard without compromising on its creative vision?
“The game content has been iteratively polished through the months. This said, we’ve been consistent in our creative and artistic vision through the years. Both feed from each other, so it is less a question of balance between visual and creative, than having them both re-enforce each other. When we chose Chicago, when we chose Fall as the season during which the game took place, they were decisions linked to the core creative direction. Likewise, we have always focused on dynamism as a core pillar of what we wished to achieve visually: wind, water, density of citizen, etc. Immersion relies on many aspects and the team has done a great job at pushing them within our virtual Chicago.”
Watch Dogs will be out on May 27th for Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3, PS4 and PC. Will you be picking it up? Let us know in the comments.