Ubisoft confirms Assassin's Creed Unity 30fps cap

October 13, 2014 | 12:21

Tags: #assassins-creed #assassins-creed-unity #console-gaming #pc-gaming #playstation-4 #windows #xbox-one

Companies: #ubisoft

Assassin's Creed Unity publisher Ubisoft has hit back at claims it has artificially limited the resolution of the game in order to minimise the differences between the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 ports, but admits the game is locked at 900p and 30 frames per second.

The news of a 30 frames per second cap on the game was excused by creative director Alex Amancio as being 'more cinematic' than 60 frames per second during an interview with IGN. As part of the same interview, level designer Nicolas Guérin added that 'you don't gain that much from 60 fps, and it doesn't look like the real thing - it's a bit like The Hobbit movie, it looked really weird.' These claims followed considerable backlash at producer Vincent Pontbriand's earlier remarks to Videogamer that the game would be locked to 900p resolution and 30 frames per second on both Xbox One and the graphically more powerful PlayStation 4 to 'avoid all the debates and stuff' surrounding the relative merits of both consoles' hardware.

Suggestions that the game was being deliberately limited on one platform to make up for hardware limitations on another caused a storm among console fans, but Ubisoft claims it's all a matter of misunderstanding. ' Let’s be clear up front: Ubisoft does not constrain its games. We would not limit a game’s resolution,' the company's senior communications manager Gary Steinman wrote late last week. 'And we would never do anything to intentionally diminish anything we’ve produced or developed.'

'We know a lot of gamers consider 1080p with 60 frames per second to be the gold standard, especially on the new generation of consoles,” Pontbriand admits in the post. '[i]We realise we had also pushed for 1080p in some of our previous games, including AC4. But we made the right decision to focus our resources on delivering the best gameplay experience, and resolution is just one factor. There is a real cost to all those NPCs, to all the details in the city, to all the systems working together, and to the seamless co-op gameplay. We wanted to be absolutely uncompromising when it comes to the overall gameplay experience. Those additional pixels could only come at a cost to the gameplay.'

Claiming that he 'simply chose the wrong words when talking about the game’s resolution,' Pontbriand has defended the decision to the hilt and suggested that there is little that would enable Ubisoft to change the 900p/30fps cap currently in place. What hasn't yet been made clear is whether the Windows release of the game will have a 30 frames per second cap put in place as well, but with claims by Ubisoft that the game's artificial intelligence is heavily CPU limited even on the eight-core consoles it doesn't seem entirely unlikely.
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