[Update] Ubisoft has released a new statement regarding the whole Assassin's Creed Unity resolution and framerate controversy. Over on the studio's official blog, senior communications manager Gary Steinman takes the time to emphasize the fact that in no way is the game's technical quality being limited.
"Let’s be clear up front: Ubisoft does not constrain its games," he said. "We would not limit a game’s resolution. And we would never do anything to intentionally diminish anything we’ve produced or developed."
Senior producer Vincent Pontbriand also shared a few clarifying words, adding:
We’ve spent four years building the best game we could imagine. Why would we ever do anything to hold it back? I simply chose the wrong words when talking about the game’s resolution, and for that I’m sorry.
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. 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.
[Original] Ubisoft has confirmed that Assassin's Creed Unity, its upcoming new-gen exclusive set during the time of the French Revolution, will have a resolution of 900p and run at a locked framerate of 30fps.
Yes, that is for both Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
"We decided to lock them at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff," senior producer 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," he added.
"We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating," Pontbriand 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."
Ubi later released a clarifying statement to Kotaku, explaining that the game's performance on either console wasn't limited by the other. "We understand how Senior Producer Vincent Pontbriand's quotes have been misinterpreted. To set the record straight, we did not lower the specs for Assassin's Creed Unity to account for any one system over the other."
Are you concerned about the compromise in fidelity or do you think Ubisoft made the right call? I'll happily take better AI over a few extra 'p's and frames any day.
