It’s no secret that Ubisoft is in trouble with Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s development. The team was originally aiming for a 1080p/60FPS experience on current-gen consoles but as it turns out, these machines are simply not good enough to handle the next Assassin’s Creed game at those settings. As a result of that, Ubisoft decided to drop the resolution to 900p and lock the framerate at 30fps. The French team claimed that this was done for parity reasons on Xbox One and PS4. However, Nicolas Guerin – World Level Design Director on Unity – decided to go one step further in order to justify Ubisoft’s decision by spreading ridiculous PR bu***rap all over our faces.
Nicolas told Techradar that while Ubisoft targeted 60fps, it is now aiming for 30fps because the game feels more ‘cinematic’.
“At Ubisoft for a long time we wanted to push 60 fps. I don’t think it was a good idea because you don’t gain that much from 60 fps and it doesn’t look like the real thing.” said Nicolas and continued:
“And in other games it’s the same – like the Rachet and Clank series [where it was dropped]. So I think collectively in the video game industry we’re dropping that standard because it’s hard to achieve, it’s twice as hard as 30fps, and its not really that great in terms of rendering quality of the picture and the image.”
Now this is a bunch of cr@p. We get it Ubisoft; current-gen consoles are not powerful enough to handle your games at 1080p/60fps. We also get it that you don’t want to criticize these systems as such comments would hurt the sales of your games. However – and for the love of God – just stop making such ridiculous statements.
Nicolas concluded:
“30 was our goal, it feels more cinematic. 60 is really good for a shooter, action adventure not so much. It actually feels better for people when it’s at that 30fps. It also lets us push the limits of everything to the maximum.”
Games running at 30fps are not ‘more cinematic’ than games running at 60fps. Games running at 60fps are always better and easier to the eyes than those running at 30fps. Even action adventures and slow-paced games benefit from 60fps because movement is more natural and smooth thanks to the higher samples provided by a higher framerate. These are facts. Oh, and as for the Rachet and Clank series, its dev team decided to push more visuals to it and since PS3 was unable to maintain 60fps, they decided to drop the framerate to 30fps. That was the REAL reason. The ‘cinematic’ comment was just an excuse to cover PS3’s lack of raw power.
There is nothing cinematic about locking the framerate at 30fps. Plain and simple. End of story. Game over. Let’s move on and let’s stop spreading these excuses when our teams are unable to hit their goals, okay Ubisoft?
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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