Ubisoft took to their official blog to clear up rumors developers have constrained the resolution for “Assassin’s Creed: Unity” on Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
Senior Producer Vincent Pontbriand spoke with UbiBlog were he adamantly denied the developers lowered the standards on the PlayStation 4 to avoid comparisons to Xbox One.
“Absolutely not,” Pontbriand told UbiBlog. “We’ve spent four years building the best game we could imagine. Why would we ever do anything to hold it back?”
He added, “I simply chose the wrong words when talking about the game’s resolution, and for that I’m sorry.”
Pontbriand went on to explain how next-gen consoles’ hardware has allowed them to build a refreshing experience for “Assassin’s Creed” fans. Developers went back and reimagined key elements to the “Assassin’s Creed” of navigation, stealth and combat.
“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 said. “We realize 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.”
Pontbriand said developers wanted gamers to feel the “density” of a huge city like Paris. They wanted to make sure the consoles could support hundreds of NPCs without sacrificing gameplay.
“We want you to feel that density, the chaos that was happening back then. Paris was a huge city, with almost a million people,” he said. “So we cranked up our number of NPCs.Keep in mind that previous Assassin’s Creed games could support around 100 to 150 NPCs; Assassin’s Creed Unity has crowds of thousands of NPCs on screen, and you can interact with each and every one them.”
“Assassin’s Creed: Unity” will be released to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on Nov. 11.
