Assassin's Creed Unity's senior producer Vincent Pontbriand has apologized for using "the wrong words" while discussing the decision to lock the game at 900p/30fps on both PS4 and Xbox One.
Pontbriand said earlier in the week that Ubisoft had chosen to lock the game at 900p/30fps on both consoles "to avoid debates and stuff", leading to suggestions from the community that the PS4 game's resolution had been deliberately lowered to achieve parity.
"Absolutely not," he said in a post on the publisher's official blog. "We've spent four years building the best game we could imagine. Why would we ever do anything to hold it back?”
He continued: "I simply chose the wrong words when talking about the game’s resolution, and for that I'm sorry."
Explaining the decision to stick to 900p rather than push for full 1080p on both consoles, senior communications manager Gary Steinman explained that the answer "is both simple and complex".
"Assassin's Creed Unity is pushing the new-gen systems more than any other Ubisoft game has ever done," he said. "A quick look at the visuals – the city itself, the crowds, Arno in motion – will show how beautiful and how 'next-gen' the game truly is.
"The more complex answer? A game's final resolution isn't set until late in the development cycle. This is notable because the team has dedicated much of the past few months to optimizing Unity to reach 900p with a consistent 30 frames per second. Considering the sheer number of pixels that are being moved around at all times – which affects both the CPU and GPU – that’s a significant achievement, especially as Assassin’s Creed Unity will release when the new-gen consoles are barely more than a year old. (As with all hardware, it becomes easier to optimize with more experience and software/middleware solutions that only come with time.)
"As of now," Steinman reiterates, "Assassin's Creed Unity is locked at 900p."
"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," added Pontbriand. "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."
Yesterday, comments from creative director Alex Amancio emerged questioning the importance of the game's resolution. Assassin's Creed Unity launches on PS4, Xbox One and PC on November 11.
