Assassin's Creed Unity is the first game in the franchise to be built from the ground up for the new-gen consoles, and Ubisoft has confirmed it will run at 30 frames-per-second, and render at 900p, on both PS4 and Xbox One.
This week, gamers accused Ubisoft of keeping the frame rate and resolution down to these numbers to avoid the PS4 having a graphical advantage, but Nicolas Guérin, World Level Design Director on Unity, told TechRadar that the decision was partly to give the game more of a cinematic gloss - though did admit that it was also tough to achieve.
"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. It's a bit like The Hobbit movie, it looked really weird.
"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."
What's in a number?
Alex Amancio, the game's Creative Director, reiterated this point: "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.
"It's like when people start asking about resolution. Is it the number of the quality of the pixels that you want? If the game looks gorgeous, who cares about the number?"
This week, Ubisoft came out to say that it did not lower the specs of Unity to account for one system over another, after Senior Producer Vincent Pontbriand hinted to VideoGamer that this might not have been the case.
