1080-pocalypse: Assassin’s Creed Unity creators respond to resolution accusations

By Will Fulton October 10, 2014

week gaming master chief batman napoleon bonaparte walk bar assassins creed unity — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Ubisoft has responded in a lengthy blog post to the many PlayStation 4 owners that have worked themselves up into a frothy fit over the announcement that Assassin’s Creed Unity would be locked into 900p and 30fps on both PS4 and Xbox One.

The gist of the complaint is that Ubisoft has forced an artificial parity between the consoles by limiting the demonstrably-better PS4 hardware to match the Xbox One, rather than pushing it up to the next-gen gold standard of 1080p. Anger was stoked by comments from the game’s senior producer Vincent Pontbriand to Video Gamer claiming that the developers “decided to lock them at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff.” His statement seemed to indicate that the decision to lock in the pixel count was made in order to just sidestep the so called “Resolutiongate” debate about which hardware is better. Ironically the move only threw gasoline on the fire.

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Ubisoft has since swooped in to clarify Pontbriand’s remarks. The statement opens with the sweeping proclamation that “Ubisoft does not constrain its games. We would not limit a game’s resolution. And we would never do anything to intentionally diminish anything we’ve produced or developed.” Pontbriand himself elaborates that the decision to limit resolution was based on a desire to push gameplay and depth of simulation further. While the post explains at length in general terms the trade-offs between graphics and performance that drive development, it does not specifically address the disparity between the consoles’ capabilities.

BioWare has thrown more fuel on the fire with an ironically (or deviously) timed tweet about the resolution of Dragon Age Inquisition:

Confirmed: #DAI resolution is 1080p on PS4, and 900p on Xbox One. We maximized the current potential of each platform.

— Dragon Age (@dragonage) October 10, 2014

The Dragon Age Inquisition team has embraced the well-documented consensus that PS4’s hardware is currently stronger than the Xbox One, and scaled the different editions accordingly to squeeze the most out of each platform. That second sentence could be read as a snide dig at Ubisoft’s predicament.

Regardless of resolution, Assassin’s Creed Unity arrives on PS4 and Xbox One on November 11.

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Action Games

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…

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