Ubisoft have come under fire for remarks made by Vincent Pontbriand, a senior producer on Assassin’s Creed: Unity, who claimed Ubisoft had deliberately kept the resolution of both the PS4 and the Xbox One versions of the game the same.
Speaking with Videogamer, Pontbriand said: “We decided to lock them at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff. Technically we’re CPU-bound. The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it’s the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel. We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating,” he continued, “because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and we realised it was going to be pretty hard. It’s not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we’re still limited to 30 frames per second.”
Playstation fans responded with anger at the notion that their version of the game was being purposefully held back to accommodate the Xbox One version, but Ubisoft were quick to respond, explaining that Pontbriand’s comment had been misinterpreted. The company stated: “We understand how senior producer Vincent Pontbriand’s quotes have been misinterpreted. To set the record straight, we did not lower the specs for Assassin’s Creed: Unity to account for any one system over the other.
“Assassin’s Creed: Unity has been engineered from the ground up for next-generation consoles. Over the past four years, we have created Assassin’s Creed: Unity to attain the tremendous level of quality we have now achieved on Xbox One, PS4 and PC. It’s a process of building up toward our goals, not scaling down, and we’re proud to say that we have reached those goals on all SKUs. At no point did we decide to reduce the ambitions of any SKU. All benefited from the full dedication of all of our available optimisation resources to help them reach the level of quality we have today with the core Assassin’s Creed: Unity experience.”
Recently however, Ubisoft have spoken to Eurogamer saying that the final specifications for the game are actually yet to be finalised, saying: “Final specs for Assassin’s Creed Unity aren’t cemented yet, but we can say we showed Assassin’s Creed Unity at 900p during our hands-on preview event last week. We’re confident that gamers will be thrilled with the gorgeous graphics and how Paris is brought to life in Assassin’s Creed Unity.”
So while it sounds like Ubisoft are proud of the game’s visuals, this could be their way of attempting to change what’s been said. We’ll have to wait and see for more.
Originally published October 8, 2014. Updated November 29, 2022.
