Users planning on buying Assassin’s Creed Unity when it arrives on store shelves later this year are understandably, in an up-roar. Earlier today, Ubisoft, the game’s developer, revealed that Assassin’s Creed Unity will have a native resolution of 900 pixels and it has PS4 users livid.
In a conversation with gaming website Videogamer, Ubisoft representatives confirmed that all versions of Assassin’s Creed Unity will run at 30 frames per second and have a resolution of 900p. Where the trouble comes in is that, to avoid a firestorm, Ubisoft admits that it artificially locked the maximum resolution of the game. In effect, it’s possible that some users would be able to get better performance if it wasn’t for the artificial cap.
“We decided to lock them at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff,” Vincent Pontbriant tells the news outlet. He goes on to point out that although we have next-generation consoles with more ambitious specifications, Ubisoft is limited in what it can do with resolution. How good a game looks depends on the CPU and GPU of the console itself. Graphics processors can take a lot of the weight off a CPU, but things in the game’s environment, like the characters in Assassin’s Creed Unity’s environment, depend on the CPU. The more characters and things going on in the environment, the less space Ubisoft has to work with to improve the resolution.
Assassin’s Creed Unity includes a ton of environment characters and updated interactions. To be clear, Ubisoft didn’t exactly say that it was Microsoft’s Xbox One holding up performance. That being said, Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag ran at the same resolution and frames per second. Ubisoft later patched the PlayStation 4 version to support 1080p, leaving the Xbox One with the older resolution. That does indicate that the Xbox One is to blame.
Assassin’s Creed Unity, which will take place in Paris, France during the French Revolution and feature an all-new Assassin and multiplayer cooperative missions, launches on November 11th in the United States. It’ll only be available on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
