14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft has confirmed that it's decided to lock the resolution and framerate of Assassin's Creed Unity to just 900p and 30fps on both the PS4 and Xbox One platforms, in order to avoid debates about which version is better, and to ensure that its AI system can cope with the many different characters on screen.
Assassin's Creed Unity is eagerly expected by millions of franchise fans next month, when it's set to arrive on PC, PS4, and Xbox one, delivering a massive overhaul of the franchise's core recipe. New mechanics for the combat, the stealth, or the freerunning systems are expected, as well as a fresh rendering engine capable of producing a near 1:1 recreation of Paris.
New consoles aren't that powerful, so compromises need to be made
Unfortunately, it seems that Ubisoft's many improvements are hampered by the hardware in both the PS4 and the Xbox One platforms, so the publisher decided to make a few compromises in order to ensure great gameplay.
As such, both the framerate and the resolution of Unity on both the PS4 and the Xbox One are locked at 30fps and 900p, way below the gold standard of 60fps and 1080p.
According to Ubisoft Senior Producer Vincent Pontbriand, who has talked with Videogamer, the locked performance was implemented so that there would be no debates concerning which version of the game is the definitive one.
"We decided to lock them at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff," he explains.
The CPU produces a bottleneck due to the AI system
According to Pontbriand, another reason is that the CPU in both the PS4 and the Xbox One isn't that great when it comes to the AI system in Unity, as it can't keep up with the many characters in the game's world.
"Technically we're CPU-bound," he adds. "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."
The developer event goes so far as to say that Unity could run at 100fps, were it not for the AI system and the underpowered processors that keep it from attaining such a high framerate.
"We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating, 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."
Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, which appeared last year, ran initially at 900p and 30fps on the PS4 and Xbox One, but received a day-one update to bump the resolution to 1080p on the Sony console. Considering Unity runs on a new engine with many improvements, it's unclear if such an improvement might also be possible.
