14 DAY TRIAL // The Order: 1886 developer Ready at Dawn has come forward to defend the 30fps framerate of the new title, saying that its team is focusing on delivering a movie-like experience, so a 60fps framerate would've ruined the whole design.
Framerate and native resolution have been hot topics in the gaming industry ever since the new PS4 and Xbox One consoles were released last year, as controversies arose after games ran better on one platform than on the other.
What's more, titles that didn't reach the gold standard of a 1080p resolution and a 60fps framerate were criticized and their developers had to defend their choices or at least explain their reasoning.
After learning that upcoming PS4 exclusive The Order: 1886 runs at 30fps, Ready at Dawn, the studio behind the title, has talked about its goals with the game and how a 30fps framerate is better than a 60fps one.
While talking with Kotaku, Game Director Dana Jan said that 60fps is great for some games, but the movie-like The Order needs a smaller framerate to keep its visual style.
"60fps is really responsive and really cool. I enjoy playing games in 60fps. But one thing that really changes is the aesthetic of the game in 60fps. We're going for this filmic look, so one thing that we knew immediately was films run at 24fps. We're going to run at 30 because 24fps does not feel good to play. So there's one concession in terms of making it aesthetically pleasing, because it just has to feel good to play."
If the game retained its current style but upped the framerate to 60fps, it would ruin the whole experience as instead of feeling like a movie, it would feel like a documentary on TV, at least according to Jan.
"If you push that to 60, and you have it look the way we do, it actually would end up looking like something on the Discovery Channel, like an HDTV kind of segment or a sci-fi original movie maybe. Which doesn't quite have the kind of look and texture that we want from a movie."
Last but not least, the developer also emphasized that, right now, there isn't a game out there that does what The Order achieves and runs at 60fps.
"Then, on top of it, I don't know of any other games that are going to look like our game in real-time with no pre-rendered movies, with all the stuff that's going on lighting-wise, and run at 60. I think that's probably the thing that most people underestimate is [that] to make a game look like this."
The Order: 1886 was recently delayed from its fall 2014 release into early 2015, so expect to hear more about the third-person shooter until then.