Ubisoft Claim 30 FPS is Being Pressured by Console Manufacturers

Remember last week when Ubisoft told us that 60 FPS looks weird and claimed that 30 FPS is more than suitable for all gamers? This was all uncovered during a visit to a school where the students asked some hard questions, including “What the hell happened with Watch Dogs”. How did Ubisoft respond after the 30 FPS fact? Interestingly is the answer.

Well, they’ve kind of passed the blame along – claiming that console manufacturers are pressuring them into the 30 FPS game play, not by their own choice. Apparently a Ubisoft Game Architect was quoted stating that 60 FPS is the companies aim, but “limitations” have been seeing them settle for a 30 FPS benchmark. This representative went on to state that console manufacturers are pressuring them to replicate the same 30 FPS limitations on their finished PC products. He also made a mention that Ubisoft liked to reuse as much code as possible (most likely due to time and money savings), which is why many of their games have certain similarities.

Another hard-hitting student queried if Ubisoft was “aware of the negative responses of the recent decision to lock your games into 30FPS. If so, what do you think about that?”. They replied that due to console hardware limitations, they’ve been forced to choose between graphic quality and smoothness (frame rate).

Reddit user ‘timois’ was the original creator of this information thread, who also made sure to point out that Ubisoft implied that Microsoft is making them lock the frame rate on PC too.

Coming from a personal PC gamer standpoint, it’s pretty eye-bleedingly obvious when your gaming is running as low as 30 Frames Per Second. So much so that it generally incites a PC restart from myself and constant pondering if my system is trying to overheat itself again. It’s also made more obvious through shooter type games, like CS:GO which I’ve been dabbling in lately running at 200+ FPS and 144hz. What’s Ubisoft’s response to this question however? – “60FPS looks weird”.

I’m not here to preach the “PC Gaming Master Race” stereotype that is seen across social media ever so often in this day and age, but if the consoles are limited to 30 FPS and the consumers are happy – let them be. But please, don’t subject me to the same limitations.

To their credit, Ubisoft has made and will make some incredible games – but we’d love for them to look incredible too. Otherwise, we’re going to see a progression similar to this.

Image courtesy of eTeknix