Ubisoft Locks The Division’s Framerate at 30FPS, Graphical Fidelity to be More Important

Ubisoft apparently wants to stand out from the crowd by adding complexity and graphical definition to its titles. The company seems to focus more on delivering an immersive gameplay in world ‘full of life’.

For example, Watch Dogs has been delayed after the launch of Grand Theft Auto V in order to add more complex detail to be able to compete with Rockstar’s title. Far Cry 4 has also been announced to deliver the same ‘Ultra High’ graphical complexity on next-gen consoles as on PCs. The latest announcement points to the same graphical fidelity being applied to Ubisoft’s upcoming title, namely The Division.

However, nothing comes without some drawbacks. In order to deliver the aforementioned graphics, performance cuts need to be made. And this apparently will be noticeable in terms of framerate capabilities. This is the case of The Division, where it has been announced that the title will have its FPS counter locked at 30.

Massive Entertainment’s Managing Director, David Polfeldt, made a comment regarding the reason of locking The Division’s framerate at 30 and not upping it to a smooth 60 as gamers would like to see in every title they play.

I think we’re shooting for 30fps because it’s a trade-off, right? Graphical fidelity and immersion are more important to us than the frame rate. If we go for [60fps], we’ll have to make a trade-off on fidelity and other things. But because we want to have very, very complex destruction and extremely detailed environments; a complete weather system, full day/night cycle…at some point you have to make up your mind: where do you invest? And for us, it’s going to be 30fps”.

Although the framerate will be quite low, the graphical complexity and ‘complex destruction’, in addition to all the sweet features such as the weather system and day/nigh cycle could compensate. However, this requires a lot of optimisation in order to maintain the designated framerate when ‘all hell breaks loose’ during massive combat scenarios.

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