Ubisoft Must Think We’re Idiots With Their Latest 30FPS Claims

I’m absolutely raging this week and it’s all because of Ubisoft, who are once again talking utter nonsense to try pull the wool over the eyes of the average consumer, but they’re not fooling me! The developer confirmed this week that their new title Assassin’s Creed Unity will be running at 900P on both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, which is fine, I’m sure the game will look very nice and play well enough to keep us all happy; to a certain degree, because graphics aren’t everything.

Now for the bit that has wound me up, Nicolas Guérin, World Level Design Director on Unity said that AC: Unity was locked at 30FPS to give the game “a more cinematic feel”, what a load of nonsense, this is a thin excuse for their game engine not being able to push above 30FPS, not a technical decision to aim for 30FPS.

“At Ubisoft for a long time we wanted to push 60 fps. I don’t think it was a good idea because you don’t gain that much from 60 fps and it doesn’t look like the real thing. It’s a bit like The Hobbit movie, it looked really weird”. He continued: “And in other games it’s the same – like the Rachet and Clank series [where it was dropped]. So I think collectively in the video game industry we’re dropping that standard because it’s hard to achieve, it’s twice as hard as 30fps, and its not really that great in terms of rendering quality of the picture and the image”. said Nicolas

So which is it Nic, you aimed for 30FPS because you think it’s more cinimatic, or you had to settle for 30FPS because 60FPS was “hard to achieve.” Saying it’s not really that great in terms of rendering quality is completely contradictory, higher FPS is EXACTLY great in terms of rendering quality, it’s as simple as that.

AC: unity Creative Director Alex Amancio made matters even worse by saying that 30FPS feels better, a matter that I’m sure is subjective, but looks and feels are two different things and he’s really just wiggling around the issue at hand. If anyone here has played The Last of Us on PlayStation 4, you’ll find that it’s set at 60FPS and it looks gorgeous! But you can also set it to a more “cinematic” 30FPS in the pause menu and I love the developers for doing this, as it’s a perfect example of how quickly people switch back to 60FPS once they realise that 60FPS is king for this game, which I would now like to point out is an action adventure title…

“30 was our goal, it feels more cinematic. 60 is really good for a shooter, action adventure not so much. It actually feels better for people when it’s at that 30fps. It also lets us push the limits of everything to the maximum. It’s like when people start asking about resolution. Is it the number of the quality of the pixels that you want? If the game looks gorgeous, who cares about the number?” said Alex.

What really annoys me, other than literally everything these idiots are saying is that people will believe them! Your average consumer will think “oooh cinematic, that sounds great”, but the reality is they’re just sugar coating a half-baked game engine. So Ubisoft, you show me a 30FPS locked demo and a 60FPS locked demo and we’ll hold a vote on which is better.

Stop lying to consumers, you settled for 30FPS because it was an easy target, you didn’t want to drop the graphical quality on the console editions any further in favour of higher FPS. The reality is that 30FPS is not the visually better of the two and it will have to do. Let’s hope the PC version isn’t locked at the same level.

Enjoy these technical demos that show you the difference in FPS. Gotta love that cinematic judder.

• Demo 1
• Demo 2
• Demo 3
• Demo 4