Ubisoft: "On PC you don’t really care about the performance"

Publisher Ubisoft is already not at the top of many PC gamers’ Christmas lists and new comments from an Assassin’s Creed producer are unlikely to help.

The PC version of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag has irked some quarters of the PC fraternity having been accused of a lack of optimisation – even very powerful gaming machines are struggling to run it at 60fps at 1080p.

Now Videogamer reports that Assassin’s Creed 4 associate producer Sylvain Trottier has claimed that optimising games for PC simply isn’t a priority.

"The new platforms are a lot closer to PC, so my engineers could do the R&D on PC and we knew it would work fairly easily on next-gen platforms,” Trottier told Edge magazine. It needed to be adapted, but everything does.

"It’s always a question of compromise about the effect, how it looks, and the performance it takes from the system. On PC, usually you don’t really care about the performance, because the idea is that if it’s not [running] fast enough, you buy a bigger GPU. Once you get on console, you can’t have this approach."

The comments are just the latest in a string of moves from Ubisoft that have irritated PC fans following other poorly optimised titles and of course 2010’s DRM woes.

Poor PC ports of console games have sadly been a common theme throughout 2013, although optimistic observers are putting it down to the development complications caused by next-gen machines. Fingers crossed for better things in 2014.