Ubisoft backtracks on claims it lowered AC: Unity resolution on PS4 to achieve Xbox One parity

A developer working on Assassin’s Creed: Unity has said that the game has been made to run at a reduced resolution of 900p on PS4 to keep it in line with the Xbox One release.

Both versions of the title will run at 900p and 30fps – which was also the way for Assassin’s Creed IV, although a PS4 patch upped the resolution to 1080p.

"We decided to lock them at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff," senior producer Vincent Pontbriand told Videogamer. "Technically we’re CPU-bound. The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it’s the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel.

"We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating, because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and we realised it was going to be pretty hard. It’s not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we’re still limited to 30 frames per second."

However, Ubisoft has now distanced itself from the quotes, claiming they were misinterpreted.

"We understand how Senior Producer Vincent Pontbriand’s quotes have been misinterpreted,” the company told Polygon. To set the record straight, we did not lower the specs for Assassin’s Creed Unity to account for any one system over the other.

"Assassin’s Creed Unity has been engineered from the ground up for next-generation consoles. Over the past four years, we have created Assassin’s Creed Unity to attain the tremendous level of quality we have now achieved on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC. It’s a process of building up toward our goals, not scaling down, and we’re proud to say that we have reached those goals on all SKUs.

"At no point did we decide to reduce the ambitions of any SKU. All benefited from the full dedication of all of our available optimisation resources to help them reach the level of quality we have today with the core Assassin’s Creed Unity experience."

It’s not the first time Ubisoft has rubbished the claims made by its own staff in the face of controversy.