Ubisoft distances itself from PC optimisation comments

A statement that was re-quoted out of context” is being blamed on apparent comments from Ubisoft saying that the optimisation of PC games is not important.

Assassin’s Creed 4 associate producer Sylvain Trottier was last week quoted as saying: 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."

However, a new post on Ubiblog has dismissed the statement.

In the interview, [Trottier] expressed that during the R&D phase, optimisation isn’t the focus,” it said. Instead, it’s about seeing what you can do – and if you can’t pull it off with the tools at hand, you simply add in a bigger GPU. This statement was then re-quoted out of context, making it appear that we don’t focus on PC optimisation. Rest assured, that is decidedly not the case.”

The post adds that Ubisoft’s optimisation process actually begins on PC, partly because all devs have access to PC hardware but also because both next-gen consoles are PC-like in their architecture, making it the obvious starting point.

It’s absolutely not true that we don’t care about PC optimisation,” Trottier said in the new article. If we didn’t care about PC optimization, then we would not have such a big team in Kiev. We have a team dedicated just to the PC version [of Black Flag] in Kiev.

We are very proud of the PC version of Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag. The game runs well on low-end PCs, and lots of additional features were added for higher-end machines, allowing each and every customer to fully enjoy the experience on their PCs.”