Ubisoft was hoping Assassin's Creed Unity wouldn't become another battle in the "war" between PS4 and Xbox One. Unfortunately, that happened anyway.
The controversy started today when Videogamer published an interview with Assassin's Creed Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand. In the chat, Pontbriand mentioned that the PS4 and Xbox One versions both run at 900p and 30fps.
"We decided to lock them at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff," Pontbriand said.
Some PS4 owners assumed that this meant Ubisoft had simply downgraded the PS4 version of Assassin's Creed Unity to match its Xbox One counterpart. The specs on Assassin's Creed 4 fueled that theory. Last year's AC4 runs at 1080p on PS4 thanks to a day one patch, while the Xbox One version runs at 900p.
These gamers, believing that Ubisoft was gimping their version of the game simply so Xbox One wouldn't be left with an "inferior" version, are a bit upset. They've been using the hashtag #PS4NoParity to express their disgust on Twitter:
Ubisoft noticed the backlash to the Videogamer interview and decided to respond. They fired off a statement clarifying that they didn't downscale Assassin's Creed Unity and that Pontbriand had been "misinterpreted."
"We understand how senior producer Vincent Pontbriand’s quotes have been misinterpreted," Ubisoft told GI. "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."
To be fair, Ubisoft couldn't really win here. If they had been able to push the PS4 version to a better resolution or framerate, Xbox One owners would have been upset at them instead of PS4 owners. These specs are a very touchy subject right now. They're an occasion for one side or another to declare victory over the other. There was no way for Ubisoft to avoid getting dragged into the console war, short of releasing the game at 1080p/60fps on PS4 and Xbox One.
Assassin's Creed Unity will launch on November 11th in North America and on November 13th in PAL territories.
