Just imagine this in glorious “cinematic” 30fps.
This is a very strange story to be writing, but it appears that the developers of Assassin’s Creed: Unity may have lost all sense of reason when it comes to frame-rates. In some statements to TechRadar that make me extremely worried for the PC version of the game, experienced game designers are arguing in favour of 30fps over 60fps.
For good measure, they say that resolution doesn’t matter much either.
“I think collectively in the video game industry we’re dropping that [60fps] 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,” says Assassin’s Creed: Unity level design director Nicolas Guérin.
Just read that sentence again and remember that it comes from a man who designs videogames, professionally, for a living.
Not wanting to be left out, Unity creative director Alex Amancio weighed in with this beauty: “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.”
This is all quite strange to me, because every single Assassin’s Creed game released to date has been better in 60fps. It’s smoother to play, more responsive and doesn’t look like a slide-show when you’re turning the character around. It … look, why am I even having to defend 60fps ahead of 30fps? It’s self-evidently and demonstrably better for games in every single circumstance. Ubisoft have apparently lost their minds.
The only reasonable explanation I can give for this is that these two don’t actually believe this, but have to say it because Assassin’s Creed: Unity can’t achieve 60fps on either of the newer consoles. That has to be it, right?
I guess the proof will be in whether Unity is locked to 30fps on PC or not. Hopefully it won’t be.
