Assassin’s Creed: Resolution.
Come un fulmine a ciel sereno arriva in varie redazioni americane una e-mail di un presunto dipendente Ubisoft. Nella chiacchierata informale viene spiegato il perché del blocco a 30 fps e i 900p sia su Xbox One che PlayStation 4. Ufficialmente si è parlato di una migliore gestione del gameplay e del fatto che a 30 fps le sequenze cinematiche siano migliori. Il dipendente invece ha dipinto un quadro leggermente diverso. Si parla invece di una PS4, ma molto probabilmente anche XOne incapace di reggere la Full-HD per via delle enormi aree da caricare.
Il frame rate attuale è stato raggiunto soltanto dopo parecchie settimane di ottimizzazione e che nonostante si abbia una risoluzione ridotta il titolo appaia molto gratificante per gli occhi. In calce abbiamo allegato l’e-mail nella versione integrale:
“I’m happy to enlighten you guys because way too much bullshit about 1080p making a difference is being thrown around. If the game is as pretty and fun as ours will be, who cares? Getting this game to 900p was a BITCH. The game is so huge in terms of rendering that it took months to get it to 720p at 30fps. The game was 9fps 9 months ago. We only achieved 900p at 30fps weeks ago. The PS4 couldn’t handle 1080p 30fps for our game, whatever people, or Sony and Microsoft say. Yes, we have a deal with Microsoft, and yes we don’t want people fighting over it, but with all the recent concessions from Microsoft, backing out of CPU reservations not once, but twice, you’re talking about a 1 or 2 fps difference between the two consoles. So yes, locking the framerate is a conscious decision to keep people bullshiting, but that doesn’t seem to have worked in the end.
Even if Ubi has deals, the dev team members are proud, and want the best performance out of every console out there. What’s hard is not getting the game to render at this point, it’s making everything else in the game work at the same level of performance we designed from the start for the graphics. By the amount of content and NPCs in the game, from someone who witnessed optimization for lots of Ubisoft games in the past, this is crazily optimized for such a young generation of consoles. This really is about to define a next gen like no other game before. Mordor has next gen system and gameplay, but not graphics like Unity does. The proof comes in that game being cross gen. Our producer (Vincent) saying we’re bound with AI by the CPU is right, but not entirely. Consider this, they started this game so early for next gen, MS and Sony wanted to push graphics first, so that’s what we did. I believe 50% of the CPU is dedicated to helping the rendering by processing pre-packaged information, and in our case, much like Unreal 4, baked global illumination lighting. The result is amazing graphically, the depth of field and lighting effects are beyond anything you’ve seen on the market, and even may surpass Infamous and others. Because of this I think the build is a full 50gigs, filling the blu-ray to the edge, and nearly half of that is lighting data.”
