After Sony said on their official website that Watch Dogs would be 1080p/60fps on PlayStation 4 when it launched at the end of this month, Ubisoft has made a full statement on the Ubi Blog about Watch Dogs’ resolution and framerate (among other things).
Getting the most important piece of information over first, Communications Manager Gary Steinman wrote:
The game also looks great on both generations of consoles. On new-gen systems the game will run at 900p on PS4 and 792p on Xbox One, at 30 frames-per-second on both consoles.
Steinman continued:
While some new-gen games now offer native 1080p, [Creative Director Jonathan Morin] says it’s much more important to deliver an amazing next-gen experience than it is to push a few more pixels onto a screen. ‘Resolution is a number, just like framerate is a number. All those numbers are valid aspects of making games,’ he says. ‘But you make choices about the experience you want to deliver. In our case, dynamism is everything. Exploration and expression are everything. You want to have a steady framerate, but you want to have dynamism at the core of the experience. The same goes with resolution. People tend to look at corridor shooters, for example, where there’s a corridor and all the effects are on and it’s unbelievable, and they forget that if you apply those same global effects to an open city with people around and potential car crashes and guys in multiplayer showing up without warning, the same effect is applied to a lot of dynamic elements that are happening in every frame. So it becomes magnified in cost.’
Which, naturally raises the question: why not focus on increasing the resolution during the game’s recent delay? Because, Morin says, that was never the goal. Instead, that extra time was spent ensuring the team could fully realize their vision for Watch Dogs, polishing all aspects of the gameplay and making sure hacking is fully integrated into every system. ‘The effort was split on continuing dynamism and making sure players can express themselves through hacking without ever being disappointed in how the game responds to them, whether it’s visually or through gameplay,’ Morin says. ‘That’s important. Resolution has nothing to do with that. That’s why stuff like resolution can scale a bit down so that we never compromise the soul of Watch Dogs.’
As for the differences between the PS3/Xbox 360 and PS4/Xbox One versions of Watch Dogs, the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game won’t be getting the Decryption competitive multiplayer mode and the ability to free roam with multiple players (which Morin describes as more of a “bonus” than a core gameplay experience). Besides that, all the other online modes are included.
To catch you up on all things Watch Dogs, Ubisoft also brought out this 101 trailer:
What do you think about Watch Dogs being 900p/30fps on PS4? Let us know in the comments below.
