In a recent blog post, Ubisoft explains the resolution choices for AC Unity.

Following Senior Producer Vincent Pontbriand's confirmation to VideoGamer.com earlier this week that Assassin's Creed Unity will run at 900p and 30fps on both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, Ubisoft released a clarification explaining more in depth how they came to the decision to lock at that resolution.

Let’s be clear up front: Ubisoft does not constrain its games. We would not limit a game's resolution. And we would never do anything to intentionally diminish anything we’ve produced or developed.

Which, of course, brings us to Assassin's Creed Unity. The game has been in the media lately, and not just for a recent round of hands-on previews and features. One outlet ran a story using some quotes from Senior Producer Vincent Pontbriand to suggest we lowered the resolution on the PlayStation 4.

“Absolutely not,” Pontbriand says. “We've spent four years building the best game we could imagine. Why would we ever do anything to hold it back?” Pontbriand goes on to say that he understands why someone might think that’s the case based on a recent interview, adding “I simply chose the wrong words when talking about the game’s resolution, and for that I'm sorry.”

Pontbriand goes on to explain that the gameplay experience—featuring thousands of interactable NPCs in a crowd, nearly a 1:1 scale of Paris' buildings, seamless co-op and open world navigation, among other things—are all factors that push these consoles hard, and the game was best optimized at 900p/30fps.

A game's final resolution isn’t set until late in the development cycle. This is notable because the team has dedicated much of the past few months to optimizing Unity to reach 900p with a consistent 30 frames per second. Considering the sheer number of pixels that are being moved around at all times – which affects both the CPU and GPU – that’s a significant achievement, especially as Assassin's Creed Unity will release when the new-gen consoles are barely more than a year old. (As with all hardware, it becomes easier to optimize with more experience and software/middleware solutions that only come with time.)

As of now, Assassin's Creed Unity is locked at 900p. But why “stop” there? “We know a lot of gamers consider 1080p with 60 frames per second to be the gold standard, especially on the new generation of consoles,” Pontbriand says. “We realize we had also pushed for 1080p in some of our previous games, including AC4. But we made the right decision to focus our resources on delivering the best gameplay experience, and resolution is just one factor. There is a real cost to all those NPCs, to all the details in the city, to all the systems working together, and to the seamless co-op gameplay. We wanted to be absolutely uncompromising when it comes to the overall gameplay experience. Those additional pixels could only come at a cost to the gameplay.”

Read the entire blog post over on Ubisoft's site.

Ann "Cyliena" Hosler, Managing Editor