Assassin’s Creed Unity – has it been nerfed on the PC?

Ubisoft has been embroiled in another scandal, with Xbox’s Phil Spencer denying that he forced them to make Unity 30fps on PC.

Don’t worry, this isn’t another story about resolution. This time everyone’s upset about frame rates instead.

Assassin’s Creed Unity is still the focus though, with the allegation that console makers (i.e. Microsoft and/or Sony) have been pressuring Ubisoft to ensure the PC version of the game doesn’t run better than 30 frames per second – thereby avoiding making the console versions look worse by comparison.

The source for these allegations is a school visit made by Ubisoft developers in France, as recorded by a user on Reddit. Where rather than ask them about how to get a career in gaming the students instead quizzed them about recent news stories.




The Ubisoft developers were initially asked about Watch Dogs’ notorious downgrade in graphics, and why it only ran at 30 frames per second. Apparently the developer implied that console makers (presumably Sony in this case, given the exclusive deals they had for the game) pressured them into ensuring that the game remained 30fps on PC as well.

Watch Dogs – did Sony or Microsoft stop it looking better on PC?

Although a super smooth 60 frames per second is desirable for fast action games like racers and beat ’em-ups it’s not necessary for other more general games, and perfectly normal for something like Watch Dogs and Assassin’s Creed.

However, a high end PC doesn’t have the same technical limitations as a console and so theoretically should be able to go up to 60 frames per second.

Recently though one of Assassin’s Creed Unity’s developers claimed that 60fps wasn’t even desirable: ‘I don’t think it was a good idea because you don’t gain that much from 60 fps and it doesn’t look like the real thing. It’s a bit like The Hobbit movie, it looked really weird.’

His comments were roundly mocked by everyone, for the nonsense they clearly are, and when the students brought up the issue the developers implied that Microsoft were specifically preventing them from having the game run better on the PC.

Microsoft’s influence on Assassin’s Creed Unity has already come under suspicion, as all the previews have solely been on Xbox Ones and the game has been very prominent at Microsoft’s media briefings this year.

Interestingly though Xbox boss Phil Spencer has already denied any wrong-doing. Not that he’d admit otherwise of course…

Although the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are obviously rivals the PC is traditionally regarded as neutral territory.

But that status has begun to erode in recent years, with Intel hinting last year that, ‘somebody paid a lot of money’ to keep Grand Theft Auto V a console exclusive for as long as possible (even now it’s being released later than the next gen versions, in January rather than November).

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