Optimisation For PC Isnt Important Says Assassins Creed
Sylvain Trottier, associate producer on Assassin’s
Creed IV: Black Flag, has come to the surprising conclusion that PC gamers
don’t care how well optimised their games are.
This news comes on the eve of Europe’s Assassin’s
Creed IV release, as we’re getting reports from across the pond that the game’s
performance is highly unoptimised, not taking advantage of quad-core processors
and suffering from low GPU usage…
Speaking in an interview, Trottier said; "It's
always a question of compromise about the effect, how it looks, and the
performance it takes from the system. On PC, usually you don't really care
about the performance, because the idea is that if it's not [running] fast
enough, you buy a bigger GPU. Once you get on console, you can't have this
approach."
Revealing stuff from the associate producer and
something sure to irk the many Assassin’s Creed fans that are struggling to get
Black Flag running optimally. Trottier was keen to point out in the interview
with Edge magazine the positive results they’d achieved so quickly on the
next-gen consoles, with both the Xbox One and the Playstation 4 proving easy to
work on thanks to being architecturally similar to PCs.
Trottier continued; "The new platforms are a
lot closer to PC, so my engineers could do the R&D on PC and we knew it
would work fairly easily on next-gen platforms. It needed to be adapted, but
everything does.” It does beg the question why the title couldn’t have been
optimised for PC at a time when both consoles and PCs are more alike than ever
before.
PC gaming has often thrived on high-end performance
and delivering the smoothest gaming available, so it seems unusual that Trottier
would mention that PC gamers don’t really care about performance. The very fact
that a PC gamer is going to be spending more money on hardware indicates
they’re wanting a higher-end experience, and splashing out for a top-end card
due to an unoptimised game hardly seems like a fair compromise.
Let's hope those at Ubisoft don't try to take the
same approach to Watch Dogs when it launches next year, the already sky-high
system requirements seem to indicate that this may be a problem. The extra time
in development will hopefully give them the time they need to optimise it for
PC release.
What do you think of Trottier’s comments?
Do you care how optimised a title is, or would you
rather just splash out on a new GPU?
