What’s more important: a game with a massive player count running at a steady frame rate, or hitting the optimal 1080p resolution? This is a dilemma that DICE, the team behind the bugged-yet-beautiful Battlefield 4, had to deal with throughout development. Speaking to Tom’s Hardware, DICE's Johan Andersson discussed why the interaction between 64 different players online was a much more significant goal than simply making the game run at the best resolution possible.
“If you play Battlefield, I think you'll agree that the actual game experience of playing on the 64-player server and everyone is interacting, I mean, and having a great frame rate is actually a significant difference from what we had on the current generation of consoles with only 24 players," he said. "This sort of enables more types of gameplay, and that was the most important thing for us.
"That sort of set the bar that we need to get there, and we did get there. Sure, we did still have to do a little bit of a compromise on the solution. We're not running at the full native 1080p; we're running a little bit lower resolution than that. But I think it was well worth those trade-offs in order to make sure that we can actually have the full sort of PC game experience overall being on there.”
Plenty of next-generation projects, such as Ryse: Son of Rome, have failed to run at 1080p, and that’s caused more than a few graphic enthusiasts to raise an eyebrow to the next generation of home hardware.
