Assassin's Creed Unity will be 30fps and 900p on both PS4 and Xbox One because Ubisoft wants to "avoid all the debates and stuff".
Senior producer Vincent Pontbriand told VideoGamer that its the technical limitations of the systems' CPUs, not their GPUs, which have led to this decision.
Pontbriand commented:
"We decided to lock them at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff. Technically we're CPU-bound. The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it's the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel."
He added that because of these technical limitations, compromises had to be made:
"We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating, because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and we realised it was going to be pretty hard. It's not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we're still limited to 30 frames per second."
Last year, Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag was released at 30fps and 900p on both PS4 and Xbox One but Ubisoft released a patch which brought the PS4 version up to 1080p. So far the publisher has not stated any intention to do the same this year for Unity.
Assassin's Creed Unity is set for release on November 14th for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Ubisoft recently detailed the game's season pass, which includes a second game set in China.