The Xbox One version of Diablo 3 initially ran at a resolution of 900p. That number has since been bumped up to 1080p thanks to the game’s day-one patch.
According to Blizzard’s John Hight, the game’s lowered resolution of 900p was deemed “unacceptable” by Microsoft. For a company that often goes on and on about how resolutions don’t matter, this is pretty funny. Regardless, Blizzard worked hand-in-hand with Microsoft to bring the game’s resolution up to 1080p by optimizing the title.
“We did find it challenging early on to get it to 1080p,” Blizzard’s John Hight said to Digital Foundry.
“That’s why we made the decision to drop to 900. That’s what we demoed and were showing around E3 time. And Microsoft was just like, ‘This is unacceptable. You need to figure out a way to get a better resolution.’ So we worked with them directly, they gave us a code update to let us get to full 1080p.”
Once again, it just goes to show that Microsoft considers high resolutions to be every bit as important as having a 60 frames-per-second framerate despite their public statements to the contrary. It’ll be interesting to see how all of this plays out the next time Microsoft claims that a title running at a 900p resolution is ‘good enough’ for gamers or how no one will be able to tell the difference between 900p and 1080p.