Tom Clancy’s The Division is going to let you choose: better lighting, or a higher framerate?
This is how a representative from Ubisoft Massive explained it in an interview:
It’s actually great that we’ve given the option to disable certain lighting aspects to improve frame rate in the console version, which I don’t know if any other game does that. So if you want to choose frame rate over, like, visuals you can if you want.
It’s an interesting design choice from Ubisoft. Much like Naughty Dog’s implementation of the same feature for The Last Of Us, Ubisoft is not making a decision on this for gamers, but giving them the choice.
Now, it should be noted these choices come up on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but not for PC. That is because Ubisoft is considering the PC version completely separate from the console versions. For this reason, this version of the game is built from scratch from the ground up. It also means the PC version will have far more flexibility, so that it can be used in many different kinds of setups and builds.
Ultimately, Ubisoft says it wants to put Playstation 4 and Xbox One hardware to their limits. With this statement comes the promise of a game that could be one of the prettiest coming out this year.
I think the biggest challenge, however, would be how allowing fans to choose framerate will affect online performance. In particular, once you enter the Dark Zone, playing at 60 FPS may give you the competitive advantage over players set at 30 FPS, even if you are using the same hardware. It should be interesting to see what solution Ubisoft has arranged for this.
Tom Clancy’s The Division will be released on March 8 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows.
