Ubisoft fights back against claims of Assassin's Creed Unity downgrade

Ubisoft is hitting back against claims that Assassin's Creed Unity will be locked to 900p and 30fps on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Producer Vincent Pontbriand was quoted on the company's official blog last night to address earlier statements he says had been misinterpreted.

"We've spent four years building the best game we could imagine," Pontbriand said. "Why would we ever do anything to hold it back? I simply chose the wrong words when talking about the game's resolution, and for that I'm sorry."

Earlier this week, Pontbriand told VideoGamer.com the company had locked the specs on both new-gen consoles in order to "avoid all the debates and stuff.

"Technically we're CPU-bound," he said at the time. "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.

"We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating," he continued, "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."

Ubisoft senior communications manager has also offered clarification on these earlier statements, writing on the Ubisoft blog that the company is not limiting the game's resolution.

"Let's be clear up front: Ubisoft does not constrain its games," said Steinman. "We would not limit a game's resolution. And we would never do anything to intentionally diminish anything we've produced or developed."

Assassin's Creed Unity will be available on Windows PC as well as PS4 and Xbox One; all three versions are scheduled to be released Nov. 11 in North America.