Ubisoft Massive hopes to "cram it up a bit more" on PC

Nov 6, 2014 07:32 GMT  ·  By

Developer Ubisoft Massive has stated once again that the upcoming third-person shooter Tom Clancy's The Division won't be downgraded on any platform for the sake of parity.

There has been a lot of doubt concerning Ubisoft's decisions in regards to how its games play on every available platform, with many people accusing the company of purposely downgrading the level of visual detail on the PC version of Watch Dogs, for instance, in a bid to offer a more congruent experience across all systems the game is playable on.

Furthermore, taking into account the disparity between the footage Ubisoft showed when it first unveiled Watch Dogs and the final result, many people were left disappointed, feeling that they were deceived, in spite of the fact that the game looked pretty good by modern standards.

Some of the issues experienced with the PC version of the open-world hacking action-adventure video game, combined with a seemingly easy patch that one intrepid modder managed to put together in a very short time to unlock some of the enhanced features already present in the game files, translated into Ubisoft losing some of the gaming community's goodwill.

The Division will be put under a lot of scrutiny

Massive Entertainment, the developer of the upcoming shooter, has responded several times to the suggestion that The Division's visuals might have to be downgraded from the PC version in order to fit on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles.

"Downgrading is a weird term to use. Obviously, we want to make a game that looks the best it can on its respective format, so Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. So I think the term downgrade is a bit confusing and weird because we're trying to get the most out of every machine we use."

"So Xbox gets its attention, PlayStation gets its attention, and PC of course will be able to cram it up a bit more depending on the hardware you have," Massive's Martin Hulberg explained in an interview with Open World Games.

When asked whether all versions of The Division would feature the same specs, running at 60 frames per second in 1080p resolution, Hultberg responded that work for each and every platform was a separate effort, and the team intended to stay away from using the least common denominator as the benchmark for every version of the title.

He assured gamers that Ubisoft Massive wanted to deliver as good an experience as possible on all formats, and that nobody would suffer any downgrades for choosing a particular platform over another.

The Division is set to launch sometime in 2015, headed to the Windows PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 platforms.