Ubisoft confirms Watch Dogs will be 900p on PS4, 792p on Xbox One

In a stunning reveal serving as an example of why next-gen consoles are still nowhere near as good as current-gen PCs, Ubisoft has announced that neither the Xbox One nor the PS4 versions of their new hacker/FPS IP Watch Dogs will run at 1080p.

So far, there’s been very little that didn’t look positively amazing about Watch Dogs. Once everyone figured out that this wasn’t just a darker Grand Theft Auto with a twist, the concept really took off. As a result, this is one of the most highly anticipated games of the year so far, and with every announcement about how the city works and how the main character interacts with this world the game sounds more and more compelling. There’s so much going on in real time around you when you play that, apparently, this game can’t plat ay 1080p on the PS4 or Xbox One without dipping below 30FPS. To make sure that doesn’t happen, the resolution for the games has been locked at 900p and 792p respectively.

This resolution limitation should do very little to take away from the overall gameplay experience, but it’s hard not to look at that performance level with curiosity. It’s a classic example of the absolutely typical argument between PC gaming and console gaming. The PC version of this game will play 1080p at 60FPS with the right hardware, and while that hardware is usually more expensive and requires more work to setup and maintain than a console, it’s hard to argue with the results if the best possible experience is what you’re going for. On the other hand, the console experience has a greater chance of offering a better online community to play with, though everything we’ve learned about the game so far suggests that this is one of the few modern games where the campaign and subsequent missions will be more interesting than the co-operative online gameplay.

For now, at least, this appears to be the definition of next-gen when it comes to console gaming. Watch Dogs is going to play at the same resolution and framerate as Titanfall on the Xbox One, and it’ll be slightly better on the more capable PS4. It’s possible that someday we’ll see truly next-gen games on these consoles that offer a compelling new experience without some kind of performance sacrifice, but that day is obviously not today.

Via geek.com