Graphics Parity aka #PS4noparity has been a huge subject of debate since Ubisoft announced they would be locking Assassins Creed Unity to 900p/30fps on PS4 and XBox One. The justification behind this was to avoid any debates about which console had the better version of the game. Most of us can see where they were coming from with this, but we can also see that this is an incredibly silly idea. This is like limiting the speed of cars to avoid upsetting horse owners!
Ubisoft have already ruined one game so far this generation. The Watch Dogs controversy was a big deal, when we discovered the games visual quality and performance had been severely limited in order to give all platforms the same experience. While it does look like Assassins Creed Unity will still be an amazing game, it’s quite frustrating to know that the game you are playing was probably better looking and performed better back when it was in the development studio.
Far Cry 4 is a game that I was super excited about. After seeing how bad Watch Dogs was, my excitement has been suppressed to the point where I’m not even going to pre order the game. Until I see what kind of damage Ubisoft have done to this title, I don’t want to take the risk wasting my money on another game like Watch Dogs. It may sound like an over reaction, but it’s justified when you look at the bigger picture. Every platform has strengths and weaknesses, graphics parity takes the weaknesses from each individual platform and applies them to all the platforms. Any strength a platform has can never be used as it will give a performance increase over the other platforms. A PC will always have more powerful hardware, this no longer matters. Microsoft have invested a lot in cloud computing, which will never be used in a game published by Ubisoft with their current philosophy. Crushing innovation is not the way forward.
I would like to think the gaming community has the collective voice to force Ubisoft to undo this decision, but they seem very keen on enforcing this. Assassins Creed Unity and Far Cry 4 will sell millions of copies no matter how much damage Ubisoft do, but has it come to the point where we need to stop supporting this?
Has the graphics parity announcement effected your holiday video game wish list? Should we continue to support a publisher that is forcing its development teams to downgrade games in order to satisfy a bizarre management decision?
