Assassin’s Creed IV Dev angers PC Gamers

"Oi lads, looks like Sushi is on the menu for dinner!"

Ubisoft’s Sylvain Trottier, Associate Producer on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, has sparked fresh anger from PC Gamers about developer and publisher attitudes towards PC gaming today.

Speaking with Edge in their latest issue about game development for next-generation platforms, he was asked how easy it was to get good performance out of the new consoles compared to the current crop.

“It was much easier”, he replied. “The new platforms are a lot closer to PC, so my engineers could do the [Research and Development] on PC and we knew it would work fairly easily on next-gen platforms. It needed to be adapted, but everything does. It’s always a question of compromise about the effect, how it looks, and the performance it takes from the system.”

Ok, that’s fair enough. But wait, here’s the clanger:

“On PC, usually you don’t really care about the performance, because the idea is that it’s not [running] fast enough, you buy a bigger GPU.”

Oh dear.

Of course, this perceived attitude towards PC development by a major publisher won’t come as a surprise to PC gamers; there is a long list of games ported to PC from console that have had extensive technical issues and little support over the years, and Ubisoft has come under particularly heavy criticism from the PC gaming community in recent times, with accusations of lackluster ports, poor post-release support, and their use of DRM among other issues.

However, this is direct confirmation that PC development is not a priority from a senior developer for one of the biggest games publishers in the world. In particular, the seeming assumption that PC gamers will just buy a new graphics card to ensure PC game runs better on their system could be seen as dismissive of the need for optimization and thorough pre-release Quality Assurance on the platform; particularly at a time when many people are struggling financially and finding their disposable income at an all-time low. Those Geforce Titan GPUs don’t come cheap, after all.

We’ve reached out to Ubisoft for comment and will report back if they respond on the matter, but we’re thoroughly expecting the standard “we don’t comment on rumour and speculation” reply.

Dale Morgan

Dale Morgan

Founder, Editor in Chief
When Dale isn't crying over his keyboard about his never-ending workload, he's playing games - lots of them. Dale has a particular love for RPGs, Roguelikes and Metroidvanias.
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