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Over the weekend, a video began making the rounds featuring an unnamed member of The Division development team stating that the PC version had to be “kept in check” as it would be unfair to console players if PC gamers got a far superior looking version of the game. Ubisoft has often been criticised for attempting to achieve graphical parity across platforms but the publisher has been quick to come out and deny that The Division on PC was held back by consoles.
In a statement sent over to PCGamesN, an Ubisoft spokesperson said: “It has come to our attention that a comment from one of our team members has been perceived by some members of the community to imply the PC version of The Division was ‘held back' and this is simply not true. From the beginning, the PC version of The Division was developed from the ground up and we're confident players will enjoy the game and the features this version has to offer. And the feedback from PC players who participated in the recent closed beta supports this.”
Ubisoft has had quite a bit of bad PR over the last couple of years, especially when it comes to the PC versions of their games as well as ‘graphical downgrades'. This isn't the first time we have heard talk of Ubisoft holding back the PC version either, talk of that popped up way back in 2014, when an anonymous developer supposedly came forward to admit to it.
KitGuru Says: This isn't the first time that an Ubisoft developer has made a comment like this so it wouldn't be surprising if Ubisoft did intentionally hold back the PC version of the game to make the new generation consoles look better. That said, I did play the beta for The Division on the PC and it definitely didn't look bad but that's just my opinion. Do you guys think Ubisoft is still holding back PC versions of its games for console parity?
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised knowing Ubisofts track record but I felt the The Division worked well on the PC. Visually it was amazing and there were a ton of graphical options to play around with to finetune your experience. The Division hasn’t necesarilly looked bad so far but you never know, they could do a next level watch dogs on us despite the closed beta being 2 months from release and the open beta half a month
The video does stress multiple times that the PC version is being pushed as far as it can, I think when they say “keep it in check” they mean things like the PC version not having insane physics calculations that the consoles just wouldn’t be able to handle, so they’re not going to put those sort of features in the PC version and essentially make it a different (version of the) game
The visuals weren’t amazing and the performance was shockingly bad running on my 980. The game looks middle of the road graphics from 2 years ago at best and considering how badly Rainbow Six Siege runs (and looks), it sounds about right that Ubisoft are holding it back. That and they hire the worst devs possible.
then u have no clue what ur doing, i ran it on my 650 and had great performance , same with R6
Okay that’s fine but if the consoles could have ran those physics would it have been added in then? Of course it would have. So therefore since the consoles are too weak to handle the intense physics the PC can then the game was canned to the lowest hardware. Riiiiiight?
Was that at 420p or on a green CRT screen? /joke
Game is good but graphics are a few years old in my opinion.
PC can handle way more and they even admit it, But no one wants to upset the console kids!
Nobody actually listened to the dev. He says, and I quote:
Shame on the author; he’s the one that linked the video and everything.
The quote you put up is about features, such as multi-gpu support.
The “kept in check” comment is about graphical fidelity.
While this is a better compromise than what they did with Watch_Dogs, at the end of the day, The Division looks less pretty than it could have on PC, for no other reason than to protect the feelings of console owners, least they realize just how low-end the hardware in their boxes actually is.
I had it running fairly well with 980 SLI, getting around 60-80 fps on a WQHDscreen, this is with everything maxed. But a lot of people were having issues with fps if they were trying to run it maxed on one GPU, especially at WQHD or 4K
The reason I will not consider working for Ubisoft at all as a game developer. EA, i am looking at you as well.
I wonder how many people will be mad that their PS4 melted if I put a overclock software in console game. 😀 will be a nice opportunity to ruin Sony’s and Microsoft’s reputation.
Yeah. This is old news regarding Ubisoft. He does say quite specifically it was held back. Plain english. So if you are saying otherwise u work for Ubi or you should apply for a job. U would fit right in
On Watchdogs they were force to tone down by MS and Sony as the consoles were relatively new.
(Former Dev spilled the beans on that one too)
Why couldn’t they put those features in? The press demo’s output from a year or 2 were far superior and running on PC.
m8 my pc wud ave urs in a fight bet u 50p
Just regular 1080p maxed on an i7 and 980 and it was dropping below 30. Inexcusable as the frostbite engine looks significantly better and provides much higher framerates.
Learn to read. Shame on the guy jumping to defend a notorious game publisher.
way to cut out the whole first half of the quote. Here, let me post it for you: “We do have to kind of keep it in check with the consoles, because it would kind of be unfair just to push it so far away from them,”
If Ubisoft wanted to add vehicles to The Division but consoles couldn’t handle the speed of rendering the world while in vehicles, would they put those vehicles in the PC version but not in the console versions? That’s the kind of level of things the dev is talking about, not things like texture quality and extra graphical fanciness that you’re probably thinking about. They’re making the PC version as good as it can be but they can’t make the PC version an entirely different game just because it can handle more in terms of physics calculations and such
That’s why he says both that the pc version needs to be kept in check but also that they have a dedicated PC build that is being pushed as far as it can
Despite what this article says there’s nothing in the video that says he’s talking about visual superiority and the question was vague enough that the developer in question would be talking in terms of features. In fact just listen to what he says, he’s always careful to make sure that confusion doesn’t happen between features and graphics
It sounds like you’re working overtime at the ubisoft spin factory, I hope you’re earning time and a half.
It’s called looking at the whole picture and applying basic logic. The problem both you and Roman Cruz are having is that you’re both focusing on one half of what the guys saying.
dooo it