Ubisoft does some damage control over PC optimisation comments

Ubisoft dug itself quite a hole last week when Assassin's Creed IV producer, Sylvain Trottier, said that performance wasn't something to care about when developing for the PC platform:

“It’s always a question of compromise about the effect, how it looks, and the performance it takes from the system. On PC, usually you don’t really care about the performance, because the idea is that if it’s not running fast enough, you buy a bigger GPU. Once you get on console, you can’t have this approach.”

This quote came out of an issue of Edge magazine and it's safe to say, PC gamers weren't happy. As always, when a company offends an entire customer base, damage control must be done. Claiming that he was misquoted by the media, Trottier explains that his quote was referring to the R&D stage of PC development and he did not mean to imply that optimisation didn't matter or wasn't a focus during development:

“You want to push the particle and lighting effects to the max to see how it looks. Thing is, while you’re doing that, the performance doesn’t matter. We were doing R&D. But we weren’t doing R&D for performance. We’re doing R&D to try to see how far we can push the limits, to make our game look very amazing.” After the team has the game looking as best as it can, they begin to optimize, the Ubisoft blog also explains that PC optimisation actually comes first as the team could expect similar performance gains when jumping between platforms.

“It’s absolutely not true that we don’t care about PC optimisation. If we didn’t care about PC optimisation, then we would not have such a big team in Kiev. We have a team dedicated just to the PC version in Kiev.”

Those of you who have played Assassin's Creed IV on the PC will know that it is running quite well and that is a decent step up from the Assassin's Creed III port.

Kitguru Says: The quote from Edge magazine was probably just clumsy wording. Assassin's Creed IV has come out without any wide spread issues and it runs decently on my mid range hardware, so I'm inclined to believe what Trottier is saying. Although, the Assassin's Creed III port wasn't great, Ubisoft seems to have learned its lesson with the latest release. 

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