Far Cry 4 developer slams resolution debate

A screenshot from Far Cry 4.

Far Cry 4 will run at 1080p and 30 frames per second on new-gen consoles, but the game's creative director isn't particularly interested in discussing resolution.

"It's certainly not something I care about in a game," Ubisoft's Alex Hutchinson told OXM.

"It feels weird to me that people are cool about playing a sort of retro pixel game, and yet the resolution somehow matters. It's like: is it fun, is it interesting, is it new, is it fresh, are there interesting questions?

"Somebody was telling me that with a 4K TV, to even see it, your living room has to be big enough to sit like 12 feet from the screen," he added.

"I don't know the exact numbers, but it starts to get a little crazy. I'm just in it for the experience, I'll play a SNES game if it's cool."

Hutchinson said that games shouldn't be a business that's completely reliant on graphical quality, calling that "a bad sign".

"If our thing is, 'Woo, the same exact thing you had before, at twice the resolution,' instead of a new thing ... A new spin or an evolution, I think is much more interesting," he said.

"Think about how things used to be - it used to be the graphics on the back of a box that sold a game. And even since the Xbox 360 and the PS3, that sort of era, like early 2000, I feel like 99 percent of the time it's gone away.

"It's a rare question for you to ask now about resolution or something," he added.

"It's [only brought up] because of the disparity, the idea that one version is being held back."

Resolution hasn't been a selling point for consoles for a while, Hutchison said.

"I think experiences have been selling them, and that's your challenge," he said.

"If you don't have a new cool experience, or a social experience - Call of Duty sells consoles, even though art-wise, it's not exactly ... [compare] Call of Duty to Crytek's games: one sells a metric shit-ton and the other doesn't."

Rather, Hutchison reckons resolution is currently a big story because the press need fodder to fill column inches.

"It's the same challenge we had all across the business, where five per cent of the audience is online commenting, and 95 per cent are just buying them or not buying them," he said.

"We create these weird echo chambers for those issues, and sometimes I wonder, I don't think this is real."

Far Cry 4 is due out on November 18.

- Gameplanet.co.nz