Yesterday the internet caught fire when Sony boasted Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs would run at 1080P / 60FPS on the Playstation 4 on their website. During my news video I’d advised viewers to climb into their nuclear fallout bunkers as fans on both side of the fence took their stances on the news (particularly as there wasn’t any X1 news up until that point).
Ubisoft are still declining to comment (of course) but a curious thing has happened – Sony have now removed the 1080P / 60FPS claim from its website and has issued no statement regarding the decision. This is a rather odd turn of affairs since Sony were so happy to brag about it just a day or two prior.
An earlier rumour suggested that the PS4 would run at 1080P, but only at 30FPS (while the Xbox One version would run at a lower resolution and at 30 FPS). There’s a few ways you can interpret this news.
The first is that the PS4 version just wasn’t stable at 60FPS, and as I mentioned in my video possibly wasn’t frame rate locked. This could mean it frequently dipped below 60FPS (possibly in the 30 region) and Sony didn’t feel comfortable any longer with the claim.
The second is Sony got asked to remove the claim by Ubisoft, particularly as they’re so quiet on the specs of how the title runs on either machine. Microsoft could have said “Hey, you can’t let them say that. It makes our brand look bad”. It’s fair to say that Sony have taken several opportunities to stick it to MS (as Microsoft have done with Sony) so this is possible.
Another possibility was it was a mix up between the person(s) responsible for the PR text on the website. This mis-communication wouldn’t be ideal. While the text is removed, the claim has been made and people are now on higher alert. Check out our performance analysis when Watch Dogs finally drops and we’ll see.
