“PC’s Always Going to be One Step Ahead of any Generation of Consoles,” Says Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag Producer

Ubisoft is set to bring Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag to the PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One this holiday. Releasing on so many consoles is definitely tricky, with Sylvain Trottier, Associate Producer on Black Flag, calling it “a challenge, but everything when you do a game is a challenge.”

Trottier, speaking to Eurogamer, explained in-depth on how they brought Assassin’s Creed IV to the next generation, a process which involves taking current gen assets and up-rezzing them. Then, they “add parallax mapping so rocks look even more like rocks” and “plant physics so they move with the wind that you can’t do on current gen.” All the enhancements Ubisoft can bring to the next generation of consoles due to their power and “new tech like DX11” will help them achieve of their goal of making sure the game looks “sexier.”

Before the PS4 and Xbox One came around though, Trottier talked about how the PC was their “next-gen test bed,” due to DX11 and increased RAM:

It was the closest thing to the next gen console, so yes it was. PC’s always going to be one step ahead of any generation of consoles, so we’re still going to push tech and experiment with other stuff that could benefit Assassin’s Creed afterwards. For example all the DX11 work on the PC version of Assassin’s Creed 3, we started from there to make our base for DX11 GPUs that are on the next gen consoles.

Do you ever think we’ll see a generation of consoles that are ahead of PCs? Let us know in the comments below.

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