The Division Will Allow Console Users To Choose Between Better Frame Rate Or Better Lighting

[Alby_da_Wolf]

LudicrousSpeed said:

zero129 said:

But for how long?. Lets say the next CoD launchs on consoles and its default mode is 30FPS but it has a number of options you can turn down or off to get 60FPS. Person A buys the game when he sees his friend playing it cos it looks so good. He gets home to play it but its default settings are low so he has to figure out why his game doesnt look as good as his friends does and what them new options mean. And then like others have said we have optimising issues that could come from this with lazy devs using the "turn down settings for better framerate" instead of optimising the game proper.

CoD will always strive for 60fps over everything else, so that's not a realistic example. Also, we're not talking about multiple settings here and a double the frame rate difference. It's one setting users can toggle if they want a slightly better looking game or a slightly better playing game. Again this has been going on in a much deeper and complicated fashion in the PC market for decades and yet many PC games are still optimized perfectly fine for a wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide array of rigs. There are magnitudes less things that can go wrong with a console where you're working with one hardware build. So any optimization worries should be directed at the developer, not the idea that giving gamers choices means the games won't be optimized.

Ubisoft already makes poorly optimized games that routinely have issues. Even if they settled for somewhere in the middle, or picked the lighting or picked the framerate, the game will still probably have issues. However, developers who routinely put out quality made games will still put out quality made games. I mean, you're worried about what "lazy devs" are going to do.. we don't have to wait to see any future ramifications of this. "Lazy devs" are going to be lazy devs and put out games that reflect that, whether they have 20 different visual customization toggles, or 10, or 0.

This.  And most probably in future gens, GPUs will offer even more HW features to help game engines scale as seamlessly as possible.