The reason for their enthusiasm is that both the Xbox One and the PS4 are basically PCs at their core. Because of this they were able to build one copy of the game and push it out to both consoles without the need to make massive internal changes to ensure compatibility. This is good news for Ubisoft and, in a way, for gamers as it maintains a consistent experience across all three platforms; the PC, the Xbox One and the PS4.

Creative Director, Alex Hutchinson, stated “We want the gameplay experience to be the same on all platforms so we're leaning on technical differences. Everything you see, whether it’s the fur on the animals, the grass on the ground or the leaves on the trees. All these things are bumped up a huge amount in the next gen version,”

In fact due to their common development platform they were able to test immediately and found that they could run the PC “ultra” settings on both the Xbox One and the PS4 without any troubles.

“So even out of the box, even day one, we just stuck the code on the new consoles and we were able to dial it all the way up. So as a console player you’re already getting by far the best version we can ship.”

Whether or not this is factual is up for debate. You see the PC can be configured to be much more powerful than any console can. There is no doubt about that and for Ubisoft to act like the Next-Gen consoles can match the power of a real PC built for gaming is absurd. Do not get me wrong, the move to an x86 based system in consoles is great and brings the performance level up a notch, but you are not going to match what you can do with a PC. Instead this sounds much more like Ubisoft making the decision to develop for what the console can do and not worry about pushing the PC platform.

If this is the case it could be because they are seeing declining sales of games for the PC, or because it can be easier to prevent piracy on a console versus a PC. Either one is a good financial reason, but it does leave many PC gamers out in the cold and wonder what to do with all that extra power…

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