Remember the news that Assassin's Creed Unity's AI system would be able to generate crowds of 12,000 people at once? Well, these crowds are causing this next-gen game to run at 900p resolution at a 30fps frame rate.
Unity's AI Crowds Are Gigantic; Paris Contains 30,000 People
The news was broken over at Videogamer who, talking with Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand, reported that the game's graphical capabilities on consoles were limited by the AI they had produced. It isn't the consoles' GPUs that were holding back the graphics, he said. Rather, it is the CPU's need to process all of the sophisticated AI for the massive NPC crowds that forces the next-gen game to run at last-gen graphical levels.
"It's not the number of polygons that affect the frame rate," Pontbriand told Videogamer. "We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we're still limited to 30 frames per second."
The size of Unity's AI crowds was exciting news a little more than a month ago. The game boasts one scene with a staggering AI crowd of 12,000 models, and the game's city of Paris as a whole contains 30,000 people.
According to GameSpot, a Ubisoft representative has said since the original news was published that the final specs for Unity have not yet been locked. But with only a month left until release, it seems unlikely that a resolution-boosting fix will be implemented before the game drops.
Assassin's Creed Unity will release for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on November 11.
