Far Cry 4 director: experiences sell games, not resolution

Far Cry 4 creative director Alex Hutchinson believes gamers are interested in resolution because of platform disparities, not because true HD adds anything spectacular to games.

Far Cry 4 is aiming for 1080p on both PS4 and Xbox One, unlike Ubisoft stablemate Assassin's Creed: Unity, but not because Hutchinson necessarily thinks it's super important.

The game director told OXM that emphasising "gadgetry and technology" over new experiences is a "bad sign".

"If our thing is 'woo, the same exact thing you had before, at twice the resolution, instead of a new thing,'" he said.

"A new spin or an evolution, I think is much more interesting.

In fact, Hutchinson believes the era when players bought games based on graphics quality has been "99%" over since the last generation.

"It's a rare question for you to ask now about resolution or something. It's [only brought up] because of the disparity, the idea that one version is being held back. I don't think that has sold consoles for a while now," he said.

"I think experiences have been selling them."

If history repeats itself this article will be followed by a string of commenters opining that, actually, resolution and frame rate matter a great deal to them personally.

"It's the same challenge we had all across the business, where 5% of the audience is online commenting, and 95% are just buying them or not buying them," Hutchinson said.

"We create these weird echo chambers for those issues, and sometimes I wonder, I don't think this is real."

The full article through the link above contains further discussion of the matter. Far Cry 4 is coming to both current generations of consoles, as well as PC, on November 18 in North America and November 20 in Europe.