EA Sports UFC won't run at 60 frames a second on Xbox One and PS4 because there's "little discernible benefit", according to EA Canada's creative director Brian Hayes.
"UFC is running at 1080p," he told
Gaming Bolt in an interview. "The game sim is running at 60 FPS, but rendering at 30 FPS with motion blur.
"From prior experience working on Fight Night Round 4 and Fight Night Champion, which rendered at 60 and 30 FPS respectively, we discovered that 60 FPS didn't have a hugely beneficial impact on gameplay, but motion blur had an enormous impact on visual quality," Hayes continued.
"In fact, when we focus tested the two, the majority of people preferred the 30FPS experience with motion blur. So, as opposed to arbitrarily jumping back to 60 FPS for little discernible benefit, we decided to put those resources towards improving the visual presentation of the game in other ways."
Trade-offs between frame rate and other aspects of the experience are generally determined by the kind of game you're making. An arcade fighter like Killer Instinct needs a fast, consistent frame rate, in order to ensure a fair contest - "the fighting game community demands it," Double Helix design director David Verfaillie told us during our extensive
hands-on.
On the other hand, a realistic physics-based sim like UFC is presumably workable in 30 frames a second, because the combatants aren't capable of landing hundreds of hits in under a minute.
But all those hours you burned on Zelda, or Super Mario, or Sonic, or Metroid? Oh, yeah, that was a lie - it wasn't 1080p/60fps, so it was simply no fun.
