Ubisoft Massive Proclaims: “PC Is Incredibly Important To Us”

Ubisoft is guilty of making disparaging comments about the PC platform including remarks which brandish the audience as pirates. Not only that, Ubisoft has consistently treated the PC as an afterthought and released games in a buggy, unoptimized state. As a result, the PC community is very suspicious of any Ubisoft release and wary that the game might not live up to their marketing prowess. However, early reports indicate The Division is prioritizing the PC version and implementing multi-GPU support, HBAO+, an uncapped framerate and high resolution monitors. Additionally, Creative Director Magnus Jansén released the following statement to Rock, Paper, Shotgun on The Division and outlined the importance of the PC platform:

“PC is incredibly important to us. There are plenty of incentives to do a good PC version. Personally it’s important – a I play on PC whenever I can and I want the thing they play at home to be the best possible version. That is not to be underestimated as a driving force. Secondly, both of the studios, Massive and Red Storm started out on PC so it’s a matter of pride, or heritage and pedigree if you will. We feel kind of ashamed if we don’t do the PC version really well. It really is something that we care about.”

“We’re a very technical studio as well. Sweden is a very technical country – we’re good at infrastructure and design, and a lot of our staff come from the old demoscene as well. There’s a lot of that heritage in the Swedish dev community and that is true here at Massive as well. It comes very natural to us. The engine, Snowdrop, enables the artists to do all of that great UI work and makes it relatively easy to expose all of those options on PC.”

Clearly, the developer seems very passionate towards the PC, and it’s great to see. However, the proof will be when the game actually comes out and we hear reports from users on a wide range of hardware configurations. I’m cautiously optimistic, as surely they wouldn’t praise the platform so much if the game has performance related problems.