Need for Speed Rivals launched with the Playstation 4 on 15 November and since has garnered some critical acclaim for Ghost Games’ first title under the EA banner and using the Frostbite 3.0 engine.
Rivals has been revealed to run at 1080p resolution and with a 30FPS cap on the Xbox One and Playstation 4 platforms, but no official statement has been made about the game on the PC platform. A leak by PCGames Hardware, however, seems to confirm a 30FPS cap for the PC platform.
“A racing game stands and falls with its [sense of] speed. Electronic Arts has recently disagreed [with fans] and equipped the Need for Speed series several times with a 30FPS lock out. In view of the next-gen alignment many racers had hoped [that] EA [would break] with this tradition in Rivals. If perhaps not in the console versions, at least in the PC version,” they write (and roughly translated using Google Translate).
The 30FPS cap is, according to Electronic Arts, a necessary limitation to ensure that the game’s AllDrive feature works properly. AllDrive is a component in the game that allows players to hop in and out of each other’s sessions, bringing whatever carnage and chaos may be following them into a race or a free-roam situation.
“It is a choice we made to be able to push what we believe is really important for our typical gamer: get a lot of things happening on the screen at the same time,” said Ghost Games executive producer Marcus Nilsson, in an interview with Eurogamer at Gamescom 2013. “Anything can happen in AllDrive. That’s the key innovation with this game. You don’t have single-player, co-op or multiplayer. It just happens seamlessly.
“I could be playing the game, setting a time, and all of a sudden you could come into that world, and you could be carrying AI, I could be carrying AI, and all of a sudden, on that screen, there are a lot of cars. We always have to budget for the worst case scenario. So in this case we’ve prioritized the gameplay, because we think 30FPS is giving a satisfactory experience.”
Previous Need for Speed titles have also had frame caps implemented. Need for Speed Most Wanted (2012) was capped at 60FPS, while The Run was limited to 30FPS. Hot Pursuit, launched in 2010, also had a frame cap of 30FPS on the PC platform, which was later removed.
Other EA-published titles which were frame-rate capped are Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 (30FPS) and Dead Space 2 and 3, which limited players to 30FPS with V-Sync turned on.
Source: PCGames Hardware.de, Eurogamer, Gamefront
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