No downgrading The Division on PC, Ubisoft will “cram it up”

During a recent interview, head of communications at developer Massive Entertainment Martin Hultberg has dismissed any notions about a possible downgrade of the PC version of The Division. Instead, Hultberg has once again iterated each version is being developed to maximize the capabilities of its respective platform, meaning the PC version won’t be restricted by the ever-present issue of resolution over frames-per-second or the other way around.

“Downgrading is a weird term to use,” Hultberg said in an interview with Open World Games. “Obviously, we want to make a game that looks the best it can on its respective format; so Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. So I think the term downgrade is a bit confusing and weird because we’re trying to get the utmost out of every machine we use. So Xbox gets its attention, PlayStation gets its attention, and PC, of course, we’ll be able to cram it up a bit more depending on the hardware you have. We address every console, every platform, as its own version, so we try to stay away from the thing where you go for the least common denominator, and everybody suffers for it,” he continued, responding to a question about aiming for consistent performance – 1080p, 60FPS – across all platforms. “We want to make a good experience on all respective formats.”

The Division is inspired by Operation Dark Winter and Directive 51, real-world events which “revealed how vulnerable we’ve become; “society has become “fragile” and “complex.” In the game, a disease that spreads on Black Friday causes the United States to collapse in mere five days. The player is part of a group called the ‘Strategic Homeland Division (SHD)’, or ‘The Division’ for short. This group was established to combat the threat brought about by the outbreak and are given direct authority by the President of the United States to do whatever it takes to “save what remains” in a massive multiplayer online situation, putting them against AI-controlled enemies, as well as other players in the game.

The Division launches sometime in 2015, on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.