It seems that the ongoing resolution debate is getting to Microsoft, after Blizzard has claimed that the hardware manufacturer forced them to bump up Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition’s resolution on Xbox One to 1080p, saying that a resolution of 900p was “unacceptable.”
Speaking to Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, the game’s production director John Hight said: “We did find it challenging early on to get it to 1080p. That’s why we made the decision to drop to 900. That’s what we demoed and were showing around E3 time. And Microsoft was just like, ‘This is unacceptable. You need to figure out a way to get a better resolution.’ So we worked with them directly, they gave us a code update to let us get to full 1080p.”
Related: Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition – Everything You Need to Know
However, it’s now being reported that Diablo 3‘s resolution being upped on the Xbox One has led to performance issues, which were not apparent when the game was running at 900p.
Eurogamer stated that “while Blizzard closes the gap between Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in terms of image quality, there are now performance issues that creep in at the game’s extremes while at 1080p. They’re not game-breaking, and many players may not even notice – but it’s clear that a 44 per cent boost to resolution doesn’t come for free: in the same scenarios, the 900p version proved smoother.”
Resolution has been a key talking point in this current console generation, with the Xbox One often coming under scrutiny when multi-platform titles fail to run at 1080p on the console. Judging from Blizzard’s comments, Microsoft is aware that the difference in resolution between Xbox One and PS4 games can stand to harm their sales, though pushing Blizzard to raise the image quality of its game despite it having an impact upon the game’s performance seems counter-intuitive. With that being said, the resolution debate has been made to be such a big issue now that it’s understandable why Microsoft wouldn’t want to release another multi-platform game that features poorer graphics than it would if played on the PS4.
According to the report, Diablo 3 can drop to around 50fps when played on 1080p, which may not be too noticeable depending upon how sporadically these frames fluctuate. Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition will be released on August 20th for Xbox One, PS4, Xbox 360 and PS3, so we’ll have to wait until then to see if these performance issues detract from its gameplay too much.
