Nervous that your purchase of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag on PS4 instead of a current gen game-playing device won’t pay dividends? I’m still a bit skeptical myself, but according to Ubisoft, there are things going on that simply wouldn’t be possible on Sony and Microsoft’s existing seven-year-old tech.
In a recent video posted to the PlaySation Blog, AC IV Associate Producer Sylvain Trottier goes full geek-mode and details a handful of things making the cut in the PS4 version that will have to be left out elsewhere. As much as part of me wants to poke fun at Ubisoft pitching “dynamic 3D plants” as a killer feature, the video is actually pretty impressive, so I will refrain for the time being. In particular, the rain and weather effects in the game definitely come off as something we’ll be getting used to seeing as “next gen” inches closer and closer.
The video tells the story, but the post on the PlaySation Blog does a nice job summing up some of the cool stuff that you’ll see here.
Each raindrop is an individually lit object, puddles accurately mirror the world around them and volumetric fog accepts and reflects light from different sources. Dynamic Navmeshes (three dimensional objects you can run around on) ensure that you can jump from one ship to another without encountering weird collision issues, and can seamlessly interact between two ships involved in a boarding action.
We can use the power of next-gen processors to generate thousands of three dimensional plants that realistically react to the weather around them, as well as their interaction with Edward (perfect for judging his location during stealth gameplay).
Excited? I’m sure there are just as many people who couldn’t care less about this sort of thing as there are people frothing at the mouth over it, but at the very least, it can’t hurt to get the PS4 version of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag if you intend on buying the system at launch anyways.
The PS4 version will be there for the taking on November 15th, so you have until then to decide.