Microsoft told Blizzard that the Xbox One version of Diablo 3 had to render at 1080p because 900p resolution was "unacceptable", the game's production director has revealed.

Blizzard's John Hight told Digital Foundry that the Xbox One version's rendering resolution was initially lowered from 1080p to 900p in order to maintain performance.

"We did have 1080p, but we were finding it challenging to keep our frame-rate," he explained. "Because Diablo's so much of an action game, we wanted to have a responsive feel, especially with four players.

"When you get four witch doctors in a room full of demons, that's probably the worst case scenario for us because we have effects going off everywhere. We want to make sure that it still feels very glassy, very responsive, and that's why we dropped resolution down on it."

However, Microsoft was unhappy with this decision and requested that Blizzard address it.

"We did find it challenging early on to get it to 1080p," Hight says. "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."


Blizzard initially revealed the resolution discrepancy at E3 in June, confirming that the Xbox One version rendered at 900p while the PS4 version ran at 1080p.

But earlier this month the studio confirmed that a day one update for the Xbox One version makes the game run at 1080p and 60 frames per second.

It is believed the code update Microsoft gave Blizzard was related to the new Kinect-disabling developer tools, which turn off Kinect's body-tracking abilities and free up ten per cent of GPU memory.

Posted: Aug 20, 2014 11:10 am
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/474852/microsoft-told-blizzard-that-900p-was-unacceptable-for-diablo-iii/