We are almost a year into the 8th generation console cycle and personally I don’t think it’s been very good. With companies like Ubisoft leading the charge saying that 30 FPS is the golden goose and not 60 FPS is a complete and utter lie. I’m late to the party on this topic but I’m going to give my 2 cents anyway. Since the days of the NES- 60 FPS has always been the standard. Running a game at 30 FPS is ok but it is definitely not the norm. A lot of the titles released this year on PS4 and XboxOne have been locked at 30 FPS. This is mostly due to the both consoles being under powered. Sorry to all you die hard fanboys and girls out there but it’s true. So to try and remedy the situation it seems that most, but not all, of some game developers have gone to great lengths to argue that 30 FPS is where it’s at…….and it’s not. Last month Youtube allowed people to start uploading videos at 60 FPS- for that I was very pleased. Now people that say they don’t know what the big deal is between 30 and 60 can now see it. I recently had the privilege of proving the point to a young friend of mine as to how much better a game looks and runs at 60 FPS rather than 30 FPS. To my non-surprise he was floored. Games released so far such as Destiny, Driveclub, Assassins Creed Unity, The Evil within all run at 30 FPS instead of 60 FPS. There are a lot more games than that but these are some of the heavy hitters. I read an Ubisoft rep say that 60 frames were only good for 1st person shooters and that action games looked and ran better at 30 frames. This is a lie- he knew it was a lie when he said it. However these companies feel as if they must lie to the us- the consumer instead of just saying hey- the current gen systems are not that strong to run the game at 30 frames.
I guess honesty is not the best the policy in today’s world so instead lets just lie and say that 30 frames works better or the human eye can’t see past 30 ( which is not true). And that 30 frames has a more cinematic feel. Also not true since film runs at 24 FPS and not 30. The sad truth, as I have already stated before, is that these consoles are under powered, especially the Xbox, and that most of the games being released in the near future are more than likely going to be stuck at 30 frames instead of the true standard which is 60 frames. One more thing that I will add- if the human eye can’t see more than 60 frames then why are television sets being made with 120 to 240 refresh rate? That is a topic for another article all together. Please do not let these companies pull the wool over your eyes. However, if you enjoy being deceived and like average across the board then you go right ahead. I’m looking at you Mr. Waffles!