Titanfall Downgraded To 720p For Xbox One?

If you thought all the awesome you witnessed at E3 for Respawn Entertainment's upcoming Titanfall was a showcase of how the game would look and run on the actual Xbox One, think again. As we head ever-so-close to the release of the Xbox One, we begin to find out more and more that the games running in HD at 1080p and 60fps at E3 really couldn't have been running at that resolution if the games will run at lower resolutions and half the frames on the actual Xbox One, or so that's what we can take away from this latest bit of news.

Titanfall, earlier today, was rumored by someone close to insiders at Neogaf to have been downscaled to 720p. The rumor came from renown Neogaf leaker Famousmortimer. However, the leak, he feels, may or may not be legit.

Gamepur pored over a recent AMA on Reddit where Famousmortimer came clean over the controversy, stating the following about his sources and information regarding Titanfall running at only 720p and 60fps, writing...

“I can't get into specifics even slightly about who it was because a blacklist from activision could murder any game based website. But I can say that, no, he/she isn't like a digital foundry pixel counter. I don't know how the 720p number was come up with, whether it's a guess or was told... and at this point if I asked I would get silence."I don't post a rumor unless I have two sources most of the time. Sometimes I have one... but it's someone actually working on the thing that's being talked about. But in general I like two. I think game journalism is pretty much "fun" and not "journalism." If I'm going to dislike them for that I need to hold myself to the same standard even if I'm on gaf or reddit or whatever."

The reason this rumor picked up so much flak and interest is because previously everyone believed that Titanfall would run as clean as it did at E3, where it was discovered that many Xbox One games were running on high-end Windows 7 PCs with Nvidia GTX cards as opposed to running on actual development kits.

Purportedly, some gaming journalists came forward to defend the Xbox One, claiming that many of the games were running in real-time on development kits. In addition to this, Crytek also stepped up to defend the Xbox One, claiming that Ryse was running on a legitimate Xbox One development kit and not a high-end PC tucked away behind a cabinet.

However, Crytek also mentioned that Ryse had to go through quite a bit of code overhauling since E3, along with software rewrites for the Xbox One, in order to get the game running smoothly on the actual hardware of Microsoft's new console.

However, according to Famousmortimer, Microsoft has been evasive in their PR handling of games running native 1080p on the Xbox One and this has led him to become suspicious, potentially believing in the validity of the rumor, stating...

"That said... this was done with one source and I never felt great about it. I teased it because, honestly, I'm dumb and couldn't control myself. There was a thread that was vaguely about what I heard and what I was trying to find a second source for and I teased and Bishop (the head mod at gaf) gave me a real hard time about it. So when I got home I said what I knew even though I didn't have a second source. As for other folks like Thuway and whoever else.... I have no idea if they have real sources or not."But like I said above... I wasn't sure if I believed it before. Once MS PR got evasive... something started to stink. "

Regarding Microsoft's public relations... Albert Penello, director of product planning, has – in the past – been very vocal and communicative about issues regarding the Xbox One and its software. What's more is that he wasn't afraid to address the list of 1080p 60fps games on the PS4 versus the 1080p 60fps games on the Xbox One. But according to Famousmortimer, Penello had nothing to share about Titanfall dropping from 1080p 60fps to 720p 60fps, and was very evasive.

According to Microsoft VP Phil Spencer, when asked about any truth being applicable to this rumor, he responded with the following...

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An admission of truth through the omission of concession? Perhaps or perhaps not, but the PR skedaddling "stinks", just as Famousmortimer mentioned.

This also calls into question the validity of whether Call of Duty: Ghosts will be native 1080p at 60fps, as reported by Eurogamer, where Infinity Ward's executive producer Mark Rubin claimed that the game would be 1080p at 60fps on the next-gen consoles.

Take also into deep consideration that Xbox insider CBOAT had also stated that Xbox One games would all be relegated to a max native resolution of 900p at 60fps for its technical ceiling, and that the only AAA games to run 1080p would do so via upscaling. The reason for the cut in resolution is allegedly attributed to hardware reliability issues.

If this turns out to be true, then it not only means that the PS4 has an actual leg up on visual output over the Xbox One – especially considering that CoD: Ghosts has been confirmed to be in 1080p on the PS4 by IGN – but it also means that the Wii U will continue to have more native 1080p 60fps games than Microsoft's next generation console.

Will Usher

Staff Writer at CinemaBlend.