Destiny Isn't 60fps On PS4, Xbox One Due To Being Cross-Gen

It was revealed not too long ago that Destiny was confirmed 1080p and 30fps on both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. Quite naturally, a lot of gamers were curious exactly why the game was only 30fps when games like Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition managed 1080p and 60fps on the PS4, Shadow Warrior is 1080p and 60fps on the PS4 and Wolfenstein: The New Order is 1080p and 60fps on both the PS4 and Xbox One.

Well, GamingBolt spotted a comment from Bungie's senior environment artist, Jason Sussman, who explained why the game was not 1080p and 60fps on the eighth-gen consoles, telling Venture Beat that...

“It’s a lot of different things,”... “I could get really technical, but I’d bore you to death. A lot has to do with performance. We’re cross-platform, so we had to be very delicate with all four consoles, making sure they have the same experience, that it looks as good as it possibly can on all these consoles. A lot goes into that, from geometry to textures to post effects to particles to how many players you get on the screen. We’re always balancing that out to make sure everyone gets the same experience,”

Gamers have recently been getting irked at the idea of cross-generation games for the very thing that Sussman explains above. You've essentially paid top dollar for an eighth-gen console, yet you're getting last-gen features with a slight bump in resolution.

On the upside, Sussman at least mentions that there will be a lot of player activity on the new-gen consoles to compensate for a lack of maintaining 60 frames per second, saying...

“When you’re playing in the Crucible, yeah, absolutely. Same thing when you’re in a public space and a public event’s going off, with other players all running to one area that’s blowing up. Everyone’s throwing their supers, tossing grenades. You talk about everything going off at once, that’s where it happens.”

Strangely, Sussman doesn't say exactly how many players will be on the screen at once during the Crucible and whether or not there will be disparity between the seventh generation consoles and the eighth generation consoles.

It almost sounds like if you want a graphically smooth playing experience you'll want to get the game on the PS4 or Xbox One, but if you haven't already upgraded then Destiny is not a game that you'll need to or readily want to upgrade your console for.

With so much hype riding on the success of the first entry in what's supposed to be a decade-long venture, Bungie has to ensure that deliver and deliver big with this new game. There are already some worries about Destiny's features that they will likely need to address by the time the game is ready to launch. However, a lot of gamers are probably just happy that Bungie extended the alpha as they prep for the game's inevitable pre-launch beta.

Destiny is due for release on September 9th for the Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3 and PS4.

Update: Bungie felt that additional context was needed to flesh out their explanation of why Destiny is running at the specs that it is, sending over the following, more fleshed out explanation...

It’s the scale and scope of what we’re doing. The size of our environments and the amount of explorable space and the amount of A.I. in those environments, along with other players coming seamlessly in and out of those spaces. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a strike or playing a campaign mission or just roaming around. You’re constantly going to run across other people, seamlessly coming in and out. That feels very different to me. It’s not just a typical first-person shooter.We’re doing a lot of different technical things that we haven’t done before. We have cloth sim on the players. We’ve rewritten our engine from the ground up. This is not the engine we used in the past. Every system has been amplified, from animation to the way we’re lighting the environment. We’re tuning in to every aspect of each next-gen console as much as possible.