They straight up called it broken.
Ok, so one guy at ND used some hyperbole, and some in the studio prefer 60fps 1080p with slightly lower graphics settings vs 30fps 1080p vs slightly higher graphics settings. Talk about missing context and what has to be sacrificed in going with 60fps over 30fps.
They already explained why they might stick with 30fps and in the end did so with UC4. Apparently Fredrik never got the memo on that side of things.
"We're actually above 30, but we locked it [for the demo], Straley explained. "We're going to do whatever it takes to make the game we want to make. If it means we could go for 60 but lose something that would really impact the player's experience, then it's our choice as developers to say, 'Well, we're going to go for the experience over the 60 frames.'"
"We had a really long, involved conversation about it with all the leads and directors," Newman said. "We just realised that, for the game we wanted to make, to make the best game possible, [30fps] was just something that we had to do."
"The same amount of geometry would take longer to make because it would have to be so heavily optimized. And so that could end up having story repercussions."
Unlike the Remaster, for games like TLOU2, UC4 etc, choosing between a 30fps target and a 60fps target was never going to be the difference of some slight graphical improvements such as was the case with TLOU Remaster.
When you target 30fps from the ground up as your primary basis, you're afforded considerably more flexibility in game design and graphical ambition, eg larger environments, larger NPC count, more geometry, higher quality models, higher quality graphics settings, higher resolutions and so on. Things that clearly ND feel are more important to their recent game campaigns than having a more fluid frame rate.
I think some people forget how much has to be sacrificed in going 60fps because they're used to seeing 60fps on expensive systems like the Xbox One X or with their super powerful gaming PC or whatever. The Xbox One X ultimately has 6 Tflops of performance, in other words considerably more than the PS4 (1.8 Tflops) and even the PS4 Pro (4.2 Tflops) , and naturally orders of magnitude more than the standard One (1.4 Tflops), hence the reason 60fps is often a more viable target, especially vs the baseline with the original system.
