A desolate New York, a struggle for survival, and one hell of a hype train is what makes The Division so exciting. But what some might find not so exciting is a 30FPS frame rate and an unconfirmed resolution for Massive Entertainment’s open world survival game on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Managing director David Polfeldt told GameSpot in an interview during E3 that the studio landed on 30FPS as the ideal choice for a title with a massive and highly detailed open world like The Division.

“I think we’re shooting for 30fps because it’s a trade-off, right?” Polfeldt said. “Graphical fidelity and immersion are more important to us than the frame rate, if we go for [60fps], we’ll have to make a trade-off on fidelity and other things”. 

“But because we want to have very, very complex destruction and extremely detailed environments; a complete weather system, full day/night cycle…at some point you have to make up your mind: where do you invest? And for us, it’s going to be 30fps.”

While the decision might disappoint some, the trade off appears to justify the design choice, considering that The Division isn’t as much of a competitive multiplayer game as something like Call of Duty might be, a game that demands 60FPS. Also, as we saw in Ubisoft’s E3 2014 presentation, The Division is a great looking game regardless.

What are your thoughts?