Assassin'S Creed 3 Series Has Upped

For interiors, the eagle-eyed may notice sharper texture filtering on 360, as shown on the wooden boards to the rear of the stage.

The first shock is at how greatly the play area has been up-sized, where its recreation of an 18th Century America is estimated to be 1.5 times the size of Rome in Brotherhood.

This new reality is one of hunting animals in the native wilderness, commandeering ships launched from harbours in Boston and New York, and travelling for miles around the many satellite towns of a nation in revolt.

Its big, and a high risk-reward proposition that cant afford to disappoint.

Assassin'S Creed 3 Series Has Upped

Fortunately the hard work has paid off with a commendable 910 Eurogamer score, leaving us with just one matter left to resolve: which version is the best way to enjoy the experience As it happens, this fifth entry in the series has upped the stakes by offering wider multi-platform support than usual, with PC and Wii U versions pencilled in for the latter-half of November.

For now, however, we can turn our analytical eyes to the traditional Face-Off duo: PS3 and Xbox 360.

Each chapter in the Assassins Creed saga has brought with it a new set of technical improvements for each platform, and this entry adds its fair share.

To recap, last years Revelations may not have pushed the boat out far in the narrative sense, but certainly the richer scenery detail and improved character animations marked clear signs of technical progress.

Assassins Creed 3 carries over all these incremental advances to the new AnvilNext engine, while also bumping up the numbers of concurrent NPCs to a magnitude of hundreds, and adding new weather states to the game world.

For those who like to judge visuals in motion, we have a head-to-head video comparing matching footage for both cut-scenes and gameplay alike just below.

Alternatively, we have an exhaustive PS3360 comparison gallery for you to flick through.

On very close inspection we do spot the PS3 version chopping two horizontal lines of pixels from the very top of its output, but this isnt going to be noticeable across the run of play.

Post-process anti-aliasing is the order of the day here too, and, as with Revelations, it appears to avoid any residual texture-blurring associated with a final pass approach to smoothing jaggies.

This likely rules out FXAA, and puts it in the realm of secretive in-house solutions.

Unfortunately the AA treatment doesnt extend to shadows, which can look very low-grade on snowy floors beneath trees and buildings - though with any luck, the PC version will offer up a few more options here.

Also, a dithering effect is evident on shadows at a closer range on PS3, where the transition to higher-quality implementations can play out within your line of sight while walking forward.

This is a facet of the 360 versions design too, but the switch-over is less noticeable as a result of the shadow cascade being further afield.

Besides that, every texture asset and effect appears identical between the two platforms, and its a struggle to parse out any differences.

Texture filtering does appear slightly sharper on 360 at a distance, though this isnt to discredit the look on PS3 when played without such a point of comparison.

There are also inevitable oddities in the way global illumination affects the lighting of cities during some comparisons - a by-product of the in-game clock and weather effects in play.

Good news for all.

The visual make-up of Assassins Creed 3 is largely mirrored across both platforms, meaning were very much in nitpick territory here.

This is a common trait across the whole game, but neither versions shadows look out of place.

The NPC count has been ratcheted up a notch from the last game, and this early theatre sequence shows them of in their hundreds.

Assassin'S Creed 3 Ps3