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By Azhar on 10 Mar, 2014: published about 2 years ago
18 Comments

The Watch Dogs Graphical Downgrade Is Understandable, But Is It Justified?

The Watch Dogs Graphical Downgrade Is Understandable, But Is It Justified?

I’m sure if you’ve been around the internet during the last few days you would have caught wind of the latest controversy. That is, the likelihood that Watch Dogs received quite a major graphical downgrade since its 2012 E3 showing, which blew many minds around the world. Earlier this morning, we posted a comparison video which showed the rather alarming differences between then and now. In this write-up I hope to explore both sides of it, rather than just launch into an attack on Ubisoft and the game.

Let’s first establish and address one fact. It’s upsetting to say, but the reality is that E3 is not an indication of the final product. The reason why some games look amazing but later receive significant visual downgrades is simply because of window dressing. What I mean is that, the E3 demos take a section of gameplay, often referred to as a ‘vertical slice’, and beef them up to look as stellar as possible. For a random but relevant analogy, we’re sort of talking about the ways you see fashion models on magazines look so good from visual editing that they don’t even have pores on their skin. The demo you saw of Watch Dogs at E3 2012 of course did not depict the entire open world or the scale of the game. It was a closed off portion, small in scale, with the maximum graphical settings possible, meant to look good and sell the game the first time around.

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    Now, understand that the above does not mean I condone this or say that it’s right. There is a grey area in the sense that you can get the developer or publisher perspective. They want their game to look as great as possible on its first showing. They want to make a lasting impact. Either that, or during the primitive stages of development when the game isn’t as large or filled up with cool stuff as it eventually will be, it’s more difficult to predict what sort of cutbacks would have to be made later down the line. Both of these are understandable. There will always be trade offs and sacrifices when creating anything of sizable or expensive proportions. But I think we can all agree that it is one thing to be understood, and another to be fair or justified.

    Some would argue that what Watch Dogs did can be classified as false advertising in the worst case scenario, similarly to the Aliens: Colonial Marines saga. While not as horrifying, it’s a similar sort of situation, and it’s not like Ubisoft and Watch Dogs should get immunity because people are fans. While I’m not going to jump to condemn it as false advertising, there is definitely some validity to the claims and I certainly wouldn’t tell any gamer they’re “entitled” (I so hate that word) or “whiny” for complaining. In fairness, there is a sort of common courtesy one would expect from advertising, in the sense that what you see and what you’re promised should be what you get.

    I haven’t investigated the legal ramifications of this, but bringing the law into anything turns things ugly and overly complicated, and could lead to a no-win situation, as was illustrated by our recent Titanfall South Africa saga. It’s not desirable to go down that road when there exists a solution more in the middle, as usual. Firstly, Ubisoft has recently come out and said on Twitter, in response to a fan question, that Watch Dogs on PS4 will look the same as what was shown at E3 2013. Note the year. They’re being honest in saying that the game will look like it did last year, and not 2012 when it was first shown. Similarly, Ubisoft has also said on Twitter that the Wii U version will look similar to that of the PS3 and Xbox 360 version. From this it is clear that they are not lying about the game’s graphical quality, so to accuse them of that would be a little bit unwarranted.

    However, while they’re in the clear as far as recent honesty is concerned, I think there is one thing we can all agree on. That’s the fact that Ubisoft isn’t really winning any brownie points by acting this way, especially since their sensational reveal of The Division later turned out to not actually be entirely in-game footage. The sad part is that, despite Ubisoft’s talent and ability to create exciting new IPs and projects, they are going to, or already are getting, a reputation of amazing gaming minds first, and seriously disappointing later. It’s going to force gamers to develop a cynicism about their newly revealed projects, and rather than be excited for the game a focus will be, as it is now, on why major cutbacks were made. Over-promising and under-delivering is the worst way to go.

    I think most gamers would want to see a first reveal that is more in line with what the final product will be. In other words, consistency. Even better, many gamers would be over the moon to see a case of under promising but over-delivering. Of course that would be idealistic, since a publisher and developer wouldn’t show a game in a first reveal that doesn’t look as good as it could possibly be, or at least dressed up enough to look rather dreamy. The most likely scenario will pretty much be that cutbacks will be made as development progresses, the game gets bigger and costs rise. That’s the case a lot of the time. But I think if that’s what we should be expecting, then it is only fair that the cutbacks are not major, so that the result doesn’t look like an entirely different game.

    That, I believe is fair. It can’t be an Aliens: Colonial Marines level of a downgrade. Of course, the best scenario would be that the final product looks better or as good, but I think most gamers would be accepting of any title which receives only minor visual downgrades from its initial reveal to its release.

    Therefore, if I have to offer a conclusion on this, I would say that the graphical downgrade of Watch Dogs is understandable, but I personally don’t believe it’s justified given the recent comparison video we’ve seen, which was linked at the beginning of this article. I think publishers and developers need to be very careful of venturing into ‘false advertising’ territory or, put more simply, becoming like the Aliens: Colonial Marines saga all over again.

    I don’t think that’s unreasonable to expect. I’m sure Watch Dogs will probably end up being a good game, but it certainly didn’t need this controversy with consumers, on top of its delays. Ubisoft shouldn’t continue to make a habit of doing this, especially when the graphical downgrades seem to be as severe as they are with Watch Dogs. It can bring a fierce debate of fair advertising into play, and I for one cannot say that that would be unwarranted.

    It is only fair to us consumers at the end of the day.

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    Name: Azhar Lorgat
    Location: Cape Town
    Position: Potato

    Azhar has published 3571 posts. Read all of Azhar's posts.
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    • YOUDIEMOFO

      Yeah to me this is garbage and I can tell there is a huge graphical downplay going on here.

      Some of the faces in the scenes where they are up close look as good and maybe better in some respects, but that is a cut scene to most extent and I want raw game play.

      • Elem187

        Publishers release cinematic videos of cut scenes and call it gameplay footage and people don’t say anything.

        Gameplay footage is a human controlling the character on screen. That’s it. Cut scenes are NOT gameplay. Drives me nuts when publishers/devs claim otherwise.

    • Dynasty2021

      There IS a reason that nobody is saying.

      The consoles don’t have the power, optimization or not, to run these games with the same visual flair as they were debuted with at E3.

      They showed BF4 on a $4000 PC for god sake. You think a laughable $500 console can match those visuals? Don’t make me laugh.

      I can 100% guarantee that The Witcher 3, The Division and The Order won’t look anywhere near as good on release as they have done so far.

      Not a chance.

      The inconvenient truth is that the hardware in the new consoles is not powerful enough.

      • Arse

        ohhh glorious, obnoxious master race, was wondering when you would show up.

      • Dynasty2021

        And yet graphics are important to you console owners, seemingly these days, MORE than gameplay. Otherwise, this downgrade wouldn’t be an issue, the resolution-gate wouldn’t be an issue, and you wouldn’t be drooling over the PC screenshots and footage of The Witcher 3 etc.

        So really, you’re just one of us.

      • Jessy pheng

        I think people who really care about graphics would’ve migrated to PC long ago. Speaking for myself I console game for exclusives

      • Elem187

        That’s the only justifiable reason to have a console… I have a PC for exclusives and multiplatform releases and a Wii U for Nintendo’s stellar exclusives.

        Third party games on consoles have always been a joke.

      • Elem187

        Playstation and Xbox gamers care more about graphics than any other gamer period.

        Just look at EVERY message board last gen. It was full of nothing but fanboys arguing over which platform looked marginally and negligently better than the other platform. And this new gen won’t be any different……

        But when someone who games on vastly superior hardware shows up to remind you that you sound like a bunch of fools when arguing about the marginal differences in graphics between the two underpowered consoles.

      • Person

        I play Xbox and I couldn’t care bout graphics, its not all about visuals. Example skyrim and oblivion. Skyrim had better graphics but oblivion was more enjoyable for me. Graphics doesn’t make a game, it helps develop 5the gaming feel. Think id rather be playing a n64 due to enjoyment. not everyone cares about graphical enhancements

      • Elem187

        Whenever anyone who understands hardware starts talking about the specs of the PS4, the PS4 owners show up to defend Sony’s honor like a white knight. It’s not these people’s fault Sony built a severly underpowered console this gen… Last gen Sony went all out and sold a midrange device. This gen they chose low end specs. Why do you PS4 owners get so defensive over it?

        It’s a CPU designed for a tablet. That’s weaker than a 4 year old laptop CPU.

        The GPU is the Radeon 7850. It WAS a midrange GPU over 2 years ago, today it’s a fairly low end device. In fact it will be in integrated motherboards by the end of the year if it isn’t already.

        You PS4 owners sound IDENTICAL to the Wii U owners who couldn’t accept the Wii U is only 3x more powerful than the PS360. Just accept your purchase for what it is. It’s a $400 budget gaming device, it’s not a super computer. It’s not capable of running the E3 demo of Watch Dogs, hence the significant downgrades.

      • Orange Lada

        A $500 console could, but it would have to get off the legacy x86 processors and on to something more like Nintendo’s Wii U with its optimizations.

      • DJRickyV

        Wow, even the 7th generation consoles can’t handle it? What would it take? A PS5?

    • niklah9

      This has been a thing since the atari debuted in the 80’s. This is news along the lines of “the McRib is not healthy” is news. There are teams dedicated to coding ad-worthy game footage, then there are teams dedicated to coding an actual functioning game. If you are butt-hurt over this, I suggest you either stop watching E3 or stop gaming, because this isn’t just a ubisoft thing and it isn’t going to change anytime soon.

    • kalle

      You DO Realize, that you compared the videos from pc to x360/ps3. you cant compare last gen and next gen. ofcourse they downgraded the gfx for the last gen consoles. But for PC and next gen it stays the same. *biggest facepalm ever*

      • Elem187

        It looks like last gen, but it’s not. It was confirmed to be the PS4 version at the top compared to the PC build

        The game has been downgraded significantly. The sub Nextgen consoles just don’t have the horsepower to run what we saw at E3, so major and massive concessions have to be made to run the game at a semi acceptable frame rate.

      • http://www.lomag.co.za/ NeoN

        I really thought it was the PS3/360 that was holding everything back. Would not have guessed the new gen is to blame. :/

    • http://egamer.co.za/author/cavie Caveshen “CaViE” Rajman

      It’s weird because Far Cry 3 looked better with the final product, than it did in trailers. Anyway, a lot of what happens with these early demonstrations is that the entire demo is created standalone because a lot of the actual game is yet to be developed. So what you see demonstrated to you is stuff that’s built specifically for that purpose. It’s not meant to be ‘playable’ in the strictest sense and likely won’t even look or play the same in the final product. That’s because the final product is almost completely different. The demonstration is built from the ground up to be a demonstration. The game is built from the ground up to be a game.

    • Chaeote

      I have a problem with the comparison video itself, you can’t compare a PS4 -console-, to a PC -DEV KIT-. I guarantee you that dev kit machine is a multi-thousand dollar MONSTER. Of course it’s gonna look far better.

      It’s an unfair comparison.

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