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Was Watch Dogs For PC Handicapped On Purpose?
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Many PC gamers were disappointed that Ubisoft's latest AAA game, Watch_Dogs, did not look as nice as when displayed at E3 in 2012. But this week a modder discovered that code to improve the game's graphics on the PC is still buried within the released game, and can be turned back on without difficulty or performance hits. Ubisoft has yet to answer whether (or why) their PC release was deliberately handicapped. Gaming commentator Total Biscuit has a video explaining the controversy.
Nuff said.
Play the game for 5 minutes with the depth of field effect and you will see why that was disabled; the game is unplayable that way. As for the other stuff; no idea.
They were probably planning to charge players $50 to activate this 'DLC'.
But not for any nefarious reasons. The depth of field effect, in particular, messes with the gameplay in unexpected ways. Stuff like not being able to find a camera easily because it's more than 20 feet away and blurred out. Or when you're in a gunfight and everyone not right next to you are blurred out. That kind of thing. It's great for screenshots, and very tightly-controlled situations, but I wasn't impressed with how it felt in terms of gameplay.
While the unlocked graphics style is certainly better for screenshots, it suffers the problem of highlighting close things, while highly blurring anything at a distance. While more 'realistic', if I were testing the game, I'd definitely suggest disabling this 'feature' by default, as it really can hamper gameplay and discovery. Skyrim EMB mods frequently enter into this territory, and it can be troublesome there too.
The headlight effects are pretty cool though.
The worst middle-finger-to-the-audience has to be the mouse handling though - it's not just mouse smoothing or mouse acceleration, but a particularly nasty form of negative acceleration from capping out the maximum allowed mouse speed, presumably to match controller max speeds. This limitation is a pain in the ass if you're expecting any kind of free or accurate mouse control. I cannot imagine any tester not making this a 'show stopper' bug - it's really, REALLY bad from what I've heard/seen/tried, and can't be fixed so far (lots of half-fixes out there though).
Ryan Fenton
AAA - A game title that cost more to market and push down people's throats than the cost to actually make it. You can tell these games because theres more trailers, teasers and cut-scenes leaked than actual footage.
Analogy: A turd in a very pretty & shiny box.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Grand Theft Auto V cost $150M to develop and $150M to market. The GTA games have been the benchmark of AAA games for almost 15 years.
I have never heard anyone describe any of them as turds in a pretty box.
Graphics? Sound? HDR?
What about *gameplay* (what makes a game worth playing)
Half-Life, DooM, Quake, Quake2, X-Wing series, even some games on my C64. I'm replaying Tie Fighter on an old Ppro200 with an Ensoniq Soundscape Elite soundcard, the gameplay is amazing, the story too. Graphics are crap compared to today's games, but the iMuse music is one of the things that make that game almost perfect.
Dozens of hours of gameplay. (unlike modern games)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I was really looking forward to the game and pre-ordered it for PC. My experience has been horrible. I am running an i7-960 (8 cores, 3.20ghz), 12GB of RAM and 2 GeForce 660s in SLI (4GB of total video RAM). I have a dedicated OS drive, a dedicated games drive and a dedicated pagefile drive. By way of background, I run ~1400VMs for a living. The VMs support a number of SaaS applications that are sensitive to transaction latency. I tune applications for performance for a living.
The game runs like crap on my PC, even on medium settings. It reads files from all over the place. It pulls textures out of the temp directory. It pulls data files out of the game directory. Even with over 4GB of FREE (not Available) RAM, it still manages to make the system do a steady 2MB/s of paging.
The game play is horrible. The driving is clunky. The interface scheme was obviously designed for a game pad. The multi-player is embarassing. The net code is crap. With 6 people, there were serious rubber banding issues. That was with a very small slice of the map. It is not like they had to render the entire thing. In a good 50% of the multi-player games I was in, there was at least one invulnerable person. That leads me to believe that the code is obviously pretty easy to exploit.
The game concept was a good one, but the execution was horrible. I have learned my lesson. In this day and age, everything is in beta. Developers are okay with releasing incomplete products and patching them later. I spent my youth couriering warez and getting a free ride. Now that I can afford games, I have been willingly purchasing them to support the studios. I cannot do it anymore. They just release crap products. They are not even worth pirating.
I regularly visit my local ABC Supermarket to buy my groceries. They have their own as well as third party brands available to purchase. This works for me, and as such, I am a part of their rewards program.
ABC Supermarket signs a deal to offer one of XYZ Supermarket's products. I decide to try it out. However on the way out the door after purchasing an XYZ Branded product, I am grabbed by employees of the XYZ Supermarket, thown into the back of an XYZ branded Van, and driven to the XYZ Store. They then walk me to the counter, put a pen in my hand, and make me sign up for their rewards program. Once I do, only then am I allowed to use the XYZ product.
Next time I decide to drive myself to XYZ store to save myself the hassle of being dragged there from ABC. Unfortunately the employees don't recognise my rewards card, and have blank looks when asked about the product. A manager approaches me, and tells me that I have to first go to the ABC store, pick up the product, and THEN come back to the XYZ store before they will allow me to use it.
This is what it's like buying Ubisoft Products through Steam.
They were probably paid lots of money by a certain monopolist to cripple the PC version so as to not make their XBox version look so bad in side-by-side comparisons. The lowest common denominator wins again.
Title explanation: Recall that Halo for PC was never released. A pity because it looked quite good. What eventually came out on the PC was a low-quality port of the XBox version.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Originally it was based on school letter grades. An "A" game was one without any flaws. A game rated "AAA" not only was free of flaws or defects, but pushed the boundaries of what games could accomplish. They elevated their genres to new heights or defined entire new ones.
That definition has been long forgotten however. These days, AAA Game just means "massive budget." People are throwing millions and millions and millions at AAA games. With that kind of money at stake, studios can't afford to be creative or take risks. So AAA games are now risk-adverse "follow the leader" operations, with massive ad campaigns to ensure maximum profits. Often released annually with incremental changes (Madden, CoD, BF, etc) and sponsored by Mountain Dew, Doritos, or whatever other company is willing to throw $$$ at them.
AAA always referred to budget. I dont remember any of the classics that pushed boundaries like System Shock being called AAA back in the day.
The term comes from the finance industry, not education. A Triple A credit rating means that you can raise significant capital for a project. A AAA game is a game that has a significant amount of money behind it.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Notice: Due to the confusion caused by various nations referring to two different games with the same name ("football"), we have hereby decided to change the name of BOTH games (thus, eliminating the confusing "football" reference) to both alleviate confusion and more accurately represent the nature of these games.
American Football will now be referred to solely as "Handegg" since the game primarily consists of players touching an egg shaped ball with their hands.
European Football will now be referred to solely as "Divegrass" since the game primarily consists of players throwing themselves at the turf in mock pain.
Henceforth, please use these new and more accurate descriptions over the deprecated terminology.
Thank you for your time.
1.It could have been done because the stuff they disabled wasn't finished.
2.It could have been done because the stuff they disabled wasn't properly tested across all the hardware configurations in their QA matrix. (or it didn't work right on all their hardware configs)
3.It could have been done because it affected how the game played in some way (i.e. balance)
or 4.It could have been done because it was unstable or crashing or had other known issues.