Following Next Car Game: Wreckfest’s case, here is another game for which gamers claimed that the developers downgraded its visuals. A couple of days ago, some owners of Elite: Dangerous provided a number of screenshots to showcase the graphical differences between the previous and the latest versions.
PC gamers reported that Dust/Fog has been greatly reduced, the Galaxy Map has changed, some textures got worse, and that both the Ring LOD and Station Letterbox Draw Distance were reduced.
Frontier replied to those claims and shed some light on what exactly is going on, and whether the PC version was downgraded due to the upcoming Xbox One release.
As Greg Ryder, Frontier’s Head of Rendering, said, the team is not inclined to downgrade the appearance of anything in the game, and that the Dust/Fog system was optimised due to a pathological case of overdraw, thus some systems may look a bit worse than before.
“Please thank Granite for putting together a thread like this. The team is always striving to make things better, and we’ve found a number of things using the profiling tools on the Mac and Xbox One that have improved the PC build (thus the opposite to the fear they might lower the quality of the PC build). Elite: Dangerous is built to scale on PC (including 16k screenshot ability and hopefully one day 16k game when the monitors & graphics cards exist!). We are certainly not inclined to downgrade the appearance of anything in the game. Exposing more tweakables for an enhanced Ultra is clearly something you guys are passionate about and we’ll see where it can fit in the current roadmap.
On the ships / galaxy map front, I’m not aware of any changes that went in for 1.3.
Dust / Fog: This was optimised due to a pathological case of overdraw (which looked very broken in a number of cases). There’s definitely no downgrade due to our Mac and Xbox One versions, but there have been some changes. Performance and visual consistency should be improved in the general case, however it does seem that some systems are not looking as good as they did. As ever there is no perfect solution. For a fair comparison, the exact same position and lighting conditions are needed (some viewing angles will always looks more awesome!), but we could have entire threads dedicated to discussions on how to light rings (and we’ve had many long discussions internally). I have a number of open issues in our system on the look of the rings, though currently no ETA for when we’ll be addressing them.”
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Stuff like this always happens with games in alpha…
That would be fine… If the game were in alpha.
Wooosh!
That’s the joke.
Wasn’t this game already downgraded once before? I remember screenshots comparing a docking bay and ship cockpit that showed the graphics were much better in older builds.
Yes, they downgraded it again, and they didn’t “fixed” the previous downgrade.
I own both game, while I stated on wreckfest article that wreckfest graphics case is probably easily fixed, I cannot say the same with elite
this one is clearly downgraded!
in the official forum there was/is comparison about alpha cockpit version versus early full release cockpit version on sidewinder and it’s clearly shown massive downgrade on the asset…
and yes some of us suspect this is because of xbone.
Cool story bro
“As Greg Ryder, Frontier’s Head of Rendering, said, the team is inclined to downgrade the appearance of anything in the game”
“We are certainly NOT inclined to downgrade the appearance of anything in the game. “
Yeah fixed. Apologies. The tone of the article obviously shows that this was an awful unintentional typo.
SHAME
nice
hopefully they will fix it soon
Lies. Nothing but lies. The changes are way too drastic to slip through the cracks unnoticed, especially the raw count of asteroids before versus after. It’s MASSIVE. They knew exactly what they were doing and they knew people would be upset. Also you gotta love the pretense of naivety in “There’s definitely no downgrade due to our Mac and Xbox One versions” – YEAH, LIKE ANYONE THOUGHT THE MAC VERSION WAS AT FAULT HERE.
Ridiculous. This just damage control, they obviously downgraded the game for Xbone and had the audacity to port all the changes over to PC. Devs do this because maintaining two versions is vastly more difficult than maintaining one. They want one version which means that none of the really ugly changes will likely be reversed. If you bought the game recently get a refund.
Yep. Catering to the lowest common denominator. Thanks, consoles.
smh.. they lost 1 sale from me. i don’t support bad practices from such devs/publishers.
I hate this awful “lets make Console Friendly PC port game trend” Consoles are slowing down Game Technology Development on PC so yeah FU dirty console peasants! Pc is such awesome platform 1000 years in front of the consoles, but nobody wants to use its potential, “so lets be greedy and make dumbed down games for consoles and port them to pc” like no one will notice…..Because…Fast Money….Greed & stuff….meh…im so angry. This is not the first game… THIS IS AN AWFUL TREND ! that need to be stopped right now! And the worst thing is the developers like this are using Kickstarter to get support, trust, money from PC community for development of PC GAME , than use that money to stab PC community in the back and develop console versions with dumbed down PC ports, WITH OUR MONEY…Disgusting…
“And the worst thing is the developers like this are using Kickstarter to
get support, trust, money from PC community for development of PC GAME ,
than use that money to stab PC community in the back and develop
console versions with dumbed down PC ports, WITH OUR
MONEY…Disgusting…”
THIS is exactly right. Even though I have no cause to be worried, I’m still worried about Star Citizen because of this trend proving true over and over again.
Yes, thats huge problem today and a bad trend…We should avoid that kind of developers! Fool me once shame on you, Fool me twice….
David Braben and Michael Brookes are liars and thieves. Peter Molyneux would be proud.
I really regret having bought this game, and not just because of these latest downgrade news.
Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they start a gradual degradation so that the comparisons between PC and Xbone won’t put the latter to extreme shame.
there are no downgrades omfg