I seriously believe that Ubisoft should just stop defending its decision to downgrade the PC version of Watch_Dogs. Yes yes, the company has to do some PR damage control but statements like these do not improve the company’s image. Especially when modders have been able to reduce the stuttering issues that have plagued the PC version of Watch_Dogs; a side-effect that the development team was unable to fix and got worse after applying the official patch for a large number of PC gamers.
According to the game’s official website, Ubisoft acknowledged that the PC version contain some old, unused render settings that were ‘deactivated for a variety of reasons, including possible impacts on visual fidelity, stability, performance and overall gameplay quality.’
“Modders are usually creative and passionate players, and while we appreciate their enthusiasm, the mod in question (which uses those old settings) subjectively enhances the game’s visual fidelity in certain situations but also can have various negative impacts. Those could range from performance issues, to difficulty in reading the environment in order to appreciate the gameplay, to potentially making the game less enjoyable or even unstable.”
This all sounds like a nice PR bullcrap letter, without any kind of honesty. Because, here is an idea; Let’s assume that the game was unstable with these more ‘advanced’ techniques and had a major impact on stability and performance. Why didn’t the dev team further tweaked and enhanced them? Why didn’t it use a reduced bloom effect? Why didn’t it tweak down the anamorphic lens-flares? Why didn’t enable dynamic shadows from cars headlights on Ultra settings? Why why why.
As I’ve already said, Ubisoft should simply stop trying defending its idiotic decision of screwing the PC version of Watch_Dogs. The fact that MaLDo, another modder, has been able to improve the stuttering issues on GPUs with 2GB VRAM (while using a mix of Ultra/High textures) proves that the development team can be described as: a) lazy, b) incompetent or c) clueless.
Now we wouldn’t be so harsh on Ubisoft if it wasn’t for: a) the flawless performance of the E3 2012 build that – among other things – looked even better than the final product and b) the fact that there are no performance improvements in the latest patch (which does not even fix the stuttering issues that have been reported).
Oh, and here is a glorious easter egg. Notice the date of Ubisoft’s post? 27/6/2014. Hell yeah, Ubisoft talks to us from the future. Awesome. Time travel confirmed!
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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