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Apparently the backlash caused by the blatant graphical downgrade of Watch Dogs following its release compared to the initial E3 reveal ended up sparking a policy change over at Ubisoft, according to the company's CEO, Yves Guillemot. According to Guillemot, Ubisoft has now changed the way it shows off new titles to avoid misleading gamers.
During an interview with The Guardian, Guillemot noted that this year for E3, Ubisoft developers ensured all games were actually playable on their platforms before showing them off: “With E3 2015 we said, ‘OK, let's make sure the games are playable, that they're running on the target machines”.
“When we show something, we ask the team to make sure it's playable and make sure gamers can immediately see exactly what it is. That's what we learned from the Watch Dogs experience–if it can't be played on the target machine, it can be a risk”.
This appears to be in direct response to fan disappointment following the launch of Watch Dogs, which did not end up looking as good as it did initially back in 2012. Obviously for games that have already been shown off for years, like The Division, this policy change has come a little too late. However, new games like the new Ghost Recon, For Honour, or Assassin's Creed Syndicate, what we have seen so far should hopefully be what we get.
Unfortunately, this is also the same company that has promised to do right by PC gamers for years and consistently failed to do so, making it hard to trust what the company says at face value.
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KitGuru Says: We won't know for sure if Ubisoft is telling the truth until we see some newly announced games launch over the next year or two. That said, it would be good to see Ubisoft start to build back up and finally put its mistakes in the past.
The division aclually showeed a downgraded graphics demo lately, i think they showed a working game then
Sadly…I would have loved to play how it looked before as well, with a 980 ti, and some half decent optimization, I can’t imagine it being “unplayable”.
One thing I dislike is how they say “If it can’t be played on the target machine” I really don’t think this applies to pc, and why I believe they are only caring about console. The benefit of pc, is that you don’t really need a “target” machine. You have low settings for people with average computers, but high settings for the top 5%. It doesn’t matter if the lower end target machines can’t play it, they can still play on lower settings. Don’t take away high end graphics because less people can play it :/
We dont even need a discussion on this, its a common sense and moral ethics to release a game that can and will run just as it being shown, otherwise not following this simple common sense is called a criminal and that’s what Ubisoft is to the eyes of gamers.
‘if it can’t be played on the target machine, it can be a risk’. Call my cynical but what if the target platform is an ultra-high end PC. Obviously PCs could of run Watch Dogs as it was intended, without the graphical downgrade, all they needed to do was add a couple of extra sliders to the options menu. This seems more like a political skip around the question rather than addressing it directly. That being said The Division looks worse and worse every time they show it off, so I guess the policy has come into affect.
I think it’s mostly true, but with some engine design, there’s no low or high, the engine itself can have hard time to render whatever (like the downgrade of the witcher 3), and console games costs a lot more than pc one, so they just want consoles to be top edge, ’cause PC isn’t worth it for devs like ubi(shit)soft and they will continue to fuck with PC gamers, just a bit less than before
I think it’s true for watch dogs, but sometimes the requierement are just too high, and can’t be adapted to consoles just by lowering resolution and textures, like the witcher 3, they had to change the whole game engine to make it work on xbox one, and it looked less good, but they could’t release 2 different games on xbox one and pc, it would be too expensive to update both
It’s not rocket science is it: just show the game playing on the lowest common denominator (the XB1) first (just as with Fallout), and then in later gameplay videos etc show it on the best system (i.e. a PC) and be *very* clear about what the specs are on that PC. Don’t pretend it isn’t buggy, and don’t showcase effects etc that you have no intention of bundling into the final game.
The problem is that these things are all really basic – but the companies have ulterior motives for not doing it.
It’s fine to show the potential but don’t make it out like it is the final product. They need to be upfront that the current gen consoles are insufficient for showcasing their target graphics quality.
Oh look it’s an announcement from Ubercrapisoft…