Was Watch Dogs For PC Handicapped On Purpose? 215
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.
Re:Blur (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Controversy? (Score:1, Interesting)
Those figures are a pack of lies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Blur (Score:5, Interesting)
Depth of field is an artistic tool used by photographers to direct the viewer's gaze. It has a reputation for being a mark of a pro photographer because
The larger the camera's format, the shallower the depth of field for a given aperture. Depth of field control is extremely difficult on a cell phone camera.
More expensive pro lenses, such as the "Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II Lens " ($2396) lens have wider apertures than a (sort of, kind of) similar consumer lens such as the "Nikon 55-200mm f/4-5.6G ED AF-S DX" ($159)
However. there are photographers, such as Ansel Adams who used "camera movements" to maximize depth of field, as well as photo journalists who consider deep depths of field to be an important tool for objectivity and for telling narratives.
A pro photographer uses depth of field as a compositional element. A game's graphics engine would have to be programmed to use depth of field to direct the player's gaze to fit the narrative.. A constant shallowness is likely to interfere with game play.
(Back in the old days, fog was used to obscure draw distance limitations. It sometimes looked decent, but in real life, piloting an aircraft through dense fog is harder than piloting through clear skies...)
Re:No accounting for taste. (Score:5, Interesting)
The mouse just used to point and look.
Meatspace analogy time: Look at something on your right. Now look at something on your left. Pretty quick maneuver. Imagine being limited to 30 degrees of rotation per second, making that 180 degree change of direction (from your left to your right) a 6 second operation.
Re:Please (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out Total Biscuit's YouTube Channel "WTF is..."
He does first impressions and mainly focuses on smaller indy titles (not exclusively, but primarily) Smaller budget games can't just throw "SUPER MEGA REALISTIC AMAZING POLYGRAPHICS" and have to rely on creativity, story and gameplay instead.
Last Ubisoft game I will ever buy (Score:5, Interesting)
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.