Apparently we have not had enough of developers throwing high quality gameplay, with stunning visuals and boasting about how graphically beautiful their next up-and-coming game will look, then as soon as everyone is excited and expectation are at their greatest, pull the wool from our eyes and reveal that what we saw must have been some sought of illusion and leaving us to ponder over and our previous encounter like we dreamt it all and should be happy with what we got.
A developer, working on Ubisoft’s 3rd person tactical action role-playing game; The Division, told WhatIfGaming, “We have already downgraded a few things” and that The Division demo shown at E3 running on a PC and will be downgraded overall.
E3 was not too long ago, was it not? And already downgrades have been made. I am sure at this stage of development Ubisoft would have a good idea of how their Snowdrop Engine could cope and would not have decided so quickly after E3 to make changes? Why does another game recently come to mind that resent was released…..?
The below quote is of an email taken received and posted by WhatIfGaming.
“We really loved the reception to the demo we showed on the PC version at E3. Currently as it stands, there is definitely a lot of push coming from publishers to not make the experience so different on consoles as to alienate people into thinking that next generation is not as powerful as PC. This is probably what happened at Ubisoft Montreal. I think that while making stability changes is definitely important, it does not completely obliterate a lot of enhanced rendering applications.”
“Right now we already took out quite a lot of screen space reflections from the game and are working on asset management the best we can given consoles have that great unified memory. Naturally we will also be using online servers and have to produce a synchronization that higher graphics add to the latency so it had to be turned down. To me it still looks good, but not as good as the original reveal. I am sure as we get closer to launch and the actual console versions of the game featuring SD (Snowdrop) that it will start to seem all too obvious to people especially those on PCs. I just wanted to write and let you know that it definitely is not just stability but marketing politics plays into this a lot as well.”
“UPDATED 2nd Response from The Division Developer: Truth be told in regards to your question that while ‘Yes’ the lead platform is the PC, we simply cannot have such a big gap. As you know when the first WATCH DOGS Review was published by that one site, Ubisoft called it a “false review” and I am sure everyone can see how bad that sounded when they saw the game did look marginally better than something that was a last generation GTA IV. But no, they will not admit that they practice this or actively downgrade a game. It is much easier to say they removed things for stability which is often a lie as you can tell by the post-issues which are expected in any production we do.”
“Also to answer your 3rd question, no…they will never fully disclose what was removed from what build as no laws ask them to do so in terms of consumer rights. If we as developers published that information in very real terms for the consumer such as “Replaced particle fog simulation with 2d layer simulation in 3d space, removed particles from all explosions, lowered explosion volume multiplier by 20x, removed X # of trees and civilians, etc.” we would be out of a lot of sales and probably it would actually require too much time to deliver on the current hype that a lot of downgraded games see which look incredible with a vertical slice. I do share this in the hope’s that my colleagues and publishers and a lot of people who make false promises and do demonstrations which wrongfully create too much hype that they cannot deliver on ultimately stop doing such things. I want to see the industry actually move forward and not be so full of itself by promising too much and delivering too little. Regards”
Praise this developer for giving us this information. We knew it was happening; we just couldn’t get the information of out in the open. We now know that because of console manufacturers we are seeing a huge delay in progression in PC gaming and why we see what can be done, at E3, then what we eventually get.
I was hoping developers would have got the idea from the backlash that Watch Dogs received, that doing this sought of practice is false and does not work. Don’t lie about an upcoming game. The way I see it is you just created a bigger fan base with your altered Demo, who will ridicule you when the real thing is shown, all to keep console manufacturers happy. I have a PS4 and love it, but I don’t want it to hinder the possibility of what I could have on my PC.
It’s not the visuals gamers are mostly concerned about, although they do add to the excitement and give us more of a “buzz” around how gaming is evolving and progressing. But when you promise something and don’t deliver, that’s just disappointing.
