Watch Dogs: E3 2012 vs PC Release

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Here's a side-by-side video of Watch Dogs as it was shown at E3 in 2012 versus how the game looks today. For those of you that missed them, here's a couple links that show you how the game performs (here) and how it looks (here).
 
It looks like the game was castrated for consoles and a having a experience parity across all platforms?! If this turns out to be true i say to hell with that that!!! I want my rig catching fire when i try to play this game!
 
So glad I passed on this game. WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!! Its embarrassing that companies do this to Show Off products at E3 and then this shit happens. Bait and Switch no no, just downright lies.
 
wow....I knew there was a difference, and I had the impression that the 2012 version looked better. But both of the side by side like that?! *sigh*

Now I'm frustrated and sad.
 
Yea they really made it look like a next gen title. Seeing those side by side now, holy shit is it dumbed down. Not just graphically either.

Quite sad :( I really wanted that to be as awesome as it looked.
 
Didn't Dark Soul 2 did the same thing?

Oh well, console again....
 
If its a game from Ubisoft, Activision or EA, hold off on buying it until after release
 
embarrassing. Look at the theater lights.
I'll wait until I can get the game for $5 on sale.
 
The dynamic lighting inside the club in the release version looks pretty cool, but overall yeah, the game just looks so much more flat than the E3 demo.
 
I remember the old E3 footage and thought it would be a good buy. I'm not even into that genre too much, either. But, it looked amazing. After seeing the final product, I passed. Not really my type of game, and it looks like any other game, even worse than others. :/ Disappointed. Still, it's selling like hot cakes.
 
Bullshit, I'm more inclined to believe that the E3 footage was prerendered marketing crap than them toning it down for consoles. It was 2 years ago and running that smooth with much better gfx, vs much better cards now, worse gfx and running a lot worse. Bullshit.
 
Consoles are the root of all gamin evil. They have to make the shit cheaply thus we get this... The fleecing of the PC gamer. EFF OFF
 
This is typical bait and switch.
You show one product and generate lots of buzz and publicity and then deliver something that is stripped of the content that made it stand out.
 
I love ho people get pissed off at this kinda stuff, like it was "false advertisement" or somethin... do you also complain about trailers and tv ads? What about the picture of food on labels/boxes? It's really simple folks: don't judge a book by it's cover... same goes with pre-release game footage.
 
As bad as Kickstarter projects are, they still deliver better results than AAA games companies these days.
 
A question I have though, are these taken at the exact same time of day and weather types in the game. Time of day and weather could affect the overall lighting between them quite differently. I'd need to know for sure the exact same time of day/lighting scenario was the same, and the weather was the same.

Now, for the club, I can't explain that, the club is much better in the E3 video.
 
Consoles are the root of all gamin evil. They have to make the shit cheaply thus we get this... The fleecing of the PC gamer. EFF OFF

As PC games are being subjected to consolization (catering to the lowest plaform) console games will suffer due to mobilization (console games designed for the mobile market).
 
Wouldn't this be considered false advertising? I'm surprised no class action started over this yet lol.
 
after watching the side by side, I have to say I like the sharpness of the release opposed to the fogginess of the E3 version, but as for everything else, wow did the cut shit out. Explosions? Gone. Fog? Gone. And so much more.
 
what in the **** did they do to it it looked way better...

They severely dumbed it down. Just from watching a little bit ..

- Dynamic shadows are off or turned extremely down
- Geometry is removed from the environment. Look at the lightbulbs when he walks under the theatre sign. Those are 3d objects in the E3 one. They're textures in the release one.
- Things are brightened / less reflections.
- Weather is removed (wind/dust/etc) in the scene.
- Tesselation/advanced-shaders are off
- Textures are lower resolution
 
They severely dumbed it down. Just from watching a little bit ..

- Dynamic shadows are off or turned extremely down
- Geometry is removed from the environment. Look at the lightbulbs when he walks under the theatre sign. Those are 3d objects in the E3 one. They're textures in the release one.
- Things are brightened / less reflections.
- Weather is removed (wind/dust/etc) in the scene.
- Tesselation/advanced-shaders are off
- Textures are lower resolution

Also. I'd guess it might be possible that the E3 one was built out to be extremely graphic for the hype machine. They were probably hoping to have more power with next-gen consoles. I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't the reason for the delay last year - they had to go in and strip/redo a lot of the artwork for it to run on the announced anemic consoles.

Had the consoles been what they were when Xbox360/PS3 were launched (forward thinking, taking a loss on every console sale for the first four years, etc), we would have probably got the E3 graphics.
 
When they found out that the game had to run on AMD's integrated graphics (yes it's integrated graphics even if it's an APU) they didn't want to manage another code base for PC too. So they had to take out a bunch of stuff that wouldn't work on a console.
 
Wouldn't be surprised if this was squarely the result of using Nvidia Gameworks.

Don't start this bullshit again. Take the FUD elsewhere. The stuff they are showing can be done on both AMD and Nvidia. It's not like it there is PhysX or TXAA or some proprietary HBAO going on.
 
When they found out that the game had to run on AMD's integrated graphics (yes it's integrated graphics even if it's an APU) they didn't want to manage another code base for PC too. So they had to take out a bunch of stuff that wouldn't work on a console.

Found out my butt everyone and their mother new that Sony and Microsoft where shopping APU's in 2010 and by 2012 roughly a year and a couple months before actual launch both had probably given developers (specially Ubi/EA/Activision) a decent guidelines of performance objectives with the new consoles. CPU's have a pretty long development cycle and a custom one like this was probably already spun out for testing at the time of E3 announcement.

Why anyone thought that Ubi out of the big 3 was going to be the company that over developed and release the first "next gen" looking title is beyond me. Or that one of their games got any kind of special treatment on PC. This is one of those should have known better moments.
 
Don't start this bullshit again. Take the FUD elsewhere. The stuff they are showing can be done on both AMD and Nvidia. It's not like it there is PhysX or TXAA or some proprietary HBAO going on.

Wouldn't be surprised if this was squarely the result of using Nvidia Gameworks.

Also is this game made by Gearbox and Pitchford?

False Advertising FTW
 
You guys keep blaming consoles for it being watered down, yet so many still ate up the "Next Gen" bullshit marketing of both PS4 and XBone. If they both struggled to play the game in its current state, do you really think either of them would be able to handle the obviously-fake E3 2012 footage?

To those stupid enough to believe the Watchdogs E3 video, I say "Eat it and weep," just like the morons before who ate up BS like Killzone 2 E3, FFVIII E3, and so many other marketing ploys that people tend to forget about when they give their wallets to these companies regardless of their blatant fakery.
 
Bullshit, I'm more inclined to believe that the E3 footage was prerendered marketing crap than them toning it down for consoles. It was 2 years ago and running that smooth with much better gfx, vs much better cards now, worse gfx and running a lot worse. Bullshit.

If they optimized it for triple SLI GTX 680s, it's not surprising at all to see that level of graphics.
 
If they optimized it for triple SLI GTX 680s, it's not surprising at all to see that level of graphics.

Uh, no. It was marketing fluff. There's no way in hell TriSLI 680s could have rendered that in real time. Unless you mean they were rendering it at an extremely low native res, then upscaled for videos.
 
NRHeLh6.png
 
Uh, no. It was marketing fluff. There's no way in hell TriSLI 680s could have rendered that in real time. Unless you mean they were rendering it at an extremely low native res, then upscaled for videos.

According to someone claiming to be an ex-ubi dev on 4chan:

Anonymous Mon 26 May 2014 16:28:42 No.245113496 Report
Quoted By: >>245113951
>>245104629
Did you really intend to have watch dgs look the way it did in 2012 demo or was it all bullshots from the start....any reason for the downgrade?

>>245113496
Yes, that wasn't bullshot stuff that was our build before the changes started to happen. The build shown at E3 had long faded and changes were already in progress. But yes the original intent was to have a game that looked THAT good, had all the little fancy silly, floating details(wrappers, cans, leaves), little gusts of wind. We even had some cool minigame ideas but were quickly shot down by Montreal.
 
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