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Watch Dogs 2

For those experience stuttering while driving, that was an issue with the original title as well. There were profile tweaks that fixed it for me. Also recommended to install to an SSD drive if you're planning on using the Ultra textures.

Might want to poke around and see if you can find a file similar to the ones mentioned in this thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/243470/discussions/0/540743032558655712/

^^ That's for the original game, but if it's the same engine, those tweaks may still work.
 
so is the driving in this game bad as drivinig in the Batman Arkham Knight game ???

I couldn't stand or do the driving in BAK, game ran smooth, but driving the batmobile was
way over my abilities ... so is this games driving 'easier' to handle ??

thanks
 
is there an option to enable or disable the 4k texture pack once you've downloaded it? i can't seem to find it.
 
dchobaby said:
is there an option to enable or disable the 4k texture pack once you've downloaded it? i can't seem to find it.
Click to expand...

Ultimately it's going to operate out of Uplay no matter what so here's what you do.

In Uplay, find the game in the listing, right click it, choose game details, you get the full page, and to the right you should see a list of "owned DLC." You should see "installed" or "not installed" next to whatever is there...click on "more DLC" if need be... operate from there.
 
So, after putting some decent time into this I have some thoughts.

-I might have to roll back what I said about performance...once you get past the initial mission(s) and get into the open city, performance is all over the place even with turned-down settings. If I try any form of AA other than Temporal, it's unplayable. Even on MSAA 2x, which supposedly Temporal uses itself...? Even using Temporal (which TBH does a mediocre job of AA) I get some pretty big performance drops in certain areas, especially while driving. Hopefully they can do a bit of optimization, because it's not totally unplayable but it does seem a bit broken. I can be getting low framerate and not even fully utilizing my CPU or GPU, suggesting there is a problem with optimization

-The game itself is...fun. It's basically GTA with hacking, seemingly even moreso than the first game because of all the smartphone apps and the California-esque setting in both.

-This game sort of just barrages you with a torrent of information and random shit...a bit overwhelming at first TBH. I was constantly getting notifications for missions or side objectives or places of interest or hidden items or...just a shit ton of stuff. Not really saying that's bad or good, but just something I noticed. Kinda seems like the game was developed for ADHD kids who have a 5-second attention span. :p

-I have mixed feelings about the online portion. The co-op seems fun and I did a couple of missions where I'm not sure anyone actually connected, but I finished the mission myself. The PvP is a cool idea but has some flaws. First, it seems to happen far too often...every 15 minutes or so I'd get harassed by someone trying to hack my data. Also, something seems screwed up with it because I was hiding in a car out of LOS from the guy as I hacked him, he "found me out" somehow even though he was through several buildings from me (and not using cameras/drones as far as I could tell), and then I went to run him over, hit him, he flew over the car and a message came up saying I died and failed the hack...as I watched his body get up and walk away. From a direct car hit going about 30-40 MPH. Seems like they need to do some work on the netcode or something.
 
FYI, we are going to have a 3 part evaluation of this game, graphically speaking.

Performance Part 1 - Cards compared, apples to apples, highest playable settings, VRAM, baseline of performance.

Performance Part 2 - In-depth feature performance, high resolution textures, ambient occlusion, shadows, detail slider, screenspace reflections, AA.....

Image Quality Part 3 - image quality screenshot comparisons of features, high resolution textures, shadows, ambient occlusion, detail slider, reflections, etc....

https://hardforum.com/threads/watch-dogs-2-video-card-performance-review-part-1-h.1918896/
 
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Just a random thought, but one thing I think was a major downgrade was the menu UI. The original game did a good job of mixing the data blocks and old-system style with modern fonts to create a unique but pleasant menu.

But for WD2, they went full retro and it's annoying. It just isn't visually appealing. I know, I know, it's a menu. One of those "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
 
Spidey329 said:
Just a random thought, but one thing I think was a major downgrade was the menu UI. The original game did a good job of mixing the data blocks and old-system style with modern fonts to create a unique but pleasant menu.

But for WD2, they went full retro and it's annoying. It just isn't visually appealing. I know, I know, it's a menu. One of those "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Click to expand...
They did it because pixel art is super hip these days. It's not just in the menus either, there's a lot of pixelly stuff used in art assets all over this game.
 
I picked it up on steam, downloaded it, installed the high res texture pack and SWEET BABY JESUS it runs like crap. I guess Ubisoft never disappoints me and I never learn to stop buying their games on release day. I'm going to see what I find about performance patches, I might also have to try installing on one of my ssds.

EDIT: I see there's new ati 16.11.5 drivers that point towards this game, I'm going to try those.
EDIT1: Drivers didnt really help, trying a fresh install on an ssd.
EDIT2: fresh install on SSD didnt help, still running poorly, going to check the ubisoft site and forums, thinking about using steam to get a refund.
EDIT3: figured out it was the high resolution textures - ubisoft site says need 6gb ram per video card to run it, I removed them and game ran flawlessly on my pathetically old R9 295x2. I really wish ATI would get off their asses and put out a high end video card with more RAM so I could upgrade.
 
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It really seems like there is a problem with AA in this game. Anything other than Temporal is unplayable, and it's basically confirmed by nVidia's guide:

watch-dogs-2-multisample-anti-aliasing-performance.png


Unless you are running out of VRAM, using 2x MSAA or TXAA should not result in framerate being cut by 25%. I can run 8x MSAA in ArmA 3 with little if any performance impact, and many other titles I am able to run 4x TXAA as well. Something feels off here.
 
Patch Notes: PC Title Update 1.06.135.3
02/12/2016



Today we have just pushed Title Update 1.06.135.3 for PC to the live environment to fix top known issues that have been identified since launch. This Title Update is now available to PC players.

This PC patch has the same fixes as the patch 1.06 for PS4 and Xbox One with a couple more fixes that are PC-specific. These two additional fixes are:

• Improved stability on AMD Crossfire systems – This patch fixes instability on Crossfire systems (AMD dual GPU systems).

• Fixed Donut NPCs Glitch – After downloading this patch, PC players will no longer see hilarious hordes of Donut people roaming the streets. Only a regular number of Donut people should now be seen on the streets.

This patch also has the same fixes as the latest console patch:

Online Performance

• [Performance] Game Crashing – This patch will have various crash fixes for a smoother gameplay experience.

• [Online & Multiplayer] Seamless Online – Players should now experience improved reliability of seamless online and matchmaking through the Multiplayer App.

• [Multiplayer] Activity Frequency – This patch fixes the issue of the cooldown resetting after a player dies while being the target of a hack during Online Invasions. Players should now experience regular cooldown times and a normal frequency of getting hacked during their gameplay.

• [Online Invasions] Target Detecting Hackers through walls using NetHack – Some players reported being able to detect Hackers through walls using NetHack during Online Invasions. This bug is fixed in this patch.

We hope you're having fun playing Watch Dogs 2. We’ve been loving seeing all the screenshots, selfies, and videos you’ve been sharing. So keep sharing all that great stuff with us on Twitter @watchdogsgame and the Watch Dogs subreddit.

Should you encounter any issues, please do not hesitate to check the Known Issues List, and report them in this forum section if they are not listed there. We appreciate you taking the time to help us improve the game.
Click to expand...


This game has a good spot for itself somewhere in between a GTA game and a Saints Row game in terms of presentation and tone. It doesn't take itself *too* seriously which is a good thing.

Overall, I feel like a lot of the promised that was teased for this series starting with the ever infamous E3 Watch Dogs trailer and controversy has been a lot more fully realized in this game.
 
Game of the year, folks. Pretty easy to win though, it was a shitty year.
It's too bad when Ubisoft actually gets something right, everybody is too busy shitting on them to notice.
 
Couple big gripes about this game.

1) The police chase mechanics are total horseshit. Half the time you will have no more police on your map and they will literally spawn right in front of you.

2) There are already hackers in PvP. I went to do a Bounty mission, saw the "location" of the guy was in the middle of the water, and when I got somewhat close to the shore I was instantly killed by the guy. Never saw anyone in the water, never saw anyone capable of shooting me. Among other random bullshit that has occurred when trying to evade hacks or attempt hacks.

I wish there was a little more variety to the game. Nearly all of the missions are the same exact thing...sneak around or shoot a bunch of guys, hack a thing, then go do that at 6 more locations. The racing stuff and driving is a nice break from it but I wish there was something like the GTA challenges where you have to kill X guys in X amount of time or something.
 
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TaintedSquirrel said:
Game of the year, folks. Pretty easy to win though, it was a shitty year.
It's too bad when Ubisoft actually gets something right, everybody is too busy shitting on them to notice.
Click to expand...

I'll definitely agree with you on the second part of this statement but not GOTY. I don't see that.
 
Q-BZ said:
I'll definitely agree with you on the second part of this statement but not GOTY. I don't see that.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I would choose Doom over this TBH. Lots of other contenders as well.

Don't get me wrong, I've spent pretty much all weekend so far playing this, there is a LOT to do. The little wheeled drone and the flying drone are a ton of fun, I like using them whenever possible. Protip: you can use them from inside a car...I didn't know that for the first third of the game or so.

Online stuff still bugs me, I like the occasional PvP but there are definitely people using cheats which sucks. Even with the forced anti-cheat Ubisoft pushes... :rolleyes:

I had the game crash when scrolling through my phone pictures for some reason...kind of an odd thing to trigger a crash.

Oh, and don't hit Esc to "pause" your game if you are going to be gone long. Apparently it doesn't actually prevent you from being PvP hacked, because I walked away for 5 min or so at the pause screen, and came back to me in-game saying I had been successfully hacked. WTF...
 
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It honestly runs amazing for me & every time I keep ramping up the quality settings, I'm still getting 60fps. I'll keep pushing it upwards to see how good I can go. I absolutely love the missions in the game, especially with using the drones.
 
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LOL, I've spent more time doing driving, taking pictures, getting into all kinds of shenangians and racking up followers... I've done one mission for the main story and a couple of sidequests.

I'm having a problem with a sidequest where there's a junction box in a garage and it tells you to find the close circuit terminal to unlock it... I can't find it anywhere.

I'm really enjoying this game. There's a really impressive amount of detail in it if you don't constantly fly around at 200 mph. Take some time to take this game in.
 
That's a pretty fair video.


The bullet points at the end...
Agreed with all the positives.


The dislikes:

Controls are bad... no they're not. Remap a few keys. I basically have this game as a cousin to Division with the way I'm playing it.

Driving is arcadey... for the most part, yes, but this isn't a driving simulator. It's good enough.

Shooting is not rewarding... unfortunately I have to agree by and large although if you get the marksman stuff a bit it gets a little better. The game is clearly geared towards the stealth, hacking and shenanigans on that end. I have a nice pistol and I can drop people with headshots but you definitely aren't Rambo and you will die fast in this game trying to frag fest run and gun it. Don't bother. Play something else.

I would like to see a patch or something done to improve the shooting and make it a bit more satisfying if that's possible. I know they don't want to make Marcus this OP hacking Rambo Superman gunslinger guy but... this could stand a little help.




Story is alright. Nothing to write home about but better than one. Characters are more likeable and even T-Bone, the best character from part 1, returns. (This isn't a spoiler. This has been advertised.)


Like I said before: This game found a voice and tone for itself that was missing in part one and this vidoe did a good job catching it: The game is fun to play and the sense of having fun is in this whereas it wasn't in part one.

This game has found a nice balance in not taking itself too seriously without being a Saints Row style comic book farce. Ubisoft even trolled themselves in sidequest and some other dialog in this game for good measure.



I think a huge chunk of the promise that was teased in that ever infamous E3 2014 trailer and what we saw in the first game, all told has been mostly realized in this and I think Ubisoft is going to give it their best shot at support.

Tainted was right about this: Ubisoft has done a lot of things right here.

I thought they did on AC: Syndicate as well and a lot of the Ubisoft fanboy hate really looks and sounds stupid at this point with them putting out games like these and Division.

I think Ubisoft is well on the path of redemption if they continue on like this.

Is this a perfect game? Far from it. Is GTA 5 still the best game like this along these lines? Yes.

To be fair: This game isn't trying to be "something else" and that's good.
 
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I find the story refreshing since they poke fun at everything. I've avoided using any guns thanks to making cops & gangs eliminate "baddies" with ease. It all flows well together but I've hit a few weird bugs that I hope get fixed soon. Overall, I'm satisfied with getting this game from a Samsung SSD purchase. I'm not sure what I'll do about story DLC, but I'll watch & wait until the season pass is on sale.

To note: I've avoided the online missions, so I'm only doing the single player experience. This may limit my scope of perspective about the game.
 
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My experience/opinion on the MP so far is, it's incredibly hit or miss, but even then I haven't had an extremely positive experience. It's either been very negative (cheaters, unresponsive co-op partners, people disconnecting in the middle of a mission/PvP session, etc.) or just meh.

The concept is cool but so far in execution it's been pretty lackluster.
 
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MavericK said:
My experience/opinion on the MP so far is, it's incredibly hit or miss, but even then I haven't had an extremely positive experience. It's either been very negative (cheaters, unresponsive co-op partners, people disconnecting in the middle of a mission/PvP session, etc.) or just meh.

The concept is cool but so far in execution it's been pretty lackluster.
Click to expand...

That's more than enough of a reason for me to avoid it anyways. I'm generally not jumpy about MP unless there's a huge benefit for helping the SP side, which rarely ever happens.
 
One thing that infuriates me is when you're hacking someone, you're like 80% done and they just disconnect, and for that waste of time you get...NOTHING.
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
That's more than enough of a reason for me to avoid it anyways. I'm generally not jumpy about MP unless there's a huge benefit for helping the SP side, which rarely ever happens.
Click to expand...

The only real benefit you get from the PvP is followers (essentially XP in this game), and honestly unless you do it early-on, it's a pretty weak amount of XP given the time involvement. I think you get around 16k followers for a successful hack on someone. Most main missions net you anywhere from 20k to 200k followers. I guess from a time perspective the PvP hacks are quicker, but they also have an extremely high chance of failure.
 
I haven't bought Watch Dogs 2 but I did enjoy the first game and the pvp hacking mini-game where you invade other people's games was a lot of fun...did they keep the same mechanic in the new game?...improve upon it?
 
polonyc2 said:
I haven't bought Watch Dogs 2 but I did enjoy the first game and the pvp hacking mini-game where you invade other people's games was a lot of fun...did they keep the same mechanic in the new game?...improve upon it?
Click to expand...

I don't remember exactly what the first game PvP was like but I think it's the same in this one. I would say the improvements come from the drones you can use now, which are a lot of fun.
 
polonyc2 said:
I haven't bought Watch Dogs 2 but I did enjoy the first game and the pvp hacking mini-game where you invade other people's games was a lot of fun...did they keep the same mechanic in the new game?...improve upon it?
Click to expand...
Invasions are still there, I believe the only mode they got rid of was tailing.
 
polydiol said:
I picked it up on steam, downloaded it, installed the high res texture pack and SWEET BABY JESUS it runs like crap. I guess Ubisoft never disappoints me and I never learn to stop buying their games on release day. I'm going to see what I find about performance patches, I might also have to try installing on one of my ssds.

EDIT: I see there's new ati 16.11.5 drivers that point towards this game, I'm going to try those.
EDIT1: Drivers didnt really help, trying a fresh install on an ssd.
EDIT2: fresh install on SSD didnt help, still running poorly, going to check the ubisoft site and forums, thinking about using steam to get a refund.
EDIT3: figured out it was the high resolution textures - ubisoft site says need 6gb ram per video card to run it, I removed them and game ran flawlessly on my pathetically old R9 295x2. I really wish ATI would get off their asses and put out a high end video card with more RAM so I could upgrade.
Click to expand...
Come to the green side. We have cookies!
TaintedSquirrel said:
Game of the year, folks. Pretty easy to win though, it was a shitty year.
It's too bad when Ubisoft actually gets something right, everybody is too busy shitting on them to notice.
Click to expand...
Not a hard choice for GOTY from me: DOOM.
MavericK said:
One thing that infuriates me is when you're hacking someone, you're like 80% done and they just disconnect, and for that waste of time you get...NOTHING.
Click to expand...
The first game suffered this problem, as well, and many people complained. Surprised they didn't do something about it.
 
Armenius said:
The first game suffered this problem, as well, and many people complained. Surprised they didn't do something about it.
Click to expand...

I think an easy way to fix would be to either 1) give a certain amount of XP just for initiating the hack (which I think it does if you fail, but not if there's a disconnection...?) or 2) give a certain amount of XP proportional to how far the hack got (e.g. if you made it to 80% you get 80% of full XP for the hack, or something similar).

I don't even necessarily think the disconnections are malicious, because the netcode for this game seems to be pretty shit. I've had a number of times where I got disconnected for anti-cheat being "off" (even though I never disabled it and the MP came back on a minute or so later), or the other player will just randomly lag out or disconnect for no apparent reason.
 
Can anyone offer any graphics tuning tips for this game? Even with SLI 1080s overclocked, a 6850K @ 4GHz, 32GB of DDR4 2800 ram and a 144Hz G-Sync monitor I struggle to keep the game above 60 fps.

I'm using the Geforce Experience "optimized" settings.... is the game just that poorly optimized??
 
Turn down shadows to Ultra, turn off any Extra Detail, turn on Temporal Filtering. That should get you closer to where you want to be.

SLI scaling doesn't appear to be that great, either, so keep that in mind.
 
Sprayingmango said:
Can anyone offer any graphics tuning tips for this game? Even with SLI 1080s overclocked, a 6850K @ 4GHz, 32GB of DDR4 2800 ram and a 144Hz G-Sync monitor I struggle to keep the game above 60 fps.

I'm using the Geforce Experience "optimized" settings.... is the game just that poorly optimized??
Click to expand...
GFE's optimized settings are based on averaging 60 FPS. If you want to target a higher framerate you can customize GFE's settings to lower quality (click on the wrench next to the toggle switch). Or you can just manually adjust settings in the game, like always.
 
I beat all of the single player side quests & main storyline. I enjoyed all of it except
for the ending, which is a bit underwhelming. Bad enough Deus Ex Mankind Divided failed on that, too.
:facepalm:
 
So I figured out that being hacked, finding the hacker but not bothering to chase them down still nets you 15K followers, but doing a successful hack yourself only nets you 16K.

:rolleyes:
 
MavericK said:
So I figured out that being hacked, finding the hacker but not bothering to chase them down still nets you 15K followers, but doing a successful hack yourself only nets you 16K.

:rolleyes:
Click to expand...
It's too easy to find them with the drone, too. Just fly around the purple area w/ hacker vision scanning everyone. Usually takes about 10 seconds.
 
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