Ubisoft downgrades

[Flachbau]

I dunno, man.. Far Cry 3 looked great, especially for a 360 game.. I enjoyed the story and gameplay as well. Did I miss something?

[MyName'sJeff]

I was talking about the gameplay. f*ck your graphics, Blacklist and Driver look exactly the same as their E3 presentations.

Even the gameplay for Far Cry 3 was horrendous. The game itself was excellent though. It was not smooth at all. They didn't even try to bother fixing it through patches.

[RogerWho]

I could list a few reasons why downgrades happen. And, true enough, one of those would be stupidity.

 

But the bigger stupidity is of those people who get all hyped up to the high heavens by a game they saw on a trailer, and then they go and cry on the internet when said game doesn't meet their ridiculous expectations. And yes, those expectations are often set by the marketing team, because that's their job you know. You know what's the job of the consumer? Be smart about their purchases.

 

Downgrades show the worst of people on both sides.

 

On the side of the dev/publisher:

• graphics whoring (need to make it look good or they won't play it)
• marketing trumps the actual quality of product
• jacking up ridiculous hype
• concentrating on preorders

 

On the side of the consumer:

• graphics whoring (it needs to look good or I won't play it)
• marketing trumps the actual quality of product
• jacking up and submitting to ridiculous hype
• willingness to preorder

In short, if you cry about downgrades, you're just as much to blame as the publisher. Besides, publishers will ALWAYS try some new sh*t. If you let them over and over, it's on you. Fool me once, heard that?

 

Anyway it's funny how games eventually turn out when you play them much later after they come out, like I tend to. I still haven't even got to play AC IV. Some games that were trashed on release turn out to be excellent, while the golden pieces of heaven are often crap.

 

Even the gameplay for Far Cry 3 was horrendous. The game itself was excellent though.

Isn't that just a teeny bit of an oxymoron?

[Richard Power Colt]

Maybe he meant that there were some performance issues or something that hurt the gameplay.

Edited July 5, 2016 by Nutsack McQueen

[DODI3OG]

Downgrades happen at launch probably because the devs love jacking up games' graphics on trailers just so they could advertise it as something really good. In other words, they want to hide the flaws of their games as they're being advertised. After all, if those games were great from the ground up(optimised really well), why would they get downgraded?

 

Prior to The Last of Us' release, I was not interested in thst game. Same for Bioshock Infinite. But when everybody got their hands on it, I watched their gameplays and I was amazed by their graphics as well. I saw them great as they were because I did not compare them with their trailers.

 

Another grat thing I realized was GTA V's final product. Pre-release, the game had excellent graphics on official screenshots and trailers, but when the game released, only a few noticed the downgrade(whoch was not that significant except for miasing trees, minimalized lighting effects, and a few more). In my opinion, the game was not advertised as something better than the final. I think the downgrade happened because the of the game's scope adn the fact that it was first released on the last gen.

[RogerWho]

Here's some very gross simplification of how things happen: Studio A works on a game B. It's been in development for 1 year, due to release in 1 more year. E3 is coming up in 6 months. While by that time the game would probably already be in a somewhat playable state, it would be far from being presentable.

 

Therefore, from now on the studio will work not just on the game itself, but also on the E3 presentation. This means they'll try to make some parts of the game look like they are finished. In part, they can use stuff that's fully planned out or already finished, like a lot of the graphical assets or voice acting and mission design - this stuff then needs to be finished before the rest of the game and packaged properly for the presentation and will also be used in the game itself.

 

Then there are parts which, while are also planned out, are either not finished or tend to change on weekly basis. Things like UI, some graphical effects (shaders and such) and other minor details and finishing touches. This stuff is basically guesswork at this point, since those details often don't get hammered down until a few months before release. So the team works on a portion of the game with aspects and visuals they WANT the final game to look, but of course have no real way of knowing for sure, because nobody can see into the future.

 

So, this team is working on the E3 presentation pretty much parallel to the main game. While the game proper has details constantly being worked on and reworked, the E3 presentation fork is coming towards its release more steadily. The team can't afford to make a change a week before presentation that will blow up the demo. So they still work off decisions made a few months before.

 

By the time E3 comes, the demo version and the main game may already not look alike. Shaders are different, UI is different. And then, the game is worked on for another 6 months. And stuff changes even more.

 

1 month before release, QA finds that a certain shader effect that was imagined for the E3 demo may cause a BSOD on some graphics cards, or that it makes certain in-game text unreadable. The team is scrambling to get the damn game out and have no time to hunt down this weird bug in the shader. So they disable it.

 

Results from the focus group comes. An UI element imagined in the E3 demo and only reincorporated recently causes motion sickness in some people in certain resolutions. No time to fix it, the team replaces the UI with an alternative version.

 

ESRB rates the game. They decide it's AO because of some mission. The team doesn't have the time, so they cut the mission and rework it later as a DLC.

 

Etcetera.

 

Really, people. If you work on something, anything that's not 100% by template (i.e. like baking the same cake over and over), especially if it's something so complex with a million moving pieces like a video game, well changes happen over time you know?

 

I for one admire people like Peter Molyneux who wasn't afraid to speak about his plans and visions. Of course, his ideas were too grandiose and had to be cut down considerably for the final game, and then he got sh*t thrown on him for 'lying'. You cant lie when talking about your future plans because nobody is a f*cking time traveller. You can't know what you actually end up with at the end.

 

In the 90's, it was common for developers to be as open as Molyneux. Years later I loved reading .plan files from the development of Quake II. There was so much of great insight there. But of course, people think that if a developer talks about plans for their game, they are bound to deliver all and everything, even if it would turn out to be physically impossible.

 

And so, the devs stopped talking about their games. Instead all we have are corporate heads and PR suits, which are actually way more likely to deliver deliberately false information. So, thanks for that!

 

And if you still get your pants in a twist for devs promising and not delivering, here's newsflash: don't get hyped, stop preordering everything, take everything with a grain of salt, don't buy every new game if you don't even like the series and in general just try to behave like a smart person.

 

TLDR: You plan something, it doesn't work out. You work on something, details change over time. Is this really such a new concept?

[SmileyBandito]

I somehow doubt that Watch Dogs 2 is getting downgraded. Ubisoft literally didn't say a word about the graphics and they don't even look anything special.

Definitely, the game was revealed five months before its current release date. It's practically done. The graphics looked achievable too, from what they showed us. Nothing extraordinary.

 

And as for as this topic goes, how long is everyone gonna keep bitching about Ubi downgrades like its a new thing?

[El Dildo]

didn't realize there was so much hyperbole in this thread.

 

This is pure false advertising, shouldn't they be sued for this?

I'm still looking in to whether or not what Ubisoft is doing is completely legal.

 

I hate to burst your guys bubbles, but it's not false advertising, they cannot be sued, and it's entirely legal.

 

we're talking about PC games. PC games that must be made to run on a billion different computer hardware configurations. so they like to beef up their graphics and show you their best possible gameplay trailer before tuning it and optimizing it for wide market release. this isn't exactly a crime against humanity

 

Ubisoft is one of many studios who do this.

[Mr. Scratch]

Except it's far from being done, they mentioned that it's still in alpha which I can't really understand.