"They forced us to go at E3 2012," Morin told EDGE.
Of all people, it's Jonathan Morin himself who points us in the right direction: Since we're not dealing with a wrongdoing, I'm also not out to apportion blame – it's more useful to isolate the cause of the confusion so we can avoid it in future. I'll reiterate – Ubisoft hasn't done anything explicitly wrong here, but surely it can see why someone with a console copy pre-order would feel misled.
No, some of them are for next-gen copies of the game, bought under the assumption that next-gen and PC graphics would be if not identical then certainly not different enough to warrant a comparison video with 500,000 views. I don't have the data in front of me, but I'll stick my neck out and say the vast majority of those pre-orders aren't held by PC gamers with the kind of rig capable of running that E3 2012 build.
"The vast majority of those pre-orders aren't held by PC gamers with the kind of rig capable of running that E3 2012 build."īut, hang on, is that alright? According to analyists Cowen & co, Watch Dogs was the second most pre-ordered game of 2013.
Ubisoft Montreal didn't even have PS4 or Xbox One test kits yet, so how on earth could it have demonstrated final game quality on unannounced consoles? Live Aiden
It was coming to 'consoles and PC' and looked way too good for PS3 and 360 so we interpolated the rest, but Ubi didn't mislead us – the game was running on PC, and at looked handsome as hell. Ubisoft simply showed PC footage with all the sliders set to 11 at its E3 2012 reveal, and the later footage showing inferior visual quality comes from PS4.Īfter all, in 2012 neither next-gen console had been announced yet. So there's no visual downgrade at work here. It wasn't a difference in video compression – there was something odd going on. Textures appeared washed out, cars less reflective, colour pallets less vibrant.
That was when people started spotting game footage they'd seen before at the game's reveal at E3 2012, this time with markedly less impressive graphics. Having slipped from the next-gen console launch window to May 27th, the dystopian open world hack-'em-up treated us to a new trailer in the hopes of whetting our appetites anew. The bad press started when Watch Dogs re-emerged with a new trailer and release date after dropping off the radar for five months. You're reading about these clandestine industry practices in an article about Watch Dogs not because it's necessarily guilty of the above, but because there's so little enforceable legislation forcing publishers to accurately represent final game quality.Ĭonsequently it was able to operate well within the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and still leave gamers feeling swindled. "Ubisoft was able to operate well within the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and still leave gamers feeling swindled." Killzone 2 is the original prankster here, showing us heart-stopping target footage in 2005 that the game duly failed to deliver on when it arrived.Īliens: Colonial Marines pulled a similar stunt during its development from 2008 to 2013, to the extent that Sega had to go back and put disclaimers on its trailers. Less common is the even murkier practice of presenting 'target render' footage of a game early in its development cycle that eventually reveals itself to be completely unrepresentative of the final version's quality bullshots in motion. It's such common practice these days that we don't even batter an eye when we see Sergio Ramos slide-tackling Alexis Sanchez mid-shot at an unplayable zoom level to promote the new FIFA.