Why did Ubisoft hide Watch Dogs’ true graphics potential?
As you might have realised from our Watch Dogs coverage, we at Mouse ‘n’ Joypad pretty much adore the game. However, in the recent days there have been some worrying advancements on uncovering the game’s final development stretch.
A modder going by the name of The Worse has been doing his best to upgrade the game’s visual quality to what we saw back in 2012. Surprisingly, as he waded through the numerous files he found a really suspicious line of code called (I shit you not) E3 2012 ‘insert effect name here’. All it took to get these post processing effects to work was to set the 0 to 1 in these files and recompile them. For now, The Worse has managed to implement dynamic shadows from headlights, increased rain density and NPC density, as well as 2012 E3 bloom and lens flare. Needless to say, the game with these files modded is looking much better than the vanilla version does.
As if that wasn’t enough, the game also runs somewhat faster, once all the bells and whistles are on. No more stutters, either. And The Worse will keep working to enhance the game’s graphics even further.
Aside from this, there is another –possibly bigger– issue that was found hidden in the code.
Take of this what you will, but there might be two sides to this coin. A disgruntled employee might have left that in because he/she felt that PC wasn’t getting enough development love. There does seem to be some sarcasm in that sentence, that’s for sure.
As for the two images up top – THAT is what Watch Dogs looks like when using The Worse’s mod.
What’s your opinion of all this?