Did you think Watch_Dogs was a tad ugly compared to the early trailers, gameplay, and so on? You were certainly right but you can also now amend that thanks to a mod. PC Gamer put out an article on said wonderful little mod that amends all your Watch_Dog woes with a bunch of pretty screenshots to boot.
In short it makes the game look pretty much exactly as it did in those fancy E3 trailers long ago. Also, fun fact, they're referred to as E3 settings in the files themselves. Now you may think, "but the game already ran pretty poorly even on higher-end PCs." Well my friend, believe it or not it also improves the game's performance drastically.
Here's a few quick screenshots I took ingame on high/ultra settings, with this wonderful little patch.
Depth of Field Demonstration
Ohh sweet!
DOF seems a bit excessive but luckily that can be turned off. Also if you don't have sweetfx running already take a look at it. It might be a nice addition to a game that is only getting better.
Also I hope Ubisoft notices how modders fixed their game and will end up supporting modders in the future with proper mod tools for (I really hope) games like AC. I really want mod support for Assassin's Creed:D
Mod support for far cry 4
And Blood Dragon especially. :P
Exactly. This mod alone might actually have me buying the game anyway since modders do such a great job with these games.
This wasn't much of a mod, though. This was mostly a way to re-enable features that were left unused in the final game. Ubisoft wouldn't have needed to do much to include this in the final game... It's suspicious, isn't it? The reason is probably something else, perhaps they were paid by the next-gen console companies to not make the next-gen consoles seem inferior. After all, customers paid a lot of money to have the "best graphics available". It would raise anger if they were to find out that next-gen isn't so next-gen after all.
Being a former modder and a huge fan of Ubisoft's games, I'd love mod support. But I highly doubt that'll ever happen. The closest thing to modding we'll have in the near future will probably only be mods like these, configurations and value changes.
Indeed. Why would they shoot themselves in the foot like that by purposely disabling such significant aesthetic features? Something's not right.
I feel they were given incentive by console companies to downgrade the graphics for PC but someone in-dev didn't agree to this and left these files there for us to find. The data even had the prefix "E3" to it... couldn't be a mistake.
Definitely not a mistake, manipulation from various "outside sources" maybe, if you get my drift.
(cough sony and microsoft)
This is a mod in all senses. This isn't a total conversion (nor a partial conversion), but this is still a mod. It is a unofficial patch kind of mod.
There are various different types and sizes of mods: total conversions, custom campaigns, rebalances, unofficial patches (that either modify features/values already in a game or add new ones) and many others.
We should classify all types of mods to prevent confusion like the one I saw yesterday on the comments in the PC Gamer article about this mod.
what they were probably doing was waiting till the game had been out for a while then release an update, that re-enabled this little packet of code, as a marketing tool.
In my experience the effects released (0.7) don't seem quite right. As some others have pointed out the effects seem to be quite unusable for regular gameplay without lighting/shadow errors, weird rain (at fast speeds), etc. This is still no excuse as to the non-representative e3 demo (I know they always say non-representative of final, but that's supposed to imply improvement). They should've polished things off and got these effects in working order.
Ubisoft lie all the time
We should boycott all future Ubisoft games on PC, until they stop this nonsense.
What's the fps difference between standard on ultra and with this mod on ultra?
They don't vary much since the mod was optimized to not consume too many FPS.
heard this sentence a thousand times
The stuttering you'll usually get while driving at high speeds is gone, though on outright ultra settings the FPS drop a bit much on my machine. Simply turning reflections & shadows down to high on my Nvidia 680 and 3770k CPU rig makes it run smoothly.
There's pretty much no reason at all to not get this mod basically, it only improves everything to look and run better at the same time. Ubisoft must be collectively ******** itself in shame.
Yup. Now we can raise our fists in victory showing that true gamers know how to get the job done.
Anyone seen the new 'gameplay' for AC Unity i bet ubisoft will scale that down too.
Excellent!
Nice! Keep it up :)
I can only assume they changed the PC settings so that it looked similar to the console version. Now that makes hulk mad.
Hell yeah way to spoil their upcoming dlc ***** guys~!
power to the modders!
"Well my friend, believe it or not it also improves the game's performance drastically."
that is hard to believe, but, i believe you.
Normaly better graphics do pull the fps donw quit hard, so it is a real mistery to me that this doesn't happen here.
Still, do wonder why Ubisoft did not make this default avaleble then, but you could be right that they wanted to keep the game look the same on console and PC. Although, why would it not work then on consoles?
But that is something i really are not interested in at all, simply because i am no console fan at all.
(PC for me, all the time).
thanks for pointing this out to us!!!
Leon
And mods save the day! Once again... And once again the consoles hold back the PC.
It is starting to get ridiculous that we, the gamers/modders, are having to fix the PC version of games nowadays.
Well, I'll keep this mod in mind for when I'm able to play this game.
Power to the Modders!
Oh yessh
I advise you to remove crazy DOF
Yo dog, I heard you liked better graphics, so I put better graphics buried in the better graphics.
I had heard about a couple of tweaks going about to improve the quality of watch dogs,
When I get it, i'll be getting it for this :)
Keep up the good work :D
(buried)
Can you use this on PS4?
why do people keep asking this? if its changing game files in any way, then NO.
Nobody else asked this question.....
people ask if they can use mods on console all the time. The answer is always no.
You can mod gta 4.
Thank you sooo much for this. And shame on you, Ubi!
Whoever made this patch all i'm going to say is......Thank you.
A game about hackers where you have to hack the games files to have it running at best graphics and performance.
One could allmost think this has been intentional.
Messed up my game...
When I continue my game, Aiden has no clothes (literally).
I have the Season Pass so I thought it just wasn't compatible with the DLC clothing so I re-installed the whole game. But when I continued my game;
https://i.imgur.com/IZAXkfY.jpg
It's the same! Plus the graphics flicker and the game crashes when I try to do anything. I even tried removing the GamerProfile file but nothing...
My rig: i7-2600, 12GB DDR3-1333MHz, R9 290X.
P.S. No other game started doing this so it's the mod that messed up the game :/
wow
wil this mod get the game to run when it couldn't before on low end pc's?
Does Ubisoft plan on ever fixing the game themselves? Or are they just going to leave us PC gamers in the dust, forcing us to finish their game for them. The game still runs like **** a month after release.
I'm still ****** off that this embarrassment came to be. Never buying a Ubisoft game on launch ever again, that's for goddamn sure.
Finally Next Gen graphics!