Watch Dogs Graphics Downgraded on PC

[salm]

That sounds as if the Wii is in the same ball park as the other consoles.

These articles actually claim that The Wii has more games than the 360 and the more than the PS3:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wii_games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_360_games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_P ... on_3_games

[Vendetta]

The Wii actually did have quite a lot of high-selling games according to this list (yeah, Wikipedia, I know), but the PS3 and presumably 360's sales are divided across a much larger number of games, whereas Mario Kart Wii and New Super Mario Bros. Wii alone account for over 10% of all the Wii's software sales between them.

And you have to go down to 16th place on that list to find a game not published by Nintendo.

That doesn´t seem to stem from wearing a device, though, but from simulator sickness. That´s a problem that needs to be taken care of and it looks like it´s being addressed with pretty high priority. The new version of the rift had a lot less problems than the old version due to improved head tracking, better resolution and a couple of firmware improvements.
But if motion sickness remains a problem then VR is unlikely to succeed

But if it's not fixed for absolutely everyone then it is automatically market limiting. Even if one in twenty people have a problem with it, your market is still 5% larger if you don't use it.

Why compare all game systems without VR to game systems with VR? If you have a PC game and want to extend it´s user base to PS3 and XBox you have to port it.
If you have a non VR PC game and want to extend it´s user base to VR PC gamers you have to port it.
I think a lot of people who are not interested in non VR games will be interested in VR games.

But those ports are "find out ways to make it do the same thing", not "eliminate a whole set of things we did in the non-VR version that don't work with VR. Porting to VR requires more resource because more teams have to be involved, because if you can't, for instance, suddenly make the player look left then the thing that happened to the left that you need them to see now has to be somewhere else, so you have to redesign the level around a change you had to make to accomodate a rule of successful VR adaptation, or you have to just let the player miss that information, and if the information was "the thing they needed to see will kill them unless they do X" then they don't know about doing X and so they eat a bullshit and unfair death, but only if they're using a particular type of display.

And sure, Half-Life 2 and Skyrim got adapted, but they are games which already don't do the things that cause a problem for VR users. HL2 already doesn't take control of the camera, but the vast majority of other games do so and do so regularly in the name of cinematic presentation.

So it actually did sell a lot of software and even managed to sell a bunch of peripherals?

It sold a lot of first party software specifically designed to use it and only it. It did not sell a lot of software which was adapted to it from elsewhere or for anyone other than the people who originally made it.

And anecdotes of how great people find it when they try it don't actually mean what you think they do, because the same thing happened with motion control, and with 3D. People like it at first but don't like it enough to keep using it. That was the real long term story of the Wii, it had enthusiastic early adoption but simply didn't maintain interest, and its hardware and software sales stagnated, so despite its large install base it wasn't actually profitable to develop for.

[DaveJB]

The Wii actually did have quite a lot of high-selling games according to this list (yeah, Wikipedia, I know), but the PS3 and presumably 360's sales are divided across a much larger number of games, whereas Mario Kart Wii and New Super Mario Bros. Wii alone account for over 10% of all the Wii's software sales between them.

And you have to go down to 16th place on that list to find a game not published by Nintendo.

Actually, out of the ~60 or so games on that list, a whopping nine of them were published by companies other than Nintendo, Sega, Ubisoft or Capcom. It was profitable for some developers - mostly the few who were still developing for the GameCube and got in early enough to make some money from the initial frenzy - just not very many of them.

Unfortunately, the "lesson" that Nintendo learned seems to have caused them to lapse back into their N64-era mentality of "screw everyone else, we're designing our consoles for our in-house developers." With the Wii U, they'd probably have been much better served by just grabbing an off-the-shelf AMD APU, slapping it in a case and calling it a day; at least then developers could knock out no-effort ports, stick them on the system and still end up profitable thanks to how little time and money would be involved.

[TheFeniX]

Look, the only Nintendo news anyone wants to hear is "Retro making new Metroid game."

[salm]

Does anybody have any numbers showing that developing for Wii was/is unprofitable?

But if it's not fixed for absolutely everyone then it is automatically market limiting. Even if one in twenty people have a problem with it, your market is still 5% larger if you don't use it.

If you use it your market grows in absolute numbers because of the people that wouldn´t play your game without VR.

You don´t have to fix it for everybody. Some people can´t play First Person Shooters on monitors due to Motion Sickness and FPS are doing just fine.
Some people have slow PCs that can´t play some games and still these game are developed. So, gaming PCs don´t have 100% market penetration and still plenty of PC games are developed.

But those ports are "find out ways to make it do the same thing", not "eliminate a whole set of things we did in the non-VR version that don't work with VR. Porting to VR requires more resource because more teams have to be involved, because if you can't, for instance, suddenly make the player look left then the thing that happened to the left that you need them to see now has to be somewhere else, so you have to redesign the level around a change you had to make to accomodate a rule of successful VR adaptation, or you have to just let the player miss that information, and if the information was "the thing they needed to see will kill them unless they do X" then they don't know about doing X and so they eat a bullshit and unfair death, but only if they're using a particular type of display.

And sure, Half-Life 2 and Skyrim got adapted, but they are games which already don't do the things that cause a problem for VR users. HL2 already doesn't take control of the camera, but the vast majority of other games do so and do so regularly in the name of cinematic presentation.

Well, you do have to change a whole bunch of things, namely the controls, when porting from PC to console or vice versa and you have to make in compatible to a whole new machine.
If you plan ahead you can probably make it relatively easy to port games from and to VR. Actually a whole bunch of games currently under development are doing just that. We´ll see how it turns out.

And anecdotes of how great people find it when they try it don't actually mean what you think they do, because the same thing happened with motion control, and with 3D. People like it at first but don't like it enough to keep using it.

We´ll see but I think you´re going to change your mind after trying it.

[TheFeniX]

Does anybody have any numbers showing that developing for Wii was/is unprofitable?

I wouldn't say "unprofitable," but not as profitable. Wii Play dominated sales charts.... and came with a WiiMote. No one was going to port Halo or Gears of War over to an underpowered system with a control scheme wildly different than the other two competing consoles. The Wii went after a completely different demographic than MS or Sony did and it's doubtful many 3rd-party developers would spend the resources trying to port their games over to a system like that considering they couldn't bet on good sales from the investment.

Binary Domain pretty much showed how popular those games would sell on the Wii. The answer was "not much."

[DaveJB]

Does anybody have any numbers showing that developing for Wii was/is unprofitable?

No-one is saying that developing for the Wii in general was unprofitable, just that porting AAA games wasn't worth the time and effort, because most gamers who owned a Wii also owned a PS3 and/or 360, and wouldn't buy an inferior-looking version without good reason. In the list I linked to earlier, the only such game to even sell a million plus units on the Wii was CoD: World at War. The Wii U has the same problem, only amplified thanks to the Frankenstein-esque configuration it uses, whereas with the Wii developers were at least used to the GameCube hardware.

That said, I should probably have used the word "lucrative" rather than "profitable" in my previous post, as there were a lot of upgraded PS2-to-Wii ports (Guitar Hero, EA Sports games and the like) that no doubt made profit just because they were quick and easy to produce and the Wii had a huge install base.

Look, the only Nintendo news anyone wants to hear is "Retro making new Metroid game."

Quite right! We demand Metroid Prime Pinball 2 for the New 3DS!

Oh, wait... you were talking about a Metroid Prime 4, right? Yeah, that'd be pretty cool.

[salm]

Well, the whole Wii discussion started with the following, so there might have been some misunderstandings along the thread...

The Wii was a huge success at selling Wiis. It was not a huge suiccess at selling software for Wiis. Lots of people bought Wiis, played the packed in stuff and never bought anything else for it because it turns out it wasn't good at anything else.

[TheFeniX]

Well, the whole Wii discussion started with the following, so there might have been some misunderstandings along the thread...

The Wii was a huge success at selling Wiis. It was not a huge suiccess at selling software for Wiis. Lots of people bought Wiis, played the packed in stuff and never bought anything else for it because it turns out it wasn't good at anything else.

Yea, pushing 35 million copies of Mario Kart isn't exactly only using the "packed-in" stuff. Nintendo has just been pretty bad at 3rd party support, but the Wii was a juggernaut for their 1st party stuff and, out of any other IP that exists, "Mario" and "Nintendo" is a house-hold name.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

One reason I'm going to jump in on the first generation consumer Oculus Rift is that it's a lot cheaper than getting a new monitor. I have an old 22" 1680 x 1050 Acer that does its job. To meaningfully upgrade, I would have to spend at least $500, but for $300-400 I can buy an OR and get much greater wow factor and keep using my "just fine" monitor for day to day stuff and light gaming. I never see this mentioned, but I think a lot of people with old screens will think about the cost of a new monitor or TV and decide to get an OR instead.

[TheFeniX]

You can get a 27" 1080p monitor for less than $300. And that's for ASUS, I've seen 27" monitors under $200. 24" are now <$200. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind an Occulus Rift, but it's still only shooting for 1080p.

[Jub]

Plus an OR does nothing for a home office setup and some of us only have one PC and need to end up asking the question "OR or dual screen setup?"

[salm]

The current Development Kit has 1080p. The consumer version will have more. The most recent prototype going by the silly name "Crescent Bay" has 1440p. Samsungs Gear VR which is basically a headset with rotation (but not position) tracking, into which you can enter the Samsung Note 4 Telephone and is powered by Oculus Software. The Note 4 has 1440p. AFAIK Gear VR will go on sale in about a month for 160€. Unfortunately you also have to buy the Telephone which is expensive.
So It can be assumed that the first Oculus Rift will have 1440p or even more.

[salm]

Since Windows 10 is finally going to have virtual desktops, maybe these can be utilized to have as many desktops within the rift as you want wrapped around you.
I´m currently running 4 monitors and the energy bill has gone up.

[bilateralrope]

So now, Ubisoft is downgrading PS4 graphics to keep parity between Xbone and said PS4 for AssCreed: Unity.

Yet they still couldn't hit 30FPS on the PS4:
Assassin's Creed Unity players reporting 'crazy low' frame rates, other performance issues

Assassin's Creed Unity launched today, but prospective buyers may want to hold off until Ubisoft patches the game to fix what players are calling "crazy low" frame rates, along with problems like bugs and texture pop-in.

A video captured from the PS4 version of Assasin's Creed Unity by ZeroX03 Gaming, which you can see above, exhibits severe stuttering during an act as simple as clambering along a wall inside a church — not anything nearly as complicated to render as the hundreds of characters in the game's Parisian crowd scenes. According to Reddit user Merkwerk, the game's frame rate on PS4 is "not even close to a locked 30 fps, it feels like it's running at 20 something most of the time." The individual added, "I've had it drop way below that a couple of times already."

The performance problems aren't limited to PS4. According to unvirable on Reddit, the Xbox One version is "really running sub 30fps, which makes it unplayable." And prominent YouTube commentator TotalBiscuit reports that the Windows PC version suffers from a host of issues such as "killer [pop-in]," lighting that is "glitchy as hell" and in general, a "MASS of bugs." In addition, TotalBiscuit and other PC players in the Steam forums are reporting that the game seems to be poorly optimized, with players needing a pretty high-end rig to hit a playable frame rate.

Ubisoft announced last month that the development team had "dedicated much of the past few months to optimizing Unity to reach 900p with a consistent 30 frames per second." We've reached out to the publisher for comment, and will update this article with any information we receive. Check back later today for our full review of Assassin's Creed Unity.

Having the game be bad wouldn't be newsworthy. Except Ubisoft decided that reviewers would be embargoed until hours after launch so that Ubisoft could get launch day sales before anyone found out.

How Assassin's Creed Unity weaponized review embargoes

Opinion by Ben Kuchera on Nov 11, 2014 at 1:12p Click for more on how Polygon writes opinion pieces.

There’s always a meta-commentary to be had about the timing and execution of game reviews. If a review comes out a good ways before launch, such as the new Dragon Age game, it’s usually a sign of confidence. Strong reviews that far out can help boost pre-order numbers and lead to a larger launch at retail. A good, strong early review can have an appreciable effect on the business of launching a game.

The reviews for Assassin’s Creed Unity were held until noon, Eastern time today. The game will have been available to purchase for as long as a dozen hours before anyone could read whether it was good or bad, or if it suffers from technical problems.

"All of this adds up to a game whose technical issues often make it more difficult to play. Assassin's Creed Unity isn't as framerate-sensitive as a shooter like Call of Duty, but navigating the world when the game was struggling to respond to my inputs felt like a chore," Polygon's review states.

The game earned a 6.5 rating.

There’s no valid reason for a review embargo such as this; it’s blatantly anti-consumer and likely designed to get the first rush of hardcore fans into the stores to buy their copies of the game before the reviews hit. We learned about the embargo last week.

Hell, I was going to pick up a copy of the game today until I read user reviews. I’m glad I waited, there are way too many other things to play.

This leads us into a good discussion of what embargoes are, and what they do. An embargo is an agreement between the press and the publisher about when coverage for the game can be released to the public. In exchange for early access to the game, we agree to hold content until a certain agreed-upon time.

Breaking embargoes, on the other hand, can potentially lead to a loss of access to future release games, and you have to agree to the embargo to play the game, which means by the time you realize a game is broken, it's already too late. It's a vicious loop, and making a good faith agreement and then breaking it later is bad news for a publication that wants its word to mean something.

Usually this isn’t much of a problem, and it lets every review run at the same time and gives reviewers ample time to play the game. Embargoes can remove the temptation to rush through a game in order to get the first review out, which leads to better reviews for the consumer.

That’s the ideal, at least.

When embargoes go bad

When a game’s embargo isn’t up until the day of launch you need to be careful. If it isn’t up until a few hours after the game is launched you should probably run screaming the other way. That’s not a signal that the game may have middling reviews, that’s a signal that the publisher is trying to sell copies before the word hits the street.

It could also meant the game is still being worked on, but any embargo past midnight the night before is sketchy as hell. It’s a way to weaponize embargoes, and the best thing to do is to hold off until you can read about the game in detail.

The press can, of course, purchase a copy of the game and run stories based on the performance of that version of the game in the first hours it has been released, but that closes the door on reviews based on completion.

The good news is that these situations are rare, and this Fall you can count Destiny, DriveClub and Assassin's Creed Unity as games with launch day reviews. Take from that what you will, although that also happened with Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls, which was great.

You should always be on the lookout for these situations. The earlier a review hits, often the more confidence the publisher has in the game.

We agree to embargoes because we need to do so in order to get early access to the game. That value is that the majority of traffic on a review comes on the first day of release, and any outlet that waits loses that traffic.

This system is actually in service of reader's interests, even if we have to play by the publisher's rules. The reality is that most readers come when the embargo is first dropped. If you agree to the embargo and then go back on the agreement in order to warn readers, you're going back on your word, which hurts your credibility in every other aspect of your business.

We're reacting to the realities of the market: You tell us via your readership, or lack thereof, that early reviews are more valuable to you. This is what it takes, and sometimes it puts us in a bind. This is one of those times.

Embargoes, on the whole, are a good thing. They help us get coverage of games without rushing through after release and it’s fun when the embargo drops and you can gorge on reading all the reviews. I don’t want to live in a world where everyone gets their copy of the game and rushes to write the first review; the quality of criticism would drop significantly.

The best thing to do is to inform consumers about what’s happening, and you can always get some hints about the game from the timing of its embargo. In this case the embargo hinted at a game that’s in no way ready for release, and the reality of the situation proves that hypothesis. Assassin's Creed: Rogue was not provided for pre-launch review at all.

The industry has more to gain from embargoes than to lose, however, which doesn’t lessen the bullshit-factor of these situations. If you buy before you read reviews, written by the press or simply other fans, you’re putting yourself at risk.

The longer you have to wait to read the review, the greater the risk. In the future we're going to work to do a better job of sharing information about embargoes and when to expect reviews.

This is a gentle reminder that waiting is almost always best.

[Grumman]

Having the game be bad wouldn't be newsworthy. Except Ubisoft decided that reviewers would be embargoed until hours after launch so that Ubisoft could get launch day sales before anyone found out.

And people still bought it? What rock were they living under to not recognise "not screened for critics" as code for "stay the fuck away"?

[bilateralrope]

Probably people who liked the previous games and decided to buy this one because they hadn't hear anything bad about it. Only one step better than the people who preorder games.

[Lagmonster]

This would be an excellent time to remember that a shitload of people who purchase games do not themselves end up playing them, and in fact never even read online reviews, because they are the parents of teenagers and/or spouse to a gamer, and have conversations like, "I want the new one of the one in that series my kid likes".

[TheFeniX]

Having the game be bad wouldn't be newsworthy. Except Ubisoft decided that reviewers would be embargoed until hours after launch so that Ubisoft could get launch day sales before anyone found out.

I agree, only because broken shit isn't surprising anymore. However, the idea that a company who thinks "30 FPS is the new standard" and already had to make compromises with "current gen" hardware to hit that goal AND YET still missed by a mile shows how fucking terrible the AAA super-dooper blockbuster market of video games is going to be for the next 5+ years. Them embargoing the reviews is really just cover for the real problems we'll be facing for the foreseeable future. But remember kids, PC gaming sucks: console are where it's at.

[bilateralrope]

Unity's problems aren't just poor performance on everything. There are many other glitches.

[aieeegrunt]

Should I hold off on Far Cry 4 then?

[DaveJB]

Should I hold off on Far Cry 4 then?

That game has a different engine and development team, so unless Ubisoft decided to make this "Buggy, Slow Game Month" AC:U's quality shouldn't really have any bearing on Far Cry 4.

Speaking of which, Unity has the same engine as the previous two AC games, and I don't remember those being slow or glitch-filled, so it makes you wonder what the hell went wrong with this one. Possibly they got over-ambitious with the huge new crowds and settings, in which case they probably would have been better off delaying this game another year and producing PS4 and Xbone versions of AC: Rogue.

[bilateralrope]

Should I hold off on Far Cry 4 then?

Why are you even thinking of buying a game before it has been released ?

You should always wait until reviewers have had a chance to look at a game and find any problems that may exist. Especially from a publisher as dodgy as Ubisoft.

[bilateralrope]

Now Ubisoft is trying to Blame AMD.

Ubisoft’s Assassins Creed Unity has had a buggy launch to say the least, what with all the texture popping, low frame rates and entity glitching problems.A Ubisoft Public Relations Manager has recently pinned the blame solely on AMD GPU and CPU configurations. The actual reason, however, lies inside the gritty details of bad optimization and porting.

Ubisoft PR blames AMD for ACU – Bad porting and optimization can explain the problem better

Here is a quote from the Ubisoft PR which can be found here:

We are aware that the graphics performance of Assassin’s Creed Unity on PC may be adversely affected by certain AMD CPU and GPU configurations. This should not affect the vast majority of PC players, but rest assured that AMD and Ubisoft are continuing to work together closely to resolve the issue, and will provide more information as soon as it is available.

It goes without saying that I had serious trouble believing that the entirety of the glitches present in Assassins Creed Unity are the cause of Catalyst Drivers (AMD). While modern drivers can be the cause of low frame rates in certain cases, they are not usually behind texture popping and entity glitches. One of the primary selling points of Assassins Creed Unity (from Ubisoft’s Marketing) was the fact that the game supported ‘thousands of NPCs on screen’. Well, they were right about that, but looks like they conveniently forgot to mention the performance hit that would ensue from using so many dynamic objects. We sent some emails and and found out what is really happening:

The game (in its current state) is issuing approximately 50,000 draw calls on the DirectX 11 API. Problem is, DX11 is only equipped to handle ~10,000 peak draw calls. What happens after that is a severe bottleneck with most draw calls culled or incorrectly rendered, resulting in texture/NPCs popping all over the place. On the other hand, consoles have to-the-metal access and almost non-existent API Overhead but significantly underpowered hardware which is not able to cope with the stress of the multitude of polygons. Simply put, its a very very bad port for the PC Platform and an unoptimized (some would even go as far as saying, unfinished) title on the consoles.

Games should be created with the target hardware in mind. And from what I have seen so far, high end rigs built with the likes of Titans (Nvidia) and R9 295Xs are glitching as well. So unless the Titan GPU was secretly made by AMD, I am not really sure what Ubisoft PR is on about. The game appears to be barely functional, something that would automatically merit low scores. The post-launch embargo on reviews seems to have foreshadowed the condition of the title. I really enjoyed Assassins Creed Black Flag, but to me, Ubisoft has been making bad calls after bad calls lately, and their PR is heading towards a colossal train wreck. Alienating PC users is one thing, but at this rate, pretty soon, even console users will be wary of their games. Still, Far Cry 4 has yet to be released, so maybe not all hope is lost yet (fingers crossed).

Why does Ubisoft not want to admit that their developers screwed up ?

[White Haven]

Given the frame rate issues on the console versions, their problems can't be blamed on ports.