Ubisoft - How much longer can they get away with this 'downgrading'?

Pottsey said:
That's not true as we have been lied to as features like Ambient Occlusion are being sold as part of the game but UBI are not bothering to fix it and its never worked. This isn't about 2 years before release, this is about release features being broken a year after release. What we have been shown as part of the release game isn't working.
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No it is true. You choose to see it as being lied to, I (and other logical people) see it as features they're trying to get in but are unable to, for a number of reasons, either technical, political, third party, time, money, etc etc.

Ambient Occlusion is so important to you that you'll boycott a game for its exclusion, or get whipped up into a rage if you do buy it and it's missing? Seems very strange indeed.
 
Way I see it, companies show off products running on top hardware but even two years later majority of the gamers haven't got that performance. So in order to make people feel better that they can run games on high/ ultra they need to downgrade few things.
 
Except its literally every AAA publisher that does it. Its happened for years and will always happen. Judge the game when its released and not footage from years before hand and it instantly stops becoming a problem. No one needs to pre order as there will always be enough keys at launch so why is it such an issue? If someone keeps falling for it over and over again the problem is a bit more close to home is it not?
 
Undesirable said:
Games are supposed to generally change for the BETTER during development. Although in recent times this has apparently been shifted to mean "optimized" to adapt to low-powered consoles.

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/170479-ubisoft-massive-sweden-leak-on-division-downgrade/
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No surprise at all but there we have it, consoles are the "main" reason for downgrades.

Features/graphics are removed in order to keep the gap between PC and consoles small. This has been incredibly obvious over the last year or 2 with certain games barely looking any better on PC (see digital foundry comparison videos).

Yes it might not just be ubisoft, CPDR etc. that are the ones to blame here but still it doesn't change the fact that the games are being downgraded for the PC. Yes, the performance demands "might" be a concern as well as stability but once again, I point back to watch dogs mods that re-enabled a lot of the e3 features in the config files etc. and had little to no impact on performance nor the stability of the game (in fact the modders got the game to run and look better than what ubi did... :o)

But no doubt, this will all be called "fake news" or just a bunch of kids in a circle jerk making it up...

And as always, my point and question which seems to get ignored is, if other big developers/publishers can show accurate footage of what their game will look like before release then why can't ubi, CDPR etc.?

oldestgregg said:
Except its literally every AAA publisher that does it. Its happened for years and will always happen. Judge the game when its released and not footage from years before hand and it instantly stops becoming a problem. No one needs to pre order as there will always be enough keys at launch so why is it such an issue? If someone keeps falling for it over and over again the problem is a bit more close to home is it not?
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"Every" game developer/publisher does not do this. As I pointed out earlier, ones, which do not show misleading trailers:

- rockstar
- rocksteady
- bethesada
- blizzard
- DICE/EA

They might use in game cinematics for some trailers but they always mention or show this in the video somewhere and generally it is pretty obvious if a game trailer is in game play footage or a cinematic scene, where as with ubi, they show game play footage and don't mention anywhere in the video saying that it might change, not representative of the final game etc. (at least they didn't back when div etc. first e3 trailers were shown)

EDIT:

And this is what people want to see (taken from that article):

I do share this in the hope’s that my colleagues and publishers and a lot of people who make false promises and do demonstrations which wrongfully create too much hype that they cannot deliver on ultimately stop doing such things. I want to see the industry actually move forward and not be so full of itself by promising too much and delivering too little.
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Like I said before, show me what has improved and been added to the game each year, rather than showing me what has been removed and downgraded with each new trailer. If you don't have anything worth while showing then you wait until you do. Don't waste time and money on one small play test area purely for trailer purposes, use that time and money on the entire game.
 
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Ryan0r said:
No it is true. You choose to see it as being lied to, I (and other logical people) see it as features they're trying to get in but are unable to, for a number of reasons, either technical, political, third party, time, money, etc etc.

Ambient Occlusion is so important to you that you'll boycott a game for its exclusion, or get whipped up into a rage if you do buy it and it's missing? Seems very strange indeed.
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What are you on about? I never said anything about boycotting the game or got whipped into a rage. The only strange thing is your insistences on they never lied and didn’t downgrade the graphics when they clearly did. I just gave you a major graphics feature that is being advertised as being part of the game but is downgraded and doesn’t work.

The release game is being advertised and shown as having amazing advanced graphics features like Ambient Occlusion but when you go and buy the game you don’t get what is advertised. The advanced graphics in the game do not work. We are told “Without Ambient Occlusion scenes look flat and unrealistic, and objects appear as if they're floating.” So compared to what we should have scenes look flat and unrealistic hence downgraded graphics. The game is still worth playing without the advanced features but the simple fact is the game doesn't look as good as it should and suffers from downgrading.
 
neil_g said:
Bit of an odd stance.

For all their faults The Division, Watch Dogs 2 and For Honour have all shaped up to be very good games.

Your loss.
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It's a loss I will happily live with, even if all 3 games you mentioned were offered free, I would still say *** no!
 
Yup, if a game is good, I will happily buy it and the division is very good (ignoring the grind fest). Can't say that many of their other games have been good though, at least for me anyway, last one that was genuinely good and unique was far cry 3, 4 was a rehash in a different setting and primal was a rehash with a different setting.

Watch dogs was ok (once I fixed it with the community mods), watch dogs 2 is just bland imo, nice setting but meh to the rest of it.

For honour isn't my type of game but it doesn't look like a game, which will last very long...
 
Nemeses said:
It's a loss I will happily live with, even if all 3 games you mentioned were offered free, I would still say *** no!
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Do you realise some of those great games like The Division are not produced by UBI only sold by UBI. Why would you miss out on great fun games just because they are sold by UBI? That doesn't make any sense to me as that's like saying you wont buy or play a great game because its sold on Steam. UBI don't have anything to do with producing the game in question.
 
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Pottsey said:
Do you realise some of those great games like The Division are not produced by UBI only sold by UBI. Why would you miss out on great fun games just because they are sold by UBI? That doesn't make any sense to me as that's like saying you wont buy or play a great game because its sold on Steam. UBI don't have anything to do with producing the game in question.
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correct if I'm wrong, but to play those games you would have to download and use their platform, so no, they have used every chance they had with me.

llamadal said:
Why even bother trying to address that mentality?
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Er right :) So all the people who don't and won't play Ubisoft games have a problem, sad.
 
Pottsey said:
Do you realise some of those great games like The Division are not produced by UBI only sold by UBI. Why would you miss out on great fun games just because they are sold by UBI? That doesn't make any sense to me as that's like saying you wont buy or play a great game because its sold on Steam. UBI don't have anything to do with producing the game in question.
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The companies doing the development are all wholly-owned subsidiaries of Ubisoft; they're allowed a degree of freedom and autonomy but Ubisoft will have rules on what has to be in each game (towers to climb, icons to chase, etc :)) because they're funding the development and fronting all the marketing and publishing costs.

You're right though, it's bizarre to ignore any given game completely because Ubisoft have a bad name. Yeah they churn out a lot of crap, but they have some great games in their catalogue - Division, Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed: Black Flag among my favourites.
 
You said you wouldn't play them if offered for free, which is a ridiculous statement to make, I'm not going to get into a discussion uth you because it's pointless.

I've had a lot of fun playing the division, r6, ds2 and the Witcher, all of which suffered downgrades. It happens when it shouldn't but I'm not going to let that ruin my experience.

I take each case as it comes, watch release footage, user feedback and skim reviews.
 
llamadal said:
You said you wouldn't play them if offered for free, which is a ridiculous statement to make, I'm not going to get into a discussion uth you because it's pointless.

I've had a lot of fun playing the division, r6, ds2 and the Witcher, all of which suffered downgrades. It happens when it shouldn't but I'm not going to let that ruin my experience.

I take each case as it comes, watch release footage, user feedback and skim reviews.
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No it's not it's about companies taking the mickey until people make a stand and stick to it, yes at times I may very well lose out, like with the division, but I would rather people like me who stick to what they say than people who just swing in the wind.

Ubisoft have more than any other game developer including EA pushed their greed to boundaries that became unacceptable to me. I forget which game now, but at one time you could only install it 4 times without going through hoops to get a new key, that was for me the final straw.

It's funny how some people get all ansy when you say you don't like what they do, me I have no issue with anyone wants to do play Ubisoft games I just said I would not, without having a whine at those choose to play their games.

This is my final comment on this.
 
Nexus18 said:
Rockstar, rocksteady, blizzard etc. are perfectly capable of showing accurate footage of what the final game will be like months/years before release therefore
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Maybe Rockstar are, but they didn't for at least the first trailer for the PC version of GTAV:


The experience of the game visuals is markedly different to that.
 
Nemeses said:
No it's not it's about companies taking the mickey until people make a stand and stick to it, yes at times I may very well lose out, like with the division, but I would rather people like me who stick to what they say than people who just swing in the wind.

Ubisoft have more than any other game developer including EA pushed their greed to boundaries that became unacceptable to me. I forget which game now, but at one time you could only install it 4 times without going through hoops to get a new key, that was for me the final straw.

It's funny how some people get all ansy when you say you don't like what they do, me I have no issue with anyone wants to do play Ubisoft games I just said I would not, without having a whine at those choose to play their games.

This is my final comment on this.
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Thanks for expanding on your point further than the original bargepole comment :)

It is bit "multi national corporation in wanting to make cash shocker" though. I don't personally agree with amazon's business practices but sometimes they're cheaper than anyone else and I'm not going to cut my nose off to spite my face.

(not sure on the 4 installs comment though, need more info.. E. G. Same or differ systems etc)
 
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