Proving that Consoles are throttling Game Potential

Overheal · 16-06-2014 9:32pm #1

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=838538

Evidently these images https://imgur.com/a/QqpGf#0 show what Watch Dogs was developed to look like on the PC.

However, these weren't options to gamers in the full release of the game. They were since discovered in the game's code and mods have been unleashed on the web to unlock them. But this reveals something really stupid about the Games Industry as a whole. As some suggest these features were held back to reduce "platform disparity" that is that a PC (given the right amount of money) can far outperform a console, and threatened by a potential decline in console sales, and what Im sure also factored in piracy and all other manner of bull****, companies are actively putting leashes around developers not to go much farther than the performance that is capable on a console. It's a trend gamers started to notice over the last few years, we had our Crysis and our Metro 2033 and to this day you still hear the phrase "the next Crysis" ie. the next thing that is going to push video graphics farther ahead, but in the last few years that has slowed down, coinciding with developers discovering their maximum allowable returns from current generation console hardware.

This is posed to gamers in general: whether you play on a console or not, do you think it is unnecessary to hold another platform back for the sake of this idea of disparity? Graphics don't "make" great games, of course (I have 100 hours in FTL that can attest to that) but if the envelope can be pushed, and clearly has been pushed, is it necessary at all to hold it back?!

Magill · 16-06-2014 9:43pm

Very strange decision on their part. Everyone knows that a good PC is going to run rings around the new consoles, if they had just released the game like this I seriously doubt it would negatively effects sales on any of hte platforms.

Multiplatform games are always going to be bottlenecked by the consoles though. Just kinda funny that they're purposely downgrading the PC version.

Captain Chaos · 16-06-2014 9:51pm

Consoles are not throttling game potential on PC, lazy game developers are. Once upon a time PC games were miles ahead of console games. Remember when Call of Duty came out on PC and then the version that was released for consoles for what they could do at the time. Today with increasing PC piracy game developers are using consoles as the lowest common denominator for their main source of revenue.

Overheal · 16-06-2014 9:54pm

Captain Chaos wrote: »

Consoles are not throttling game potential on PC, lazy game developers are.

Reading the original post - does that look like lazy game developers? Because they had these features working.

Captain Chaos · 16-06-2014 9:59pm

Overheal wrote: »

Reading the original post - does that look like lazy game developers? Because they had these features working.

Yeah they did it but they never followed through with it to retail. There is no reason to hold it back just because of consoles unless MS and Sony threw Ubi millions to stop gamers running out and building high end gaming rigs.

16-06-2014 10:03pm

Captain Chaos wrote: »

Yeah they did it but they never followed through with it to retail. There is no reason to hold it back just because of consoles unless MS and Sony threw Ubi millions to stop gamers running out and building high end gaming rigs.

I don't think the developers in the main got much choice in the matter. I'm not industry insider but that's how I think things work.

CiDeRmAn · 16-06-2014 10:04pm

I would say it's the visual fidelity, as well as physics engines and everything else that goes into a modern, realistic game, that drives these overheads up and up.
The team sizes needed to produce assets for use in games is costing a whole lot of money, and this will eventually impact on profits, as the number of potential customers garnered by having better, well everything, reaches an inevitable limit.
Consoles provide a lot of revenue, and this gets ploughed into future development that surely benefits all games players.
Consoles also tap into a market that doesn't want to play games on PC, so count them out and all you get are fewer gamers playing fewer games that may look nicer but the revenue may not be sufficient to fund them.
Console gaming has also provided the platform for a lot of creative minds that PC gaming may not have nurtured, Team Ico, Shigsy Miyamoto, Yu Suzuki, Suda 51.
Games like Super Mario Galaxy 2, Killer 7, Ico and SotC, Sonic the Hedgehog, none of these may have seen the light of day if all developers did was chase the PC dragon.
Consoles provide a new way to play, compared to computers, and should be seen as to PC's as handhelds are to home consoles, in my opinion anyway.

super_furry · 16-06-2014 10:35pm

Gotta go where the money is.

Overheal · 16-06-2014 10:39pm

super_furry wrote: »

Gotta go where the money is.

Well thats the thing - it might not be, if they are manipulating market forces.

nesf · 16-06-2014 11:00pm

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Consoles provide a new way to play, compared to computers, and should be seen as to PC's as handhelds are to home consoles, in my opinion anyway.

How should they provide a new way to play? They've been around longer as a way to play computer games. The only thing older are arcade machines. The two systems co-existed for decades, the issues starting coming about when more and more games were being launched cross-platform (both across multiple consoles or consoles + PC) and development time wasn't increased to compensate for the complexity of developing for the different sets of hardware. It's not consoles throttling game potential or PC doing so but game developers being silly, e.g. Watchdogs was not in a state it should have been released on AMD GPUs on PC, but Watchdogs *had* to be launched across all three platforms, so where we may have seen a delay to implement fixes on the PC version if it was PC only we instead have it shoved out to meet the deadline. We saw the exact same thing happen to PS3 owners and Skyrim (PC had it's own issues with this particular launch that were mindboggling).

Not that single platform development guarantees games that aren't incredibly buggy on release anyway. The Creative Assemblies of the world will surely disappoint over and over. But we all lose when companies are trying to force out games with identical features without enough time being given to do the job properly. I *much* rather getting a working port a few months on than a botched port on release personally.

calex71 · 16-06-2014 11:25pm

Captain Chaos wrote: »

Yeah they did it but they never followed through with it to retail. There is no reason to hold it back just because of consoles unless MS and Sony threw Ubi millions to stop gamers running out and building high end gaming rigs.

I don't think that would ever happen to be fair, I have built 16 or 17 high end gaming pc's for pals at this stage over the years yet I still play 100% of my games on Xbox.

Hell I even remember having to take a saw to a pc case to make a gfx card fit lmao .

I have my reasons for doing this even though I should know better and many would call me crazy :pac:

wes · 16-06-2014 11:55pm

Wasn't the PC version of Watchdogs pretty unoptimized at launch, especially with AMD graphics card.

Also, the thing to consider, is that people with high end PC rigs are very much in the minority, sure just look at the steam pc stats that they release from time to time. Most people have modest rigs. Personally, I never went to crazy with my PC, always aiming for the mid-range, which has given me console beating performance, and hasn't cost me an arm or a leg either.

Having said that, I see no reason why UBI would deliberately hobble the PC version. They have 0 incentive. Sure if someone decided to dump consoles and get a PC, its still a sale for them. I think it far more likely that they knew there were optimizations problems, and thats why they dropped the features.

Also, one benefit of consoles, is that people with modest PC are more likely to be able to run the latest games, as developers have to get them working on far weaker consoles, so some of that stuff may find its way into the PC build. It also mean that I can keep my current rig, and play the latest games for far longer, while I wait for 4k TVs/Monitors and the graphic cards capable of playing games in 4K to come down in price, before going for an upgrade.

At the end of the day, the high PC player is a minority amongst even PC owners.

gizmo · 16-06-2014 11:59pm

Captain Chaos wrote: »

Yeah they did it but they never followed through with it to retail. There is no reason to hold it back just because of consoles unless MS and Sony threw Ubi millions to stop gamers running out and building high end gaming rigs.

Of course there's a reason, there's two in fact, optimisation and testing. From reading through the Guru3D thread there are reports of the changes severely impacting people's framerates, rendering SLi unusable in cases were it was previously fine, causing sporadic freezing and some of the effects being excessive to the point of unusable. Whether some of these adverse side-effects are mitigated in future releases from the modder remains to be seen but either way, it provides a strong indication that not all of these features were finished in the first place.

On the testing side of things they were already releasing the game on four different platforms so I'd imagine an effort was made to bring some of the versions more in line with each other to make this process easier.

Personally, I can forgive all of that, the game still looks pretty damn good. What I can't really forgive are the performance problems still plaguing the game due to the poor work on the PC version and the continued use of Gameworks which is harming the experience for those gamers who own AMD cards. I can only hope their Snowdrop engine isn't going in the same direction.

The idea that the platform holders are responsible for the above is crazy though. I mean, where does it end? Were MS and Sony content to pay off Ubisoft to downgrade the PC version but leave the performance differences between their own platforms in place? Or did MS not have the cash to secure 900p like Sony? Did they not have the cash to pay Ubisoft off to NOT have the PS4 version at 900p if their own one only ran at 792p?

As for the question posited in the OP, of course they are but, at the same time, it's over simplifying the situation. At the end of the day it comes down to costs and to insist a public company pump large amounts of resources into assets which will only be seen by a subset of the install base on your lowest selling platform is ridiculous.

marco_polo · 17-06-2014 12:10am

I'd think with Watchdogs its obvious they put the bulk of work in to get it up to the quality seen in earlier builds, I'd hazzard a guess that after all the delays they were just ordered to get it out the door on time in a "good enough" state. After all a delayed PC release would probably have hurt saled on that platform much more.

Captain Chaos · 17-06-2014 12:24am

marco_polo wrote: »

I'd think with Watchdogs its obvious they put the bulk of work in to get it up to the quality seen in earlier builds, I'd hazzard a guess that after all the delays they were just ordered to get it out the door on time in a "good enough" state. After all a delayed PC release would probably have hurt saled on that platform much more.

But all the files are on the disc and ready to be used, they just chose to lock it all away. It's not like they were under pressure to build and add all the lighting and particle effects and shaders, they were all in place ready to go.

marco_polo · 17-06-2014 12:31am

Captain Chaos wrote: »

But all the files are on the disc and ready to be used, they just chose to lock it all away. It's not like they were under pressure to build and add all the lighting and particle effects and shaders, they were all in place ready to go.

Oh I know but there would still be additional testing and optimization work to do (and there was plenty of that to still do on the released build:p) I mean I can't think of any other reason why all that extra time, money and effort would have gone into the game if the original intention was not to use it?

johnny_ultimate · 17-06-2014 12:33am

I think the only thing this discovery 'proves' is that the Watch_Dogs PC port has been a serious mess, and one that ran into serious practical and technical difficulties.

It would be nice to think PC could become a technological wonderland that unified games around the world and allowed developers to realise their wildest dreams without restrictions. But yeah... the imagined utopia is not equal to reality.

AAA gaming at the moment is reliant on consoles - no doubt whatsoever you'd see more developers and publishers targeting PC first and foremost if it wasn't the case. This is for many reasons, but mostly financial. Those crazy expensive retail copies of games are what fund these mega blockbusters, whereas many PC gamers refuse point blank to buy a game full price - they'll wait for a Steam Sale, or maybe buy it off a semi-dodgy Eastern European key site. Won't even mention piracy! PC gaming is so vast and so varied that it's incredibly lucrative for many types of games, from free to play to indie titles, but it's the big blockbusters that PC is a distant second in terms of supporting (although on the plus side they have a longer shelf life PC, where seasonal sales and the like will give them a second lease of life).

The fragmentation is both an amazing asset and significant liability for PC gaming. Sadly, it's a niche audience that has the hardware capable to run games at their best (and are willing and able to keep it that way), and it'll be a generous publisher willing to fund the resources to fully optimise a game for that small market - certainly one that is fit for market and not just a couple of high end machines. When you make a PC version of a game, you have to make compromised versions anyway to ensure a wide enough audience will get to play the thing, not just those with the most powerful machines. The AMD and Nvidia arguments going on at the moment are also a cause for concern - Watch_Dogs is a game whose performance is affected by your graphics card manufacturer of choice, which would be a fairly grim development if that turns into a trend!

And hey, sometimes a single, set hardware is a useful thing - many artists perform best under limitations, and being able to design a game and release it on a platform where everyone has the same specs or SKU is clearly an attractive proposition, practically speaking: everyone gets to play the game as the creator intended.

PC has countless advantages over consoles, and sure in a hypotethical world where consoles disappeared tomorrow I'm sure you'd see a near instant jump in the level of graphical fidelity in new games. But the various financial and practical eccentricities of PC gaming mean that's unlikely to be the case barring a radical change in mass market perception.

On the plus side, these AAA games aren't exactly the ones that are going to be truly pushing games' potential one way or the other: graphically, yes, but they're always going to be some of the most conservative, 'safe' titles out there anyway. Like in Hollywood, the irony is the productions with the funding to go a step beyond are the ones that are always going to be held back from doing so. Luckily there's people out there redefining the medium's true potential all the time with innovative design and gameplay, and there's no shortage of them on PC and consoles alike

CiDeRmAn · 17-06-2014 1:09am

I did all my gaming on a PC for a while, and a proper pain in the nethers it was too.
Mind you, it was in around 1996-ish, I had Tomb Raider, Quake and Mechwarrior 2 belting along on an early graphics card.
Yes, F1-97 looked a lot nicer on the PC, compared to the PS1 version, but it was a hell of a lot more fun on the console, plus I didn't waste a day or two mucking about with drivers, Direct X and why the audio card stopped working.
Good times!

Magill · 17-06-2014 1:25am

Cool story bro.. I remember having driver issues.. must be at least 10 years ago.

Kirby · 17-06-2014 2:22am

Magill wrote: »

Cool story bro.. I remember having driver issues.. must be at least 10 years ago.

I would have agreed with you up until recently. I built a new PC for a family member and the absolute pain in the balls the sound drivers gave me is criminal.

I thought things like that were in the past due to not having much issue regarding drivers in a while. Oh how wrong I was....

PC's can still be a pain. They are more complex and varied in their configurations....and therefore more can go wrong. There is a pleasant simplicity in a plug and play console.

ShadowHearth · 17-06-2014 9:34am

Holy ****, are we still on about drivers...

Well, if I need to press once every several weeks "yes, I want to update my drivers", then that's the price I am willing to pay to be able to play on pc.

I understand there might be issues on initial first time build, if some parts decide: "computer says no", but this is now a really rare thing to happen.
Funny enough when people got their brand new ps4 and those had issues too. It was a painful and anal way of troubleshooting and in the end most likely you needed to send out machine back to Sony.

I will take drivers issues over console bricking issues. And yes, both of those issues are very rare these days and get a lot more moaning then it deserves.

richymcdermott · 17-06-2014 11:34am

are we talking about a visual technical aspect or gameplay wise ?

Genghiz Cohen · 17-06-2014 12:17pm

ShadowHearth wrote: »

I will take drivers issues over console bricking issues. And yes, both of those issues are very rare these days and get a lot more moaning then it deserves.

My last few driver issues were "Failed to install", so I ignored it and it installed itself later.

Given the simply filthy number of games I have access to, it's a no brainer to put up with a minor bug every few months.

Genghiz Cohen · 17-06-2014 12:35pm

Far Cry 4 will be restricted to run the same on all platforms.

http://mrgamesofficial.com/far-cry-4-ps4-and-xbox-one-graphics-to-be-equivalent-with-pc-ultra-high/

Mickeroo · 17-06-2014 12:40pm

Maybe I like the lower frame rates :-/

Shiminay · 17-06-2014 12:59pm

There is one department in every AAA release company to blame and it's not Art (making overly ambitious assets that promise a lot but then have to be scaled back to meet technical limitations), it's not Testing (with Consoles we can all agree it's a much more straight forward process than PC, but they can't warp space-time to give themselves enough opportunity to test things fully) and it's not Tech (who have either written a difficult to work with engine and/or have been struggling to implement the ideas laid out by creative).

It's Marketing.

Marketing departments run AAA Publishers.

They set the launch date. They book all the advertising. Recent trends show that the money being spent on marketing is nothing short of madness and it could make life changing differences to every resident of a medium sized town. When you're wielding that kind of money then you get to have that much of a say in the game despite the fact that you have nothing to do with its creation, it's features, the platforms it runs on (unless of course you've signed an exclusivity deal - see EA vs Respawn for Titanfall) or what it's even about. You get to tell the Art department that you need exclusive stuff for GameStop pre-orders. you need to tell tech that they need to have the "Beta" ready for all pre-orders from Steam, etc.

When you have to pay out millions in advertising, you get locked into some pretty tight contracts and tighter timelines - the media blitz that accompanies the launch of a game is vital - first week sales will make up the biggest single chunk of a game's total sales over it's life (in most cases).

So if you're looking for a reason we have seen and continue to see broken software being released by the biggest companies on the block, it's Marketing's fault for making promises that they don't understand and that the rest of the company simply cannot deliver on in the timeframes necessary.

How does this tie back to PC vs Console? Console sales far outweigh the PC, focus is always going to be on that. When you're tight on time because of the release date Marketing's picked, you're going to spend that time on the source of your biggest returns. No developer or artist or musician or engine architect wants you to get a substandard product. They don't get any say in it though. The people who now run these companies are not gamers, they don't play games and they don't understand games or the people who play them. They see a product, not a piece of art (you may not consider games as art, but I think we do a disservice to the work that people with incredible creative talent do in the pursuit of making our entertainment medium of choice to think of them as anything less).

So the next time you meet someone from the marketing department of a AAA publisher, punch them in the face and tell them what you think of the devastation they have wrought upon this industry. Don't shout at a community manager on a forum, don't wish death upon the developers, don't tell the composer his music was sht, don't tell artists their work is bad.

o1s1n · 17-06-2014 1:01pm

richymcdermott wrote: »

are we talking about a visual technical aspect or gameplay wise ?

Apparently PC gamers aren't happy unless the visual quality of their games far exceeds that of consoles.

When everything is on par they can no longer consider themselves the 'Glorious PC Master Race' :pac:

In all seriousness though, it must be really frustrating to build a high end PC only to have things like this happen alright. I know I'd be fairly miffed myself if I'd built something in anticipation of Watchdogs only for things to go the way they did.

But then again, that's why I stopped comparing resolutions/textures etc many years ago and just focused on playing the games instead.

richymcdermott · 17-06-2014 1:11pm

o1s1n wrote: »

Apparently PC gamers aren't happy unless the visual quality of their games far exceeds that of consoles.

When everything is on par they can no longer consider themselves the 'Glorious PC Master Race' :pac:

In all seriousness though, it must be really frustrating to build a high end PC only to have things like this happen alright. I know I'd be fairly miffed myself if I'd built something in anticipation of Watchdogs only for things to go the way they did.

But then again, that's why I stopped comparing resolutions/textures etc many years ago and just focused on playing the games instead.

yeah it must be annoying for pc gamers to invest so much into there platform and not see the reward for it but I sort of draw the line towards the criticism its consoles fault because they are weaker.

the blame should be towards the publisher for not given enough time for the developer to achieve there ideal idea because they have a deadline or the fault of the publisher for it to be a marketing deploy to hype up the mainstream and showcase something that was never going to be possible in the first place.

I am not a pc gamer even owning a pc that can run things max I still prefer to play consoles but doesn't Ubisoft have a bad track record on Pc ?

People should learn not to buy into hype unless its a proven franchise. learn to maintain expectations till the game is in your hands while still main your interest.

NTMK · 17-06-2014 1:28pm

richymcdermott wrote: »

I am not a pc gamer even owning a pc that can run things max I still prefer to play consoles but doesn't Ubisoft have a bad track record on Pc ?

Ubisoft are absolute *****. worse than EA imo

Pixelbastardo · 17-06-2014 1:32pm

It might be worrying if it was done across the board, its only a few companys who do this though. EA, Ubi, Activision. But its still bullsht

Overheal · 17-06-2014 2:52pm

Pixelbastardo wrote: »

It might be worrying if it was done across the board, its only a few companys who do this though. EA, Ubi, Activision. But its still bullsht

Considering you just named the 3 companies that account for the largest portion of titles on the market...

Proving that Consoles are throttling Game Potential

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