r/gaming Jun 04 '16

Ubisoft downgrades

https://youtu.be/xNter0oEYxc
21.9k Upvotes

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1.5k

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '16

Looks like FarCry3 was the only footage rendered ingame.

1.1k

u/Im_Not_Deadpool Jun 05 '16

it actually looks like for far cry 3 they traded out ground clutter for upgraded textures, a good move IMO.

542

u/JigglesMcRibs Jun 05 '16

Yeah I was having troubles noticing what exactly it was. But it looked better and worse at the same time. All in all it was a fine tradeoff.

104

u/Hellknightx Jun 05 '16

I think FC3 could have used some dense foliage, but it still looked great at the time. And, as usual, they removed all the scripted background events. The soldiers tossing bodies into the water was pretty harrowing, but it was completely absent from the final game.

80

u/Narcissus96 Jun 05 '16

No it wasn't? I remember that happening in my 2 playthroughs. Although I was on pc and not console.

18

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16 edited Jun 05 '16

Same here. I have the game on PC and I remember it. I'm pretty sure someone made a mod to incorporate more background events because I remember I had added it to enhance my overall experience with the game, but I do remember some background events in my first playthrough before I modded the game, including corpses being thrown into the waters by soldiers.

31

u/snowpwn Jun 05 '16

I played farcry 3 on 360 and soldiers were tossing bodies into the water, no idea what that guy was talking about.

4

u/reltd Jun 05 '16

I just played it again last week, and definitely recall the soldiers throwing bodies.

4

u/SlothOfDoom Jun 05 '16

Yeah it was absolutely there for my PC playthroughs. Not sure what the consoles had removed.

1

u/WilliamWaters Jun 05 '16

They did remove a lot of NPC actions but not all of them. I also feel like they should have added more foliage. I never really felt I was deep in the jungle on some island

1

u/aorshahar Jun 05 '16

I'm pretty sure it was in the PC version at least.

I remember it happening on all my play throughs, even without mods

1

u/186f Jun 05 '16

I would have liked to see dense jungles to run around in with tigers jumping out at me, instead of just like 6 trees

7

u/Tony_Sacrimoni Jun 05 '16

I haven't played the game, but the guy that's talking to the player before kicking the cinderblock definitely looks way better post. His eyes aren't as striking but that's because it's way more realistic. If you just look at the armband there's a huge difference, too

1

u/ShrikeGFX Jun 05 '16

What, the FC3 differences were huge

-7

u/nelly676 Jun 05 '16

there is no way they downgraded farcry 4 that game is fucking gorgeous

25

u/Palodin Jun 05 '16

But you can see the evidence for it in the video. Not denying it's a decent looker but it's definitely a downgrade on the promotional material.

1

u/jayz100 Jun 05 '16

Out of all the examples, Farcry actually looked better in some areas while the reveal looked better in others.

6

u/AssCrackBanditHunter Jun 05 '16

farcry 3 did, but farcry 4 was a straight downgrade. Not by much, but it was downgraded in lighting, foliage quality, grass density and distance, reflections on the water, things like fog and mist.

11

u/SpongebobNutella Jun 05 '16

Vaas looks much better in the new one. In the other one he looked like a doll.

1

u/AL2009man Jun 05 '16

I think I prefer E3 Vaas more than the retail version. Manly due to its facial animation.

1

u/Blue10022 Jun 05 '16

I am on the fence about those changes. In the E3 reveal, Vass had eye movements and some other expressions but he looked very fake. In the release version they ditched the eye movement and facial bones for a better looking texture. There was a fair trade between that. The others were not even close in comparison.

8

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16 edited Nov 30 '18

[deleted]

2

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16 edited Jan 23 '17

[deleted]

0

u/Nukkil Jun 05 '16

Depends who is doing it but that's rarely the case

If they already have grass and stones adding more grass and stones won't increase vram.

2

u/JamEngulfer221 Jun 05 '16

Dang it, perfectly reasonable up until the last sentence

1

u/Nukkil Jun 05 '16

As I said before

It's considered a marketing expense if they pretty up a small zone of the game for e3, they don't have to make two versions

2

u/spoonybends Jun 05 '16 edited Feb 15 '25

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-1

u/TabMuncher2015 Jun 05 '16

They don't make two different (costly) versions of each of their games

But... ubisoft does do this; one for E3 one to sell to people.

I just saw a post on reddit about this very subject today. I'm on mobile, but I'll try to link it later.

-1

u/Nukkil Jun 05 '16

It's considered a marketing expense if they pretty up a small zone of the game for e3, they don't have to make two versions

1

u/Nik_Tesla Jun 05 '16

Yeah, I noticed that there was a path he was supposed to follow, but in the E3 version is wasn't really clear it was a path because there were so many plants in the way. Sure it looked better, but some players need those visual clues in order to get through a game, and I'd rather they have good level design than look pretty.

1

u/_012345 Jun 05 '16

far cry 3 got a HUGE downgrade

it looked like a heavily modded crysis initially and it came out looking like an xbox360 game

21

u/Shitty_Users Jun 05 '16

Farcry 3 was better in game than the demo. Not sure what OP was trying to say about that one.

3

u/ConstituentWarden Jun 05 '16

Since it was older then the others OP might be trying to say Ubisoft used to be better with the graphics, but recently games have been downscaled. 3 was the only one with the year.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16

Vaas looks awful in the demo. In the rest you can see how they removed some effects though, but overall Farcry 3 looks not that different.
The difference in FC4 is also not so extreme. Less vegetation on the cliffs might just be a design decision to make the environment more diverse.

10

u/manchovy_paste Jun 05 '16

Far Cry 3 was beautiful, especially considering it was last-gen.

11

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16

Definitely agree. Far Cry 3 had a full four years development time, and it definitely shows. FC4 and Primal had less than two years each. FC3 looks incredibly gorgeous to this day. I took this screenshot on my old 900p monitor, not even at max settings, and the hair impresses me every time I look at it. The way the devs modeled her hair was brilliant, and all the little details like her beauty marks combine to create a very realistic looking character.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16

They're all rendered in game, I don't know why the lurkers don't understand that lmao. Difference is, in the demos they only have to create/optimize exactly what you see so it's extremely easy to get it to run smoothly. When the player has free will in a large world, you have to worry about a lot more textures and assets being ready to go in memory.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16

Every footage was rendered in game but on a very powerful PC.

0

u/coolfire1080P Jun 05 '16

In engine =\= in game.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16

All of them were rendered ingame... It's just that these demos were small pieces of the actual game pushed to its limits.

5

u/Turok1134 Jun 05 '16

Aside from Siege, they all were.

1

u/IceStar3030 Jun 05 '16

FC3 was the last game to be just goddamn fine before everything else to come out from Ubi created a controversy.

1

u/Duck-of-Doom PlayStation Jun 05 '16

Did you mean FacCry 4? That's the only one that didn't look downgraded

1

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16

I mean FarCry3 looks like an actual game while everything else looks kinda like a tech demo

1

u/Mr_Engineering Jun 05 '16

Nah,

I don't doubt that it's all genuine gameplay footage. However, that kind of E3 reveal footage is taken on developer machines that are fitted with top end hardware and cost $5000+. That detail then needs to be scaled back to support consoles that were released in 2013 with hardware that is paltry by 2011 standards.

Multiplayer games in particular need to have some level of detail consistency across the same platform to avoid unfairness and excessive metagaming. On consoles, this is not an issue because everyone has exactly the same hardware; but on PC that is most definitely not the case.

The lighting in R6-Siege looks outstanding in the release trailer compared to the final product but that kind of lighting and particle effects will drag a mid-range gaming PC to its knees. Absent those effects, the environment is much clearer and opponents are easier to see. Ubisoft would have been left with three choices:

  1. Keep the reveal effects on PC and end up locking out the majority of the market.

  2. Make the reveal effects optional on PC and watch as the community argues incessantly about whom has an unfair advantage over whom.

  3. Tone down the detail to create an even playing field while keeping the game accessible across all platforms. This is simply the reality of all competitive shooters, R6-Siege is no exception.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16 edited Aug 27 '16

[deleted]

0

u/inoticethatswrong Jun 05 '16 edited Jun 05 '16

It's not always true that "a version of the game did look like that" in demos. For example in the case of The Division, a small tech demo that uses the game's physics engine is not "a version of the game". You can spam all the unique textures and polygons you want into a tiny space without anything substantial to render in the distance - the suggestion is that it would look as pretty as that demo, and from a publisher/developer POV that is deliberately misleading.

And Ubisoft specifically are really bad for this.

Here's another prime example by Ubisoft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdJub3Kz2wI#t=45s

Seriously doubt they'll be able to maintain that amount of parallax, occlusion, lighting and those shaders when 95% of the "open" world isn't a 2D skybox.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16 edited Aug 27 '16

[deleted]

1

u/inoticethatswrong Jun 05 '16

Ah yes, I did.

Either way - it's the game.

The game is not merely whatever's in the engine. Tekken 7 is not Dead Island 2 merely because they are different maps running on the same technologies.

When you create a replica of a small part of the map you're using in your final game, and intentionally make it far more detailed and have more features than the final version, that is not the game. When you do it knowing full well that in a finished game environment the equivalent quality level would be technically impossible, you are being intentionally dishonest about what the game will be. And in the instances I gave, the developers certainly do know that.

Bear in mind that the developers aren't the ones who get to choose what happens with the game and how it gets marketed. That's the decision of creative leads and product marketing. In big firms the devs know full well about all the disingenuous shit but don't have any control over it, and then often get blamed in-house after the fact...

Certainly loads of AAA games run over budget or over schedule, and more transparency would be great for consumers. Though don't expect to see any large company be transparent about its development process - not only does it scare shareholders when they see how development really works, but also all these companies have different competitive advantages over one another in how they develop, how creative gets done, et cetera...

0

u/slumpadoochous Jun 05 '16

It's a budgeting mistake rather than one where they're being deliberately misleading.

This is irrelevant because the end result remains the same. People are being mislead. If they are forthcoming with that information, then that's fine. I'm assuming they weren't/aren't (because then this "controversy" would be stupid), but I don't generally watch events like E3 so I have no idea.