Ubisoft admits they hold back PC because of consoles...

"One good thing about The Division is we've always considered the PC as a separate platform," the developer went on to say. "We do have to keep it in check with the consoles; it would be kind of unfair to push it so far away from them. But it's been good having a dedicated PC build for this game."

Source

I'd hardly call that an official Ubisoft statement, but it makes sense. They want gamers to have a largely similar experience across all platforms... At least we get all the extra visual/performance bells and whistles.

Didn't they state this ages ago?

And to do that you're gimping PC? Great.

Weird, you mean they don't want to alienate the people who buy most of their games just to cater to whiny nerds who hate them? Color me shocked

Ubisoft should just focus on making sure their games run okay before we complain about the graphics

Then how about they stop developing games for the shitty Xbox One then? That accounted for only 11% of their revenues whereas PC accounted for 23%.

@Juub1990: how would that help anything when they'd still have to focus on the shitty ps4? The gap between pc and consoles is much bigger than the gap between the ps4/Xbox

@Juub1990: They're still a notable improvement over the console versions. We really don't know much beyond a fairly broad statement. This should literally be the example for making mountains out of molehills.

It's no surprise, they are not going to make two versions of the core game for different systems. Although they should attempt to make the graphics as good as they can do, perhaps just release the unoptimised versions of the graphics before the downgrade that the consoles get, I don;t think anyone expects a different version of the engine though.

That's nice. What is their stance on all of their open world games being exactly the same with mind-numbingly boring filler content and some vague spazzy 'story' thrown in somewhere?

Do they feel 'held back' by consoles in some way to explain how they have zero creativity or innovation in absolutely all of their games?

Generally if you want your console version to look good, you can't just make an uber PC version and scale back. The art direction needs to be done in such a way that lower fidelity looks good.

Look at the Witcher 3 on the consoles. There's a lot of noticeable flaws in the graphics. Witcher 3 was a PC game (from an art and tech side) that was scaled back considerably on the consoles. It still looks "good" but it's much more inconsistent than it could be if they would have tamed the PC version and distributed the lower fidelity better.

It makes sense. Building for top-end PCs then scaling back is going to really butcher the console versions of the game, especially considering the gap between the consoles and high end PCs.

It's really not that big of a deal. The Division on the PC is still one of the best looking games ever made despite the console target. On the consoles the game looks really good too. They did a very good job overall.

Best response EVAR. "PC Gamers" are such cry babies. They cry when their system can't handle a game. They cry when their game looks the same as consoles. They cry when their game is running at 59.99999 FPS. Poor "PC Gamers".

Nice excuse from them but it sounds like bullshit to cover up for their lies and downgrades.

You know, we'd be more forgiving if they didn't show us an Uber PC build with the promise that the final game will look like this..... *Cough Watchdogs cough*

You can make Watch_Dogs look about 95% the way they showed it off with those configuration files, so that game didn't get downgraded as much as it just had things disabled.

Still, the way they show off games and the state they release in graphically is pretty upsetting.

That's why PC gamers should boycott their games

Its Ubi, use a high end PC to show off games at Ultra settings...only to gimp it to medium on release for PC...because of console parity. :P

That's kinda the point, why disabled it on PC?...why do PC gamers have to go and edit config themselves? :P

Oh they made up some bullshit like it was just for presentation and it could be damaging to the gameplay experience so they disabled those things lol...

@nyadc: lol...wow that's just bad. :P

But they already did make a Uber PC version on 2013 so we've seen how it could have looked like. In fact, it seems that was exactly what they did, make an Uber PC version and then scaled back, even for the PC....because parity. And people don't really like that...because well, the 2013 looked DAMN GOOD.

Pretty damn sure most developers do this. I know this forum likes to hate on Ubisoft, but come on.

You saw a demo level. One little part of the game. One little part of the game built to run well on one piece of hardware. That's it.

They didn't have the entire game built to "scale back" at that time. As they playtested it internally and starting fleshing out the content they made changes accordingly. The game in its current state isn't exactly easy to run on a PC. Trying to run that 2013 demo was probably not going to happen for the vast majority of PCs on the market and doing as downscale of that level of fidelity on the consoles would have probably looked terrible.

Well said. Consoles make them the most money on every single game.

Thats probably the case but they do know its going to upset quite a lot of people right? Apparently UBI did this with all of their games and it just reeks of dishonesty and simply treating your potential customers like idiots by misleading and false advertising. Thats not right, that shouldnt be the case. Not everyone knows how game development works, they don't have to.

Of course the onus is still on the consumer to know what they are buying but people should also be able to call them out for it.

Ok before anyone thinks I'm a gfx whore, I'm not, I'm still using a 7970 thats 4 yrs old (altho i'm thinking of an upgrade soon-ish) and my current reasons for the being on the fence are more on the gameplay side of things (it looks a bit boring tbh and uninspired) but the thread is about the gfx so....

Duh.

Lots of developers and publishers do, because if you want the game to sell on other systems then you can't have such stark disparities that people don't bother with the lesser ports. If they admit it, good for them, but it's the truth and they're not the only ones that do it.

You'd be lying to yourself if you think many other prominent and celebrated developers/publishers didn't do this. I think developers are okay with games on PC just outperforming consoles in framerate, resolution, effects, but not to the point there's such a different they don't seem like the same game at all, not to where gamers resent the console port efforts.

Ubisoft's problem is they show the game before it's final build, people's expectations are greater and they'll know on final version if the game was held back. They instead should focus on hyping a game with realistic footage of the game. Watch Dogs everybody thinks about, probably Rainbow Six Siege is another that was a lot different from its reveal and the final build.

Yes. They've been doing this since the 80's. They'd show 32-color screenshots from the Amiga which only a fraction of gamers had. Most PC gamers still had 4-color CGA. IBM and Tandy owners may have low-res 16-color graphics which were still pixelated, regardless.

So people would be alienated simply because another platform's version looks and plays better? Shocker, it's as if you are openly admitting that PC is the superior platform, and needs to be kept in check in order to allow the console platforms to survive!

Well I don't care. I am at a point with graphics that I know what the graphics artist is trying to make something look like. People can be differentiated from shadows, cars look cool and have dents, rust or shiney coats, an M4 actually looks like what I had slung to my kit. I am not saying I don't get impressed when I see the advances in the tech but I don't sit and crave it to the point that something like this gives me negative feelings. That seems like such an unhealthy obsession with wanting rather than being at peace with where things are.

In other words, PC gets lazy ports. Nothing new.

Yeah they did.

And ubisoft is not the only one doing this... All the big publishers are. In fact Activision and Warner Bros actively make their PC versions worse :/

I would not care if a game looked/performed better. As a console gamer I don't care about pc games as I don't own the platform yet. If games from pc come to console that interest me I will buy them.

If I want a pc experience I'll get a pc which I plan to in the near future. I despise parity holding a game back to cator to a lower end platform but at the same time I understand devs need to reach a wide audience not just high end pcs to get as many sales as they can.

Sounds like Ubi is making excuses to cover there lack of creativity.

@Pedro: "Best response EVAR. "PC Gamers" are such cry babies. They cry when their system can't handle a game. They cry when their game looks the same as consoles. They cry when their game is running at 59.99999 FPS. Poor "PC Gamers"."

Aren't PC games usually cheaper than the console version?

And this is news how? Ubisoft admited to hold back the ps4 version of acu to avoid arguments vs the xbox one imagine pc which is way more ahead. Hahahah is pathetic and a insult to PC gamers that spend top dollars on those GPU to have a developer hold back a game because of how big the gap will be between consoles and pc.

@lundy86_4: @mems_1224:

I would be freaking furious if i spend 3k for a super PC only to know that developers on purpose held back a game to not hurt the fealings of certain groupd of people than own an inferior product.

Didn't like when ubi held back the ps4 version to 900p to avoid arguments and i dont agree with this now is like getting a 360 last gen and only being able to get wii graphics because developers would not want to hurt the wii userbase feallings.

Would any of you 2 like if developer would have only push the 360 and ps3 to wii level of graphics or those graphics but with just higher resolution.

No, Ubisoft held back AC:U on PS4 because of their deal with Microsoft.

Another day....another whine. Nothing new about this. Not the only dev that does it. And FYI not all PC gamers have high end systems so they have to move the goal posts down anyway.

@tormentos: I spent two and a half thousand on mine, and i'm not all that bothered. This game isn't simply a case of slightly better looking textures and AA/AF/Resolution... As with plenty of multiplats. There are a plethora of advanced graphics options. There are a number of out-and-out bad ports, but not that many.

PC Gamers when;

When the game is targeting console hardware - "Consoles holding back gaming as usual. The game could have looked tons better but now it got downgrade to please those peasants."

When a game takes advantage of the PC but they try to run it on a mid-end machine- "Oh this some unoptimized crap. Don't the developers know how to do anything. Lazy devs. Boycotting this game."

Lol who runs a game on a mid-end machine and not a high-end and expects it to run great? The people who complain about bad optimization usually have high-end machines not mid-end.

That's patently false. If a game melts my soon to be GTX 980's SLI, it better look fantastic. If it looks decent it'll be unoptimized to me.

Completely with you there champ.

you had an M4? Jammy sod, we could only dream of getting hold of one of those when i was in the British Army.

It's a bit like this situation.

British Army (consoles) vs US army (PC) lol

Well yeah - the console players fund the pirated PC games. Far Cry 4, for example.

U goddamn right , Piracy is the real problem here though The PC is the second strongest platform for Ubisoft game sales

Lol. It's "unfair" for the consoles if they make their PC versions better. And it's not unfair to force people with more expensive and better hardware to play with shitty console graphics? Fucking asshats. Yeah, keep making your games worse than they could be. We wouldn't want the console kids feel they've been treated unfairly when they see that better hardware than theirs is capable of more.

I'm not targeting piracy, I'm targeting the belief that consoles 'hold back' anything (OP) - they don't, they pay their way. PCs disproportionately do NOT pay their way. If they did, they ought to be on top of that list, not merely second. Why would the publisher cater to the second group over the first?

When you find the XBOX thread complaining about the Ubisoft PC releases, you can ask that question

why PC is not on top ? ....lmao .....you srsly expect to see PC players on top after Ubisoft screwed them again with a half-assed port called AC Unity , even the 6.5 GB patch hardly fixed it's frame drops . yet, despite all these , the game sold more than 200K on steam....well that's what I call disproportionate