I don’t know who’s buying this justification, though
Modders have found settings in Watch Dogs‘ files that can be enabled to make the game look better and, in some cases, even improve performance. What’s the deal with that?
“The dev team is completely dedicated to getting the most out of each platform, so the notion that we would actively downgrade quality is contrary to everything we’ve set out to achieve,” said Ubisoft. “We test and optimize our games for each platform on which they’re released, striving for the best possible quality. The PC version does indeed contain some old, unused render settings that were deactivated for a variety of reasons, including possible impacts on visual fidelity, stability, performance and overall gameplay quality.”
“Modders are usually creative and passionate players, and while we appreciate their enthusiasm, the mod in question (which uses those old settings) subjectively enhances the game’s visual fidelity in certain situations but also can have various negative impacts. Those could range from performance issues, to difficulty in reading the environment in order to appreciate the gameplay, to potentially making the game less enjoyable or even unstable.”
Which may be the case for some users. But there are enough reports coming in from folks who aren’t having issues that it’s curious Ubisoft didn’t include these settings in the options menu as is, or, you know, address those “various negative impacts” before doing so.
Watch Dogs PC Update [Watch Dogs]