News of hidden graphics files in the PC release of Watch Dogs rippled all over the gaming-centric internet yesterday. This data unlocks better graphics for the Windows version of the hit multiplatform game and thousands of players who own that version of the game installed it to see if there was any drastic change. Let’s take a look at what they documented.
As of this writing, more than 1,000 videos featuring the patch by modder TheWorse have been uploaded to YouTube. Some of these have other add-ons like SweetFX running on top of the patch-enabled files; others just feature the effects wrought by the files themselves. The video below from popular YouTube commentator TotalBiscuit features the game running solely on TheWorse mod. While the consensus is that Watch Dogs looks demonstrably better after applying TheWorse’s work, some users say that the game’s performance takes a hit as a result.
People are calling it the ‘E3 2012 mod’ because the results looks like that first reveal of Watch Dogs from two years ago. Furthermore, users that have dug into the code have noted that some of these files are tagged E3.
Ubisoft hasn’t issued any sort of comment on the matter, except for a tweet from a Belgian PR representative:
@Beeelow i recall replying saying that the game was not downgraded, i still stick to that yes.
— Tessa Vilyn (@UbiTessa) June 16, 2014
Another poster on the Guru3D forums who goes by the handle kadzait24 claims that theWorse is taking credit for work that he had done. However, it’s the latter modder’s release that has spread. For his part, TheWorse says he’s going to continue working on the mod as people point out issues. Kotaku will update this story as it develops.
Comments
14 responses to “See Watch Dogs’ Hidden Graphics Options In Action”
Now we wait for the Dark Souls 2 graphics mod…
There’s already one, I forget the name though, just search it.
Tried this out last night. Before I was getting decent FPS and response from just the high settings but I bumped it up to Ultra after the install and and it’s running fine (on a 7970 BTW).
Give it a go if you’ve got this on PC. I don’t feel it’s a major difference but it certainly is better looking.
Aww, I wish all this had come out before I finished playing the game :\.
I finally got the NAT connection issues resolved (thanks to other users on the Ubisoft tech forums, their support and community team are absolutely useless) but I have lost the motivation to play it.
The invasion hacking mp is just line of sight wars, the 4v4 vs mode is the only mode with any longevity and even that’s pretty lacking.
CToS mobile app and mp game mode are probably the only things that have any longevity and I can’t really be arsed firing up the game just to play a couple rounds of that, such a shame.
Was really hoping we’d get co-op vigilante stuff in free roam, such much work on single player (which most people will finish with in a week) and mobile modes that feel like they really needed a beta test to discover all the cheap workarounds people would figure out aka pillar humping.
Also no way to replay the story missions without creating a new game is ridiculous, so I have to wipe all my open world progress to play through the story missions again? WTF were they thinking…
How short is this game??
I put about 50 hours into it myself. If you didn’t do any of the side content at all you could probably fly through the story in 10-12 hours.
Oh the advantages of not riding the hype train…
Keen to try this, but I’ll have to wait for Ubisoft to patch the stuttering issue.
Same
Great, now we get to see Aiden Pearce act like an a**hole to everybody in even better graphics
Looks good but I’m still not sold on the whole Depth of Field effect and any game. DOF seems to assume that you are always focused on the foreground, in real life we all adjust our focal length dependent on what we are looking at. When I have tried to increase DOF in games like Dark Souls 2 I get annoyed when I cant focus on a distant landmark that I might be heading to. Not sure how this might be addressed; perhaps the mouse wheel could control the DOF effect?
Eye tracking to get *approximately* which part of the scene the player is looking at then get the depth at that point and use that.
Perhaps they didn’t “downgrade” it, but they certainly didn’t make the PC version as good as it easily could have been. Whether that’s just laziness or a desire to reduce the difference between PC and Console, well, we’ll probably never know. But the truth of the matter is that they could have made the PC version look much better with probably minimal effort, and they chose not to. Which is a bit bizarre. Personally, I don’t think they did this to please the console makers because theh people who would buy it on Console would have always bought it on console, regardless of what the PC version looked liked. It’s not like they came out ahead of time and said “THE PC PORT WILL BE MIDDLING AT BEST! SO BUY IT ON A CONSOLE!”. They didn’t do that – which leads me to suspect that in reality, it was sheer “We-can’t-give-a-damn” on Ubisoft’s part. Which is okay – it’s their game, they can put as much effort into it as they like. And I am free not to buy the game since I was hoping for a great PC version and they don’t have one.
Still getting unplayable stuttering.