Playing A Game Watch Dogs PC

I'm sorry, it fucking runs better than before? Are you shitting me?

- Reddit user Asmius

For my part, I didn't notice a dramatic improvement in visual fidelity or performance; but the visible results, and the interweb's consensus, are undeniable: Watch Dogs on PC actually shipped with its early-tease graphical capabilities, requiring only a humble patch to enable them. (This makes the 14 GB digital download quite a bit easier to believe.)

As for why these effects ended up disabled, there are a number of fan theories, all boiling down to standard managerial bullshit -- the performance gain over stock settings makes it pretty clear, that dialing down the visuals was a near-last-minute decision. The sad part is that we'll never know the truth; any official response to the debacle will be from Ubisoft PR, any technical explanation will be pointlessly uninformed, and any policy explanation will be totally untrustworthy. But there are two ancillary aspects of this fiasco that I find interesting.

The first is that it paints a sharply-contrasting portrait to Rockstar, and Grand Theft Auto IV's PC version: although this, too, was much maligned in its day for poor performance, it scales to today's hardware fantastically well. Hell, it generally looks better than Watch Dogs on the same rig, despite being more than five years its senior. Of course, there's still time for Watch Dogs to have this level of quality officially patched in... but given Ubisoft's track record of anemic post-release support, this doesn't seem realistic.

The second is that, even with blindingly great graphics, Watch Dogs is still generally incomplete and hobbled. The driving still stinks. The side-missions are still dull. The emergent sandbox gameplay still isn't enticing. The soundtrack is still ... baffling.

Ubisoft's ability to continually disappoint me is equally as undeniable as their ability to frequently rope me in with tightly-crafted campaign gameplay (well, mostly). This shit-storm is really just the latest proof that, when it comes to Ubisoft games, expectations need to be tempered.