Disappointed by Watch Dogs’s graphics ? See how it looks with unlocked, hidden settings. Awesome!
When you are interested in 3D and game graphics in general, you probably stumbled upon these excellent and extremely good-looking in-game demo of Watch Dogs back in 2012. And were freaked out, like everybody else. According to the publisher’s statements, the demo showed real in-game graphic, made on a high-end development machines, so no pre-rendering or fakery anywhere.
When Watch Dogs finally came out these days, a big “Whaaat?” went through the gaming scene: What the hell is this? Why does this look COMPLETELY different than in a 2 year old demo, even in the highest settings on high-end PCs ? See a video comparison here (note that the video has been made with the highest settings possible):
It get’s even weirder! Some clever people have found out that there are hidden settings inside config files of the game. And these settings unlock a lot of beauty in the game! So, when using a hack that edits these settings, Watch Dogs suddenly looks much much much better (make sure you watch these videos in 1080p):
How to get the mod
To get these effects, search for “the worse mod” on Google to get the mod, the install tutorials and latest news on compatibility with latest versions of the game itself.
Ubisoft installed mod-blocker with latest Watch Dogs updates (!)
No joke: The publisher of the game seriously released an update that breaks this (totally stable) mod. More info here.
So why this bullshit ?
Good question. Currently there’s a lot of rumours going on, some people say big console-makers paid a lot of money to “make Watch Dogs looks everywhere the same” [on PS3, PS4, XBox, PC] to channel sales and to prevent people from switching to PC or PS4 versions. An interesting perspective! However, it’s really really weird to remove excellent, awesome graphic features (that the whole world wants and that are a clear buying-argument) from a AAA-game. This simply makes no sense. In addition, all statements regarding this from Ubisoft are really really weird.
I’ll update this article when there’re news.