Ubisoft on Watch Dogs mod: prettier but broken

If you've been playing Watch Dogs on your PC with a certain TheWorse mod installed, then you might want to heed Ubisoft's official take on the matter. While the game maker does admit that there are certain options lurking beneath the code that have been disabled for the PC version, they were disabled not to make the game less visually appealing but to make it actually playable and enjoyable.

Game modders are a fine and sometimes rather passionate lot. If there is something lacking or wrong in a game, you can expect that sooner or later, sometimes sooner, someone will step up with a mod or patch to make it right. Sometimes, of course, they can also go overboard in their zeal to get the most out of any game they play. That might be the case here with Watch Dogs which Ubisoft launched just last month. That, of course, depends on you how you see things, almost literally.

TheWorse mod practically re-enables hidden graphical files and options that were disabled but not taken out of the game before launch. The purpose of enabling those options was to bring better visuals to the game with greater depth of field, dynamic lightning, dynamic shadows, and so on. But apparently it comes as a two-edged sword. While some have reported noticeable improvements in graphics, they have also reported noticeable degradation in performance.

Ubisoft says that it is to be expected. Those settings were precisely disabled because they would aversely affect stability and performance and the overall experience of players. However, they do not deny that the mod does enhance visual fidelity, but qualifies it as something subjective.

"... the mod in question ... subjectively enhances the game's visual fidelity in certain situations but also can have various negative impacts. Those could range from performance issues ... to potentially making the game less enjoyable or even unstable."

Here's a gameplay video clip with the said mod applied.

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and some will most likely sticking to the mod and call Ubisoft's excuses as hogwash. But, should they run into issues with the mod, they at least know the publisher's official stance on the matter. If you are one of those playing Watch Dogs on a PC with an NVIDIA graphics card, do remember to update to the latest driver as that does have graphics boost for the game that is at least official and supported.

SOURCE: Ubisoft

VIA: Eurogamer