A developer from Ubisoft Massive anonymously says that the E3 2014 presentation of Tom Clancy’s The Division was running on the PC and also asserts that a downgrading practice has been a usual marketing scheme for the Ubisoft company.
The anonymous developers state that as far as The Division is concerned, there are plenty downgraded changes made to the game already. Whatifgaming reported on this last Friday.
“Right now we already took out quite a lot of screen space reflections from the game and are working on asset management the best we can given consoles have that great unified memory. Naturally we will also be using online servers and have to produce a synchronization that higher graphics add to the latency so it had to be turned down,” the developer said.
“To me it still looks good, but not as good as the original reveal.”
While the site urges that readers take this information with a light heart, the e-mails that WhatIfGaming received from the developer also indicate that this seemingly underhanded strategy to wow consumers with high-end presentation only to downgrade that visual elegance later on retail versions has been happening for quite a long time. Games like Far Cry 3 and Dark Souls II have been given this sort of treatment.
They also said that Ubisoft often uses the issue of stability as an excuse, so to dodge the bullet of being accused of this practice. In reality, these changes were more than just a few switch-ups here and there.
“[Ubisoft] will not admit that they practice this or actively downgrade a game. It is much easier to say they removed things for stability which is often a lie as you can tell by the post-issues which are expected in any production we do,” the developer said.
“If we as developers published that information in very real terms for the consumer such as ‘Replaced particle fog simulation with 2d layer simulation in 3d space, removed particles from all explosions, lowered explosion volume multiplier by 20x, removed X # of trees and civilians, etc.’ we would be out of a lot of sales and probably it would actually require too much time to deliver on the current hype that a lot of downgraded games see which look incredible with a vertical slice. It definitely is not just stability but marketing politics plays into this a lot as well.”
The site claims to have confirmed that these developers were actual people working with the Ubisoft company. So if any of this is true, this could pose a major problem in terms of how well they will be received by gamers going forward and whether or not these practices should actually be viewed with a bigger magnifying glass.
This would also raise a question about their product management decisions, piggybacking on the Assassins Creed: Unity controversy concerning the supposed problem of being able to put females in the game according to Ubisoft’s technical director, James Therion. While the company has since issued an official statement saying that they “look forward to introducing some of the strong female characters in Assassin’s Creed: Unity,” who is to say that Ubisoft isn’t dodging the bullet here, either?
The Game Fanatics hope to get the bottom of this soon, but right now we’re still pretty concerned about Ubisoft and their business practices as of late.
