Tweet
At E3 2012, Watch Dogs kickstarted the next generation of gaming long before the PS4 or Xbox One had even been announced, joining Star Wars 1313 as one of the defining moments of the show. A short gameplay walkthrough demonstrated a highly detailed world with a slew of impressive visual effects, animation and physics work that added an extra level of realism not possible on current-gen console platforms.Similar to many multi-platform titles targeting next-gen hardware, Watch Dogs was initially demoed using high-end PCs, rumoured to be using Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 graphics cards, which stood in for the closed-box capabilities of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Given the raw power in these PC-based set-ups is much greater than either of the next-gen systems, there is some concern that what people were seeing might not have been representative of the final product, with potentially higher frame-rates and higher grade visuals being the result.
These fears were seemingly confirmed when Watch Dogs was shown running on PS4 hardware for the first time at Sony's E3 press conference earlier this year. At first glance, the game appeared to lack some of the sheen of the PC code revealed a year earlier, and didn't seem to match the version seen at the PlayStation Meeting event in February either. Clearly at this point in time it's too early to tell if the technological gap between the two versions of the game will carry through to the final release of the game - months of development remain and presumably the Ubisoft teams will be optimising right up to the last minute, not to mention moving onto newer versions of the PlayStation 4 SDK - but it was a concern nonetheless.
Read more…
More...