Watch Dogs- GameGPU Preview
| BASIC INFORMATION ON THE GAME |
Release date : May 27, 2014
Genre : Action-adventure, Action- Stealth, Open world
Developer : Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft Reflections
Publisher : Ubisoft
You play as Aiden Pearce, a brilliant hacker with a criminal past that led to a violent family tragedy. On the way to justice, the main character can hack into any system or device around him. Aiden will have access to the ubiquitous security cameras, download personal information to find a target, control of traffic lights and public transport to stop the enemy, manipulation of public utilities and police networks will greatly simplify the passage of the task.
| GRAPHIC COMPONENT |
With the release of a new trailer for Watch Dogs, Ubisoft has come under fire for degrading the visual quality of their new action adventure. Ubisoft categorically denies attacks by players on the quality of the graphics of the final show of the Watch Dogs action. Indeed, if we compare the screenshots from the presentation video presented at E3 in 2012 and the latest trailer, we can see that the quality of the effects has really fallen. Ubisoft PR manager Tessa Wilin responded that "this is impossible": - "Guys, I saw the game, it looks amazing. It's a real nextgen, I'm sure."
But not everything is as bad as it might seem at first glance, the character models, or rather their faces, practically do not differ from those previously demonstrated.
Unfortunately, the video does not show many elements of physics that were very clearly demonstrated at E3, for example, how the wind shakes the leaves on the trees. The environments in general look more realistic in early cutscenes.
The quality of the explosions has also been seriously degraded, especially visually, physically you can still see a lot of debris that scatters after the explosion, but the surrounding objects do not respond to the explosion as well as it was presented at E3. In the new trailer, the explosions feel less bright and less impressive.
The latest trailer lacks anamorphic highlights. Perhaps Ubisoft completely removed them from the game, whether it will be possible to enable them in the settings is not known.
Gamespot recently streamed the PS4 version of Watch Dogs. Below is a comparison between the current version and the 2012 build. Due to the different weather and times of day shown in the trailers, it's not possible to accurately gauge the lighting, but the final build has identical reflections to the original.
Now for what's new in Watch Dogs, firstly Ubisoft has added some new smoke effects to the game, which are undoubtedly much better than previously demonstrated.
The filter that automatically turned on during shooting and affected the general lighting has been replaced with a simplified one.
It's worth noting that the latest story trailer showed off a version for the next generation of consoles (at least that's what Sony claimed on their official Twitter account). Thus, the picture shown in the trailer is what you will see when you buy Watch Dogs for PlayStation 4, Xbox One or PC. Also, it became known about the technical characteristics of the game on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One: 1080p/30fps and 960p/30 fps, respectively. The PC version will run at resolutions up to 4K and optional fps.
| Supported OS and graphics API |
Watch Dogs will run Windows Vista (SP2), Windows 7 (SP1), or Windows 8 all systems are 64-bit. Other operating systems are currently not confirmed to be supported by this game.
The priority and main graphics API for Watch Dogs will be DirectX 11. The game will work through the Uplay digital game sales service.
| Game engine |
After the presentation at E3 by the French publisher of one of their most ambitious projects, Watch Dogs, it was believed that the game was being developed on the old, but modified engine - Anvil Engine (Assasin's Creed). On February 24, 2013, the game's technical director tweeted that the game was being developed on a completely new engine, Disrupt, specially developed for the Ubisoft Montreal division. According to the developers, none of the technologies available at that time (CryEngine or Unreal Engine) met the requirements and was not suitable for creating open-world games.
The main feature of the Disrupt Engine is dynamism. Many real phenomena have been recreated in the city. How people drive cars, the behavior of water, wind, electricity. Everything reacts to everything, interacts with each other and you get branching reactions.
Take for example the rain, when the sky darkens, the townspeople take out their umbrellas. Lights are reflected from a wet surface. You can see how the wind changes the direction of the rain, blows away debris and leaves. Clothing is also affected, as Aiden puts his hands in his pockets or a gust of wind will force a passer-by to tighten his jacket. These are not big, but important details. Heavy traffic or an accident will make the townspeople nervous, horn or even leave their cars to find out what's wrong. Bystanders may call an ambulance.
Such capabilities of the engine, of course, affect the attractiveness of the city and immersion in its atmosphere. And to jump into the flow of events and look at the consequences will be interesting for the gameplay. And this is another feature of the engine - your influence on the world. How people around you treat you depends only on your actions. Moreover, according to animation director Colin Graham (Colin Graham), the reputation of the character will be somewhat more complicated than just “good-evil”. Simply put, if you demonstrate weapons on the streets of the city, open fire and arrange "mayhem", people will increasingly recognize you and call the police. As a result, you can generally become a famous person whose face does not disappear from the news releases. At the same time, stealthily killing an ordinary NPC will not add “+1 to the renegade” to you.
And saving an innocent victim will not bring people's love if before that you swept through the city center with a machine gun at the ready. Switching to multiplayer will have absolutely no effect on the world around you. According to the developers, the presence of each player in the multiplayer will be invisible. You can only intentionally connect to another player's "world" in order to hunt them down. But until a certain point you will not know if someone is watching you. From here it becomes clear that in one “world” there can be only two real players - “hunter” and “victim”. The one you are hunting will no longer be present in the world of the one who is hunting you.
Plus, the Watch Dogs engine is adaptable across multiple platforms and generations. Of course, this does not mean that the picture on old consoles will be the same quality as on new ones. We have already talked about the Disrupt Engine settings for different generations of consoles earlier. Also, there are already quite a few gameplay demos, so you can see how many moments look in the game.
It is also worth considering that Ubisoft works closely with NVIDIA in developing its game. First of all, we are talking about support for 4K resolutions, high quality textures, TXAA anti-aliasing and other benefits.
| Gameplay video |
Below we publish directly the video of the gameplay itself from the official Watch Dogs website:
| Estimated system requirements |
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SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR GAMEGPU "Watch Dogs"
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Based on the above material, some conclusions can be drawn. The game will apparently be very demanding on video memory resources, and it is even possible that developers can add a check for the availability of system RAM to the game, and let's say if you have not 6, but 4 Gigabytes, or even 5, then the game may refuse to start.
Since we should not forget that the Disrupt game engine was developed from scratch specifically for Watch Dogs, then it is quite possible that the game should have very good optimization for multithreading. Therefore, for the full disclosure of the gaming processor potential, the game will most likely need 8 or more cores.
Well, if you think about the graphics subsystem that will be needed for Watch Dogs, then in our opinion, video cards starting from the level of NVidia GTX 770 or AMD Radeon HD 7970GE will be able to provide sufficient performance. Optimal performance with all the maximum settings activated can be expected from the NVidia GTX 780 Ti or AMD Radeon R9 290X.