Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're talking about watchdogs this is the official review I've already spoken about the PC performance on multiple video cards we've talked about mouth smoothing we've talked about crash fixes we've talked about PC optimization and all these things happened because watchdogs in short has been somewhat of a disaster in terms of its release on the PC as a platform so that gives you a bit of a spoiler as to what I think in this review the review will contain discussion on a Hardware optimization it will go into bugs I've experienced me doing Ubisoft's QA job for them talking about fundamental design issues unintuitive input dooming the game to user abandonment and then the conclusion so quite a bit of stuff to go over here today and it's all stemming from one single factor and that is that this game has been hyped to oblivion and back and it is it's completely unable to achieve any of the expectations set by that hype so that is a fault of the industry and of the consumers but it's not a not necessarily something we'll dive into too deeply here in this review so that's a lot of topics let's start with the hardware since that is the easiest to discuss putting it short watchdogs is the most horribly optimised PC game I have ever had the misfortune of playing in recent years titanfall was pretty damn bad watchdogs is entirely new levels of bad it was I achieved all of 53 FPS on average when using a 780ti in combination with the 4770k and lots and lots of RAM that was at a very high speed and the performance is detrimental for several reasons first of all Ubisoft has failed to optimize their game for computer hardware in general I'm sure Ronnie friends have more acceptable on consoles but on PC it is totally unacceptable to have 53 FPS with almost maxed settings on a 780ti which is a $720 video card that has 2880 cords it's got 5 teraflops of rock compute power a 3 gigabyte frame buffer I mean the thin has a memory bandwidth of 336 gigabytes per second so we know we're capable of filling that frame buffer if necessary and yet the game performs horribly on it so why is that well after some research it looks like a lot of it is it's really it's twofold one part is anti-aliasing for some reason anti-aliasing is a massive hit to performance and watchdogs more so than I've seen in every any other game I've ever been smart and that's an issue on Ubisoft part failing to optimize it and probably build anti-aliasing properly into the game and this is evidenced by the fact that jumping between MSA a 4x and TSM a produces almost a 2x FPS increase whereas dropping from ultra settings to medium is about a 10 FPS increase on the 780 Ti so the only reason we see a big increase on the 780ti when changing settings is when changing anti-aliasing further when testing with a 7870 or 270 X or a similar architecture card those are that's basically the same video card with the our series branding I get frame freezes these are actual freezes several seconds long we got stuttering we got frame drops I got frame drops and mic stuttering that was quite severe when using SLI and trying to use crossfire was actually I heard the advisable to disable both of those use a single GPU because it was so bad and that's kind of frustrating as a PC user so this all happens because of optimization and it happens regardless of your video card drivers in fact updating 2:00 a.m. these new drivers produces about a 10% FPS improvement and you have to update because if you don't you're gonna get a blue screen of death when playing the game on 14.4 with certain AMD cards so it's a bit of a mess I thought the CPU might be the throttle but changing from a 35 70 K to a 4770k saw almost no improvement in performance that was noteworthy it was about half a frame per second which is within margin of error and the game overall is is pretty underwhelming in terms of graphics it looks great don't get me wrong but it is not this generations crisis it is not something that pushes the 780ti to its limits so we've got some kind of issue in the software that's bottleneck in the hardware not the other way around but moving on from the hardware stuff because I know a lot of you aren't necessarily as interested in that we have plenty of other wonderful experiences with watchdogs that I've gone through in the last week and a lot of it calls back to my experience working as a test engineer at at Dell and at other companies doing QA so the reason I mentioned this is because I've done Ubisoft a huge favor and have classified several issues as severity one or severity two in my full article that's linked in the description below and just kind of skimming over some of these issues that ruin the game experience entirely as a gamer we had I experienced three different scenarios when CT DS crash to desktop would happen regularly one was with you play online mode simply being enabled so if you wanted to use you play which I that makes you a rarity in and of itself if you actually wanted to use you play and you had online mode enabled it would occasionally and sporadically crash the desktop another issue it stemmed from actually was just completely random I was a memory link week potentially where the game would just crash after some time of plane another issue was a sporadic audio loop that caused to crash the desktop I was unsure of which audio file triggered this I also got blue screens of death which is 100% inexcusable in software it's not in the slightest bit allowed in terms of when I play a game if I get a blue screen of death I am instantly condemning that game for all manner of reasons and that's because if a bsod occurs first of all you're not just losing game data now you are threatening the users environment in that if the OS is performing some kind of right depending on the OS you could potentially be you could be compromising the OS and it's stability upon reboot you can also be compromising the integrity of an SSD if it's performing some kind of garbage collection or right function because SSDs don't like being shut down randomly when they're performing these functions and neither do hard drives and then we've got the issue of background applications if I have a Word document open or if I have a certain tab open in the background and it's not saved and I get a blue screen of death from this game I've suddenly lost that data and so the list goes on and it's it's problematic and frankly I hope that other game companies can learn from this because in my eyes it is inexcusable for a game company to put this sort of software out on the market and this doesn't even get into net negotiation failures it doesn't get into you plays servers being unable to handle the load of their overhyped game it doesn't talk about servers failing to synchronize cloud data between multiple pcs or even on the same PC when forced to play using local settings due to the the server downtime and it doesn't talk about some of the performance issues we've already discussed and and all these other things that are actually frankly so bad that it it's almost laughable and further on the performance side a lot of this is happening because Ubisoft is in terms of the low framerate is happening because Ubisoft is abusing it or misusing the page file I didn't investigate this too heavily but if you disallow a page file usage and watch using the steams properties and you're on a hard drive not an SSD I saw almost no difference on an SSD then the salient page file uses usage excuse me will finally utilize a bit more of the RAM because for some reason the game does not natively go about above about 1.9 gigabytes utilization which is kind of unbelievable given the era we live in that's actually less RAM usage than titanfall which is arguably not as good-looking and and does not require as much RAM as I came like watchdogs it would so they're hitting the page file pretty heavily they're hitting storage pretty heavily and potentially without reason because we've got all this very high speed ram going untouched and that again tells me that we've got optimization issues when porting to PC from consoles even given modern console architecture largely mirroring pcs being x86 and both incidents but now we can talk about fundamental design issues and move along from me doing a QA job for free talking about design I've complained about hand-holding in the past where a game tells you how to play it I find that insulting as a player and off-putting and just really quite unnecessary I mean we used to play arcade games that had no hand-holding at all and you figure it out after a couple quarters that's because people have some reasonable level of human intelligence that should be expected so I've complained about this regularly watchdogs doesn't necessarily do a lot of hand-holding but it does have a lot of restrictions and we'll go into that in a second first I want to point out that watchdogs does a few things very well it's got a fairly compelling story not necessarily unique but unique within the world of gaming it's it's a story that we've explored in books in movies but haven't gotten into in an environment where we can play as the main character and that is fairly compelling it actually does have a bit of emotional pull as a player the game further has strong central characters with very visible flaws which is always a good thing the backdrop as a sort of cyberpunk dystopian society or one that is on the precipice thereof is very interesting and fun too to think about the multiplayer drop in drop out gameplay as a concept is very good one that you play servers are functional but all of these things are obstructed by watchdogs itself watchdogs in effect is getting in its own way it is it is both interesting and awful at the same time and is almost like Schrodinger's cat is it is Schrodinger here's a watchdog it is both a good and bad game simultaneously and that's because we can't enjoy the good parts of it because of the bad parts of it so starting with my hatred of the save system as I wrote in the full review linked below the game uses only auto saving 100% auto saves you are not allowed to manually save because clearly as a player you are not qualified to make the decision of when you should be saving your content and so the game only auto saves when you're completing missions or when you meet reach a major milestone in some kind of main quest it doesn't really autosave almost ever during a side mission which is problematic and this is problematic for a few reasons first of all just looking at all the things I've already enumerated in terms of bugs if we crash during a mission especially one that I've taken 30 minutes to try and figure out or execute in a particular way that impacts my reputation within the game in a particular way and it crashes I've now lost 30 minutes and that's assuming it doesn't crash during the right interrupt my save file which has happened before by the way because of this auto saving you're constantly losing data during crashes if I could manually say every quick save as I do in Skyrim every 30 seconds out of habit because of its crashing issues with all the mods I've installed that is my fault by the way then this would not be an issue but alas they don't let us do manual saving and so we sacrifice data constantly during crashes now maybe your game doesn't crash so much so what's the issue then outside of this well outside of this removing saving as a as a manual function from the player suddenly takes away a huge part of an open-world game and watchdogs is an open-world game and the huge part it takes away is simply the fact that you should never tell a player how to play within your open-world you've provided them you can be open-world or you can be railroaded you can't be somewhere in the middle where you're telling them to go down the road but also giving them the tantalizing glimpse of the entire world surrounding them without letting them have their way with it and this comes from me speaking as a veteran DM of tabletop RPGs so so that's kind of my viewpoint of it and the issue here is let's take morrowind back when morrowind was the game to be played I'd often end a play session by going on some sort of silly rampage or whatever out of boredom just to create a challenge for myself you can't do that here because if you do you're doing it on your only file for the character unless you copy/paste it don't make backups now you're you're potentially changing how your characters perceived within game so you can't have a splitting reality for your character one with being more anarchistic and one with being more of a citizen and that removes a bit of the fun it also makes it impossible to explore different story lines or different pathways depending on how you execute things because once again you can't manually save once it auto saves it overwrites whatever you had before and it generally just makes things extremely annoying but all of that is a shadow in comparison to the input and controls on PC and this is where we start having issues of user abandonment of the game the game as I've explained in previous videos as Mouse acceleration and mouse smoothing and both or acceleration rather impacts both negatively and positively and what these things do and they exist in Skyrim as well as they produce a very strange unintuitive movement of the cursor across the screen now smoothing attempts to smooth I don't want to say smooth the pixels that's not really a correct term but it's if you think of it that way it comes from the days of mice that had the mouse ball when you would sometimes get sort of a jump or a jitter in your movement because it would perhaps not track as many pixels per inch so that's where my smoothing comes from it's very useful with analog input devices like controllers but it's awful with high precision mice and we end up with something that feels like it feels like you've poured maple syrup on your mousepad and you're attempting to move your mouse through it it's very sluggish and lags behind almost where your brain is telling you the crosshair or the cursor or whatever should be on the screen Mouse acceleration is attempting to keep a more consistent speed of the mouse as you move it across the screen so if you're moving too quickly and it's mind will call it will give it a bit of an threw for more flies there but moving too quickly and most acceleration will try to slow it down a bit that's negative acceleration moving too slowly it might try to speed you up to reach the other side of the screen more quickly this is atrocious on so many levels when it comes to a game where you're trying to shoot things because now especially a game like watchdogs we're shooting them in the knees has a huge difference from shooting them in the face in terms of gameplay outcome not just how efficiently you kill them because now we we have trouble aiming at those particular objects and this is furthered by the fact that there is a masa stand watchdogs on the PC which is not only insulting but that's romantic to the way I want to play the game and that's just really the start of it so moving from there we've got issues with mouse sensitivity and speed as a whole in different parts of the game watch dogs is a game that has various menu and UI elements that change depending on what you're doing the main menu before you start the game has an insanely fast Mouse movement speed which can be cured easily by decreasing the amount of sense the the DPI in your mouse or sensitivity in the options menu but then as soon as you get in game you realize that the mouse is incredibly slow because you've decreased its speed from the menu and the speed between the game the menu that hammers you hack and the infrastructure that you hack and the smartphone and driving all feels terribly different and although the speed doesn't actually change from being in the game to driving it doesn't execute the same way and this is in part because of acceleration and smoothing but that's sort of the it feels different and that's all that matters as a player it is actually different on an objective level between the menu the camera and in-game movement so if i hack a camera I've got to violently move the mouse to get the same amount of movement I would get with a half inch half inch pull of the mouse in the menu and if I'm trying to shoot someone in the game I've got to move the mouse a different amount than when I'm hacking the camera so that's sort of where I'm coming from there and that's really obnoxious on many levels as a gamer to the point where it chases me away and makes me want to play something that makes me more mechanical sentence like Counter Strike where I know exactly and precisely how the mouse is going to move every time I pull the mouse it's not ever changing and the sad thing with all this stuff is it doesn't even get into the times that input completely stops working like when enter no longer functions as a key within the game requiring you to restart the game completely or avoid using enter which is pretty hard to do in watchdogs since it has horrible design to begin with in terms of controls for PC and other than that I have issues in minimizing I have to Control Alt Delete to minimize and then when it comes back up it's in windowed mode so you have to all to enter to resume in full-screen and the best part I think is when alts get stuck down prefer no apparent reason so you jump into a car and just hear the horn for five minutes because that's what triggers it so moving on from that we've still got gameplay to discuss and this is where I take the quote from my article and say don't give me an open-world and then tell me how to play in that world that's just it's it's not even it's just teasing the player at that point and I say this because first of all gameplay is a bit repetitious which is kind of normal for open worlds but it's basically go here hack this kill that or disable that and and that's okay but what's not okay is the upsetting rules they've placed within the missions that are in the game whether those are main missions or not so as an example we have something called mission zones these are physical these are like actual circles on the mini-map around your character where you must execute the mission and if you exit that zone it'll tell you hey you're exiting the zone you have ten seconds to get back in there or you forfeit the mission so okay this this I want to stem two topics off of this the first is just that the mission zones are very restrictive feeling and the problem is they don't necessarily expand as you expand your conflict with the enemy so if I'm out running an enemy because I need to reposition myself and I start exiting that zone and say the enemy is right behind me the zone doesn't expand it just because the enemy is right behind me I have to now turn around do a u-turn turn around go back in there and I can't reposition in the way I want to which is horrible for gameplay because I don't I don't need to tell you why if you're all gamers you know why that sucks it's very annoying and it sort of kills the immersion outside of mission zones we've got issues of a mission failure so when a mission has failed and you're still alive meaning you didn't die in trigger failure maybe because you've exited the zone or or something when the mission has failed it'll actually reload you at the beginning of the mission reload the last autosave so you lose all your progress and that progress may contain things like a vehicle that you've jacked and you maybe decide you'd rather keep that and continue playing without completing the mission or maybe it contains something like a simple map positioning you've reached an area that you'd like to stay in and and so what should happen here is if you fail the mission this is similar maybe to just cause if you fail the mission it should simply fail the mission and let you keep playing in your open world and let the bad guys go do whatever they were gonna do before inevitably despawning or being killed or whatever instead it just reloads you at the start of it which tampers with how the player potentially wants to play your open-world game you've created then we've got an option in the game to abort or abandon a mission and if you choose that it does the same thing it'll reload you at some nearby spawn or autosave and you once again lose anything you've accumulated during that mission and so far as map positioning vehicles and things like that and that's just the start of the gameplay issues I think no matter what whether you agree with me or not on the gameplay there's really very little room for argument on the objective Hardware performance data and optimisation which are outright terrible and I sincerely doubt will ever be resolved to any reasonable extent it's it's just too far along and they already delayed the game several months I'm gonna do it then they're not gonna do it now they're gonna keep making DLC and push more content at you for you to purchase so what does this tell us it tells us that these game development studios and publishers really need to learn from watchdogs they really need to learn from battlefield 4 they need to learn from Titan falls abuse of its PC players and I've written articles about that if you're not sure what I'm talking about and overall we need to be more careful of hype this is something that's been touched on for as long as the game the game industry has been around and just I wish watchdogs didn't have such lazy game design because I really want to enjoy the story but it is what it is I would strongly urge all PC gamers to avoid this title save yourself to $60 I bought this game out of pocket and only we try to get review samples but we could not get one in time for this one so I bought it myself did all the benchmarking and I'm now doing this review I would say avoid it go buy something that's actually good is something that respects your 50 or $100 Mouse that's got high precision is something that respects your ability to aim as a player and something that respects your ability to make decisions as a human and that's all I've got to say about watchdogs full article linked in the description below please subscribe if you found this interesting and I will see you all next time peace