When Watch Dogs was first shown off at E3 in 2012 it was draped in graphical effects, gusts of wind, fancy blooms, and crowded streets. It was showing what Ubisoft thought the next generation of consoles would be capable of before they’d even been announced. What was eventually released trimmed many of those niceties away.
Modder TheWorse has found these old effects hidden away in Watch Dogs’ game files and is resurrecting them one by one to make the PC version look as good as it can, which might of aided it in our Watch Dogs review.
Here’s a comparison video between the E3 footage and what Watch Dogs looked like at release.
Quite the difference.
“I’m a very obsessed person,” writes TheWorse. No kidding, when confronted with the screen stutter bugs in Watch Dogs he converted the game from binary code into Hex so that he could find hidden files in the game directory. He then found and studied tools to convert those files into something he could alter and reactivate. The result: “I was able to integrate and enable many effects.”
These are just some of the things TheWorse thinks he’ll be able to change for Watch Dogs:
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Changes to the default fog values
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Enabled bokeh DOF for the main cameras
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Stuttering Improvements
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E3 2012 Bloom
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Performance Improvements
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Enabled Headlight Shadows
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LoD Changes
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Reflection changes
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Added 3 new cameras to the game(closer, normal, further)
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Rain changes(High quality rain drops, properly reacting to light, etc)
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LensFlares(WIP)
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Lighting changes(TESTING AND WIP)
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Civilians density changes
And many more things besides
To show he’s not just blowing smoke, here’s some screenshots of the newly improved version of Watch Dogs in action:
It’s already looking significantly better to what Ubisoft shipped. If TheWorse is able to bolt on the rest of the features then it will make Watch Dogs into one of the prettiest open world games available.
It’s bizarre that, if Ubisoft had all these graphical lovelies working, they weren’t included in the PC version. Sure, the consoles can’t handle them but why throw away all the hard work?
You can download TheWorse’s mod and see the improvements for yourself.