There’s been a lot of chatter lately about video game ‘downgrades’, where the finished game appears graphically inferior to its reveal trailer.
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How and why video game ‘downgrades’ happen was first published on September 4,2018.
There’s been a lot of chatter lately about video game ‘downgrades’, where the finished game appears graphically inferior to its reveal trailer.
Some see these reductions in scope as a massive middle finger pointed directly at their face, almost as if the developers behind the games were purposely taking away all their graphics. “No graphics for you, gamer boy,” they probably say while sitting on a throne made out of microtransaction money.
Whether it’s the density of The Witcher 3’s world or the puddles in Spider-Man, it’s a topic that pops up more than the textures in the first Rage.
So, let’s dig into exactly what downgrades are and why they happen, with insight from people who actually know what they’re talking about.
Since we all love a bit of drama, why not kick off with some actual bad practices. Sometimes, downgrades are the result of wasted resources, occasionally initiated by a decision from up high, according to one source familiar with development on triple-A Ubisoft games.
“I found they were very insistent on pushing the quality of their products for mass market appeal at global events,” my source tells me. “This leads to a lot of man hours churning through content and pouring over the quality of the game during an intensive period.”
This quality does not scope out to the rest of the game – all we get is a highly polished vertical slice that the developers can’t hope to replicate across an entire sandbox world. For Driver San Francisco, this affected Marin, a late game county that looked nowhere near as nice as San Francisco’s main body. This is a case of the developer putting all the money up front, since only a small portion of players actually see the credits.
Sometimes, instead of rolling with it, the developer decides to scale back the rest of the game instead.
“[Occasionally], the level of parity in the game needs to be identical, therefore you reduce quality to ensure that everything looks of equal quality,” my source explains.
