Fresh Watch Dogs trailer appears online 24 hours before Ubisoft’s pre-E3 briefing

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By Jeffrey Grubb

One of Ubisoft’s big guns has a new trailer that probably wasn’t supposed to go live until tomorrow.

It’s a CGI video that shows the game’s hero Aiden Pierce using technology before solving all of his problems with guns. Vimeo user “Aiden Pierce” uploaded it (as spotted first by Kotaku) to the video-sharing site, which suggests that this is possibly deliberate.

Watch Dogs is Ubisoft’s new near-future open-world action game. It has players hacking the city of Chicago to complete missions.

Check out the trailer below:

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Watch_Dogs E3 Walkthough Demo

Posted by Nik Schmidt // Community Developer, Ubisoft

In this most recent Watch_Dogs gameplay demo, we witnessed the wide variety of tools that Aiden has in his arsenal, all expressed through gameplay.

Whether it be by driving in a stealthily way to try and evade assailants, by assisting a friend in escaping a sticky situation, or by blacking out parts of the city to give him tactical advantage, we were able to see all the agency we’ll have while exploring the great city of Chicago.

Now, we’ve seen how Aiden lends a helping hand to a friend, but who’s helping him? Who’s helping you, the player, when the odds seemed to have been tipped against you? That’s where it becomes interesting.

There’s yet another layer of connectivity that will be available to you in Watch_Dogs: Co-op on mobile devices. When you’re calling for help, you are sending a request to friends who are connected to the Watch_Dogs universe through their mobile devices.

When that request is accepted, a co-op experience starts and the goal for the two players is to survive from the police by escaping their pursuit. This is just another way Watch_Dogs brings you the full, hyper-connected experience.

We’ll have even more exciting news for you very soon, but for now, you can follow the latest Watch_Dogs updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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Watch Dogs Trailer: It Could be PS4, but it Looks a Lot Better in 1080p

By Giuseppe Nelva

The release of the new story trailer of Watch_Dogs has caused a lot of controversy within the gaming community, due to the fact that many simply feel that it doesn’t look that good. Some (me included) initially thought it showcased the last generation version of the game, but from what we can gather, it definitely seems to be the PS4 version, even if Ubisoft seems to be covering the tracks.

The official PlayStation Denmark twitter account answered a question from a fan yesterday, stating that the trailer showcased PS4 gameplay. Unfortunately the tweet has been canceled since, probably under the pressure of the backlash. That said, it didn’t come from Ubisoft, so that cannot be considered conclusive evidence.

Yesterday, while I was checking the new trailers for my usual night reporting, I noticed something interesting. Ubisoft Japan published two versions of the trailer. The first was titled “ウォッチドッグス　ストーリートレーラー” (Watch Dogs Story Trailer), while the second was named ウォッチドッグス　ストーリートレーラーPS4版 (Watch Dogs Story Trailer PS4 Version).

You can imagine my excitement as I immediately opened the “PS4 version” to see the difference, only to discover that there was none besides the splash screen at the end. Even more interestingly, it was immediately unlisted and hidden from sight. Luckily i still had the URL so I was able to find it again. Here it is:

You can see a screencap of the video at the bottom of the article just in case it gets removed completely.

So far everything seems to point to the fact that the trailer belongs to the PS4 version of the game. Ubisoft is being extremely hush about it. We have reached out for a possible confirmation or denial, but we didn’t receive an answer yet.

That said, regardless of the platform, one of the reasons behind the backlash is probably found in the fact that YouTube really butchers trailers with ominous compression. One of the best features of Watch_Dogs seems to be very high resolution textures with absolutely lovely normal maps, and high compression completely ruins that.

That’s why we picked up a 1080p version of the trailer with very high bitrate (15 Mbps) and snapped a few lossless PNG screenshots for you, in order to show you exactly how the game looks when it’s not ruined by an unflattering compression. You can see those screenshots in the gallery below (make sure to click on each to see the full screen version in 1080p). There’s still a small bit of compression going on, but it’s radically less than on YouTube or on other video sites.

There are quite a few elements that you may have overlooked while watching the trailer, especially if you watched it on Youtube. First of all, the beautiful textures. They’re extremely detailed and the high resolution normal maps make the grain stand out even more. It’s especially visible with clothes (just look at Aiden’s coat and sweater) and skin. The detail of tattoos is also another great indication.

The second element is the many fine details that are modeled in the game, and that are easy to miss. Facial hair is one of those. Even nasal hair is actually modeled strand by strand. A similar level of detail is visible in the grass of the tomb scene.

There’s simply a whole lot going on the screen, with elements that are often modeled in much lesser detail in open world games, but since they’re small elements they’re harder to notice. The elevated railway is a good example, with its extremely complex structure. There’s a whole lot of polygons that the engine has to move there.

Another element is the draw distance. It’s extremely high compared to most open world games. There’s no distant fog to keep the polygon count low, and it definitely makes a big difference in creating the sensation that we’re walking in a real city and not into a series of blocks where you can clearly see only a few hundreds of metres away. The whole city is visible, and there are thousands of objects between buildings, vegetation and vehicles. And Watch_Dog doesn’t seem to use many of the usual tricks that keep things lighter on the machine, but degrade visibility radically at a distance.

This isn’t to say that some elements of the visuals haven’t been possibly toned down since the latest showings of the game, but looking at the footage without the hindrance of compression makes it a lot easier to notice elements that are often sacrificed in other open world games for the sake of performance.

It’s inevitable: open world games will look worse than linear games on the same hardware when you compare single elements directly. That’s because the engine has to render a lot more objects around our character, and often a lot more characters, vehicles and so forth. No matter how many resources you are, they’re always finite, and the more elements you need to render, the less detail you can dedicate to each.