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curl-6 on 27 November 2014
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fatslob-:O said:
curl-6 said:

WD uses far less reflection mapping than NFS though. Most surfaces are flat and lifeless. It also appears not to use HDR lighting at all, (save for what looks like a very cheap fake effect when you leave a dark tunnel and everything is white for a second) while NFS employedHDR to strong effect. Add in lower screen resolution, lower texture resolution, and a lower framerate, and WD on Wii U isn't even in the same league as Need for Speed. Texture filtering also appears worse in WD, though this could also just be a combination of lower screen resolution and inferior AA.

I don't recall ever calling the WD Wii U team "lazy", but they certainly could have done better. Even compared to other Wii U multiplats, the porting here is of a substandard quality, though to be fair, since it was doomed to flop, Ubisoft probably decided not to commit the resources needed to produce a strong port to avoid losing money. So it could be more the fault of management than the actual coders.

It's not really about the amount of reflection mapping going. Heck, it doesn't really mean much when it's a cheap technique like FXAA or when it's a screen space hack in this case. The HDR was certainly more noticeable in Need for Speed Most Wanted but the cause of the lower contrast in Watch Dogs is mainly due to how ambient occlusion is handled on the WII U. As per textures, I think Watch Dogs is at an advantage here since the objects actually don't look horrible compared to Need for Speed Most Wanted and plus the building exteriors also sport a higher resolution texture too but both of their textures for organic surfaces are terrible. The texture filtering in both games are awful as both games employ trilinear texture filtering scheme but the lower resolution really does hurt the image quality in Watch Dogs to which I agree on. 

Lighting and surface shaders in general in Watch Dogs U are used so sparsely it almost looks like an original Xbox game at times. Even in indoor settings there's a tiny number of light sources at a time, while it NFS you can race down a street and through a tunnel with dozens of light sources reflecting off your vehicle. (Said vehicle is also much higher poly and better textured and shaded than its WD counterparts) When you leave a tunnel in NFS the HDR effect is lighting based, manifesting as bloom, while in WD it's a cheap white layer over the screen.

NFS also doesn't drop to 23fps when there's 2 guys in a bland room with no demanding effects. Even the CPU is no excuse there, that's entirely the fault of the software, not the hardware, which has proven itself far more capable in other games.

WDU looks like console GTA4 from 2008, while NFS is a graphical upgrade over one of the better looking console multiplats of 2012, that alone is indicative of how much NFSU obliterates WDU graphically.