I'm not talking about you or to you. I'm talking about the general wii u owner. Yes those people will and probably do buy third party games on other platforms that's not the point. The point is that your average wii u owner is no more discerning for "quality" products than anyone else.

I agree about the cutscenes, but it's not just those; when he's sneaking out of the stadium it can't even hit 30fps in bland rooms devoid of effects and with a mere handful of characters. That's clearly not the hardware's fault when we've seen it run much more demanding scenes more smoothly in other games.

And if Need for Speed Most Wanted U, a game that blows Watch Dogs Wii U out of the water graphically, (and is also an open world game you can move through at high speed) can spare the texture units and bandwidth for better-than-PS360 textures, I'm sure WD could as well had it recieved the same level of care.

Of course, Ubisoft knew the game would flop, so they had no incentive to really invest in getting the most out of the hardware.

I don't think Need for Speed Most Wanted U looks all that great compared to Watch Dogs ... The only thing that Need for Speed gets right on the WII U are the ground and car textures whereas Watch Dogs has the advantage for a lot of objects plus the shading in Watch Dogs WII U is also a step above Need for Speed U. All of those factors can adversely affect memory bandwidth usage so it's possible that the WII U's sparse memory controller could potentially prohibit Watch Dogs from using higher resolution textures on the WII U.

While it's true that Ubisoft certainly had no incentive to put effort into the WII U version but I think putting in some extra time to get Watch Dogs more stable is proof alone of some sort of effort was put in ... 

I'd definitely contend the shading point, Watch Dogs on Wii U is very flat in that department, whereas NFS U had reflection mapping on wet roads and such, plus NFS runs at a higher screen resolution, higher framerate... the gap is actually pretty major.

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As I understand it, the Wii U version didn't really get "extra time", it was put on hold for a few months so that the crew could assist with the higher priority versions, so in the end it didn't get any more dev time than the other versions.

Both Watch Dogs and Need for Speed Most Wanted had screen space reflections even though it was used more sparsely in Watch Dogs but this technique does not impress me one bit when you consider that the only things you can reflect on a near perfect specular surface are the objects in that frame. In other words this technique fails to reflect objects that are not in the camera therefore if a ball is out of a frame the orthogonal perfectly specular surface will not be able to capture an image of the ball and it's also not computationally expensive when shading is already applied to the object so the only you have to do left is a lookup towards an object that is orthogonal to the reflective surface to apply the reflections.

The other reasons why I think the shading in Watch Dogs is above Need for Speed Most Wanted is because it's also applying subsurface scattering and SSAO. 

The WII U version may have been put on hold but finishing the last gen versions also counts towards helping the WII U version in the end since the additional experience the team gained can potentially better help iron out the technical kinks such as bugs or performance dips in the future. 6 months is a lot of time to improve the older build so I don't think it's fair to go all out crucifying the dev team with extreme prejudice when there are other factors at play. Sure you can say that the the results from them were below average and that they did overlook some things but describing them as lazy when they are at their chairs pushing out code left and right for 8 hours a day for 6 months is sort of off mark. 

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 upgrde over one of the better looking console multiplats of 2012, that alone is indcative of how much NFSU obliterates WDU graphically.

I'm not so sure you can say that there is a scarce amount of shaders used in Watch Dogs when it's applying subsurface scattering, SSAO, and it's own material shading model. Sure the textures and the models for cars in Need for Speed is better but with Watch Dogs there is a higher density of cars which is probably the bigger stress benchmark of the two. 

I'm not denying the performance issues found on the WII U version of Watch Dogs but there is more shading going in that game compared to Need for Speed even though some of effects are less obvious and more subtle. 

Really ? You sure about that ? Now, I realize that Watch Dogs may have a muddy image quality (most likely due to resolution) but it looks gobsmackingly better than GTA IV. You may think that NFSMWU tops WDU but I think it's the other way around since the textures are lacking in more than one way or the other and it has less graphical effects going on.