Ok, they didn’t really confirm they shouldn’t be developing PC games – that is the humble opinion of this (and many other) PC gamers. Today, Ubisoft released a statement explaining that the unearthed rendering settings found by modders were in fact disabled on purpose. The settings include increasing rain density and increasing the number of NPCs rendered at a time.

Read their response here: http://watchdogs.ubi.com/watchdogs/en-us/news/index.aspx#

They claim to be disabled to optimize performance for PC, which may be true. The initial release was very rocky with many people not having a very good experience with the game (even those with strong performing PCs). The thing that is still hard to comprehend is the reason the final release of the game had visuals that were dumbed down significantly from the E3 2012 Demo (see comparison below).

Our personal suspicions is two parts:

• The PC version received very little optimization, in favor of time spent on console versions
• The PC version was also dumbed down to keep it in line with the “Next Gen” console versions

But, whatever the reasons, we are definitely nervous about Ubisoft on the PC front going forward.