Ubisoft Strikes Again? THE DIVISION E3 2015 Graphical Comparison

It looks like Ubisoft may be at it again. At their E3 press conference this year, Ubisoft showed footage of their much-hyped game The Division and it didn’t take long before a video comparing the graphical fidelity of this year’s footage with past E3’s to crop up. Considering Ubisoft has a history of showing off beautiful “gameplay” footage at E3 only to downgrade the game later so it can run on consoles, it’s perfectly understandable for people to be on the lookout for further graphics shenanigans. And, according to this video, it looks like something is definitely afoot.

The 2013 and 2014 footage looks identical in quality, as far as I can tell, but the jump to 2015 is obvious. Colors are flat and textures are far muddier than on previous years. Some of the most obvious inconsistencies I noticed are the details on the character model’s jacket (which can be seen around 1:09) and the general environment. Lots of little details are lost in the transition from 2014 to 2015. Stitching and fabric texture in clothing are far less defined, if they are there at all, and details on the environment are much blurrier in the 2015 footage. 

Many people would love to pounce on Ubisoft, declaring this another Watch Dogs-sized graphical downgrade, but right now the evidence is inconclusive. The graphics in the 2015 video is obviously worse, although that may be because the video quality itself is not that great. You can see obvious compression artifacting at multiple points in the video and even watching it live it was hard to judge what the game actually looked like since it was streamed and streaming quality is erratic at best. Given Ubisoft’s track record, I wouldn’t be surprised if The Division doesn’t look like what we saw in 2013 and 2014, but we need more evidence before we make any conclusive judgement.