PC games, especially ones that’ll soon make their way to consoles, are perpetually accused of downgrading their graphics. The latest game that PC pundits are angry about? Space-sim Elite Dangerous.
The game was recently patched to 1.3, bringing with it a host of changes and additions – not all of which were appreciated. Especially the ones that, users claim, heavily downgraded the game’s graphics by dicking about with fog effects, reducing textures and generally making the open-ended space sim look worse than it used to. Here’s an example cited by angry people on the forums.
Head of Rendering, Greg Ryder, at Frontier Developments has responded by proxy.
“On the ships / galaxy map front, I’m not aware of any changes that went in for 1.3,” he said, though he did confirm that fog and dust effects were tweaked.
“This was optimised due to a pathological case of overdraw (which looked very broken in a number of cases). There have been some changes,” Ryder said. “Performance and visual consistency should be improved in the general case, however it does seem that some systems are not looking as good as they did.”
As for the imminent Xbox One version of the game being responsible for the game’s visual “downgrade?” Not true.
“The team is always striving to make things better, and we’ve found a number of things using the profiling tools on the Mac and Xbox One that have improved the PC build (thus the opposite to the fear they might lower the quality of the PC build),” he said.
“Elite: Dangerous is built to scale on PC (including 16k screenshot ability and hopefully one day 16k game when the monitors & graphics cards exist). We are certainly not inclined to downgrade the appearance of anything in the game.”
Here’s the thing. The game does look appreciably worse in the eyes of many, but it likely wasn’t done on purpose, and is likely the result of how complex it is to tune games for the dizzying array of PC configurations. It’s certainly not something to get angry over.
Last Updated: July 2, 2015
Admiral Chief's Adventure
July 2, 2015 at 10:35
Yeah that does look crappy, major difference
HairyEwok
July 2, 2015 at 10:55
If it was ported from console to PC I would have understood, but from PC to console and that happens to the PC version. This just doesn’t make sense.
Joe Black
July 3, 2015 at 20:49
Maybe you think the reason why PC version have recently been plagued by bad graphics lies with PCs…
Just saying.
Alien Emperor Trevor
July 2, 2015 at 10:39
I’m no astro-meteorologist, but maybe the space fog just cleared up because that part of space got warmer? 😉
Lord Chaos
July 2, 2015 at 10:42
For an alien you know very little about space.
You’re a janitor aboard a massive ship with no windows aren’t you?
Alien Emperor Trevor
July 2, 2015 at 10:46
I can’t know everything about space because space is even bigger than your mom. 🙁
HairyEwok
July 2, 2015 at 10:47
Joh joh joh. I’ll run and get the cold water.
Lord Chaos
July 2, 2015 at 10:47
So…. About half the size of JJ’s brows then?
Alien Emperor Trevor
July 2, 2015 at 10:49
JJ’s brows are nebulous. tee hee.
HairyEwok
July 2, 2015 at 10:53
They’re so big the universe revolves around them.
Admiral Chief's Adventure
July 2, 2015 at 11:25
*mehbulous
Hammersteyn
July 2, 2015 at 10:52
I think if you braided JJ’s brows you could make the same Tesseract like the one in Interstellar
Alien Emperor Trevor
July 2, 2015 at 10:52
Also you should stop making JJ upset, when he frowns it can effect so many seemingly unrelated things. I believe it’s called “the browterfly effect”.
Hammersteyn
July 2, 2015 at 10:43
console parity
VampyreSquirrel
July 2, 2015 at 10:47
People want the games to be the same on PC and console… this is what happens when you want games to be the same.
Hammersteyn
July 2, 2015 at 10:49
Planetside 2 looks fine on console but better on PC and I’m cool with that. The game plays very well and I enjoy it immensely. The graphics issue has led to too many meetings behind closed doors.
Alien Emperor Trevor
July 2, 2015 at 10:48
Honestly, why would they downgrade the visuals of an already-released PC version because of an upcoming console version? Tinfoil hats make silicone troll brains overheat far too quickly.
Hammersteyn
July 2, 2015 at 10:50
MEHlite Dangerous?
Alien Emperor Trevor
July 2, 2015 at 10:53
😀
Ottokie
July 2, 2015 at 11:59
…
Hammersteyn
July 2, 2015 at 12:06
*Pulls down pants
GooseZA
July 2, 2015 at 12:30
Easy now….
Mighty Meh
July 2, 2015 at 13:30
Im hardly dangerous…
Hammersteyn
July 2, 2015 at 13:40
Is that a pedo bear avatar XD
Joe Black
July 3, 2015 at 20:50
Because fools and their money are easily parted.
HairyEwok
July 2, 2015 at 10:51
Why poke around on something that people play and like already graphics wise. That’s like PC gamers taking a console game like Halo and making it worse, oh wait we can’t.
GooseZA
July 2, 2015 at 12:29
This game has consumed me. I love it.
Brady miaau
July 2, 2015 at 12:49
I am waiting to get it on the Xbox One, to be honest.
Looks like fun.
GooseZA
July 2, 2015 at 15:10
It’s fantastic. I bought the preview version. Just don’t expect it to hold your hand. At all.
Nereus77
July 3, 2015 at 09:00
I think I’ll just sit over here and wait for Star Citizen. Elite: Dangerous fans always appear to have something new to be angry over.