This

Also as long as ubi/EA fanboys keep supporting these lying basters, nothing will change anyway. Everyone rushes towards pre order like it's WW3 then bitches when the game turns into dog shit.

Compare Half-life to Unreal, Morrowind to Sands of Time and Bioshock to Halo 3 or Crysis on medium settings and tell me that they had good graphics for the time. Certainly not high end ones.

this is a cat ... and you see it with LSD eye's ^^

HL was supposed to be very accessible, whereas Unreal clearly wasn't.
Morrowind and Sands of time is a bit of stretch between genres and formats, but I agree that a lot fans made texture packs that were nicer AND (edit for emphasis) lighter really quickly.
I never heard anybody saying Bioshock to be ugly.

What!? Bioshock, Morrowind and Half-life had a super graphic on release!
Also, graphic style IS important in a game, it's just NOT more than gameplay. (I said style, so even an old one could be cool)

The nerfed Watch Dogs' graphic for PCs is just a shameful trick to elevate the shit-gen consoles and maybe sell a fake enhanced pack dlc later..

What gets be is, by the sounds of it, they turned down the graphics AND made it run worse - that's a special kind of evil right there!

They probably had to ship before they were ready and were hoping to enable the effects in a patch later on after more optimizing and testing.

Terrible may have been an overstatement on my part (I'm good at those). I've compered all three to games from the same era (Crysis/Halo 3, Prince of Persia: Sands of time/Half-life 2 and Unreal/Quake 2 respectively) Non of them retrospectively seem impressive for the time (Half-life 1 particularly).

A good style can help a game from an artistic perspective. Shogo: MAD, also from 1998, doesn't hold a candle to Unreal or even Quake 2. But has a style that invokes anime and is pleasing to the eye. A game can have no visual charm however and still be a masterpiece (Minecraft anyone?).
Strangely though some really old games sprite-biased games can be more visually pleasing than modern 3D ones. I'm playing Sonic CD right now and it make me feel teary-eyed sometimes it looks so nice. That said I wouldn't care if it had looked like it's genesis counterparts.

From the amount of posts I thought this game was already released.
When is it to come out?

27 May

I think anyone would've guessed that a AAA Ubisoft game coming to PC wouldn't be as good looking (or run as good) as shown in E3 trailers (or similar announcements) after Assassin's Creed 3 and 4.

As far as graphics go...eh. They're nice and all, but I don't consider them that important in most games (although I think Tearaway, Papers Please, Dark Souls, and other titles had amazing art styles that go along with those games very well).

I personally do not give much to the graphics on a game (hence 90+% of my games are bought here) but from the sounds of things Ubi are pulling a strange act with Watchdogs. If they have spent time making the nice graphical assets to help sell the game then why throw everything that the teams worked towards under the rug? Why just throw away all that money?

Anyway everyone should watch this.

TotalBiscuit
Was Watch Dogs for PC handicapped on purpose ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b43ZlqPvBDs

Optimization. If using all the nice GFX you cannot keep a decent framerate, you keep the assets there but disable them ingame. Should you manage to optimize it, you can then re-enable them ingame, or give the information on how to tweak the ini settings to use them once technology manages to surpass requirements.
Or you could of course just remove the files, thus preventing anyone from using the extra nice textures.

Eh, it goes with the territory. 15 years ago it was gamers arguing over hardware configs and trying to actually find a decent gfx card. 5 years ago it was the debate over everything rolling over to Steam (that argument has still yet to be decided, IMO) and now it's gfx gimping due to studios' love for consoles in the never ending format wars.

And somewhere around the world, just as I type this reply, several hundred people are dying from starvation and disease. Can someone please send Sally Struthers another buck or two. Her grocery bill is quite high from what I hear.