Ubisoft doesn't have the greatest of reputations among PC gamers at the moment, and it's becoming increasingly clear that the company's totally indifferent to it. When Watch_Dogs released, the company was widely criticized for reducing the graphics detail in the PC build, based on the fact that the game looked better at E3 two-years-ago. It's since been discovered that the same settings used for that E3 demo can be reenabled - the game will look better, and without much of a performance hit.

The fact that Ubisoft could deliberately disable a setting that any PC gamer would want enabled is striking, and it's causing rampant speculation around the Web. A common belief is that Ubisoft is so invested in the console market, that it wanted some sort of graphics parity between all of the builds. At first, I didn't buy into that, because for Ubisoft, maiming the PC build could accomplish nothing, as far as I saw it.

But now? I'm not sure - Ubisoft is making things harder for itself to explain. The company's upcoming Far Cry 4 looks undoubtedly impressive, but what's most striking about the game is that Ubisoft claims the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions will match the PC's "Very High" quality settings. As the title of this post says, "Yeah, right."

Based on specs, and also what we've seen in the real-world, there's no denying that the current crop of consoles are under-powered when compared to a modest gaming PC. A $500~$600 gaming PC today will have at least twice the graphics horsepower as the current consoles, so how on earth is Ubisoft able to make such a bold claim? By deliberately throttling the PC build of the game, would be my guess. It's not outside the realm of reason given the company did the exact same thing to Watch_Dogs.

A smart Ubisoft would stop pulling these kinds of stunts, because PC gamers are already miffed at the fact that they're forced to use Uplay to access the company's titles. I'm also miffed at Uplay because it doesn't share leaderboard info across different platforms despite being the same exact service (I'm looking at you, Trials Fusion).

As a devout PC gamer, it's frustrating that a company like Ubisoft, which makes some amazing titles, treats PC gamers in this way. If anything good comes out of this, it's for EA's benefit: For once it doesn't look like the worst game publisher out there.