On game graphics and fairness

I've been quite looking forward to playing a new game by the name of WARDOGS to the point where I pre-ordered it and got to participate in the closed beta testing.

I have to say, that for an Unreal Engine 5 release, it's a pretty good one - on my Intel Arc B580 I could manage about 80 - 100 FPS with a mix of low-medium settings at 1080p and some upscaling, though the performance dropped closer to 60 - 70 FPS when making the game render at its original resolution. Don't get me wrong, it's still worse than an equivalent Unreal Engine 4 game would give you, but at least they didn't go all in on Epic's marketed features and ruin the performance like other games like Borderlands 4 did, before trying to gaslight their audience in thinking that such bad performance is somehow okay.

To understand what I mean by that, just look at this video on YouTube, which shows how badly UE5 games can run even on top tier hardware:

This is why I think it's great that the developers actually paid attention to the performance and even people on budget-mid tier hardware like me (a few steps above integrated graphics) can still enjoy the game without breaking the bank, especially due to whatever the hell these current GPU prices are:

and

Seeing that, you should also remember that the median salary in my country, Latvia, is quite limited - the net income after the taxes ends up around 1300-1600 EUR for most folks. While I have been blessed in some ways with a better paying career, we should remember that not everyone has a lot of money and certainly can't afford to spend a lot on hardware.

That's why, when I saw this post on the WARDOGS subreddit, it felt a bit off:

(credit for the images to the user, I'll merely showcase them here as examples)

The complaint itself is valid - people running on low graphics (much like has historically been done in e-sports titles in particular, for lower latency so the frames you see on the screen are as fresh as possible, even when the framerate exceeds the refresh rate of your monitor) not only get better latency but due to the unfortunate way the illumination and shadows work, actually a further competitive advantage here, by being able to see into buildings.

How bad is it? Well, let these images from the post speak for themselves:

vs

Ignore the FOV difference for a second and just look at the building on the right - on the higher graphical settings you simply cannot see into the building at all. That leads to a fairly awkward situation: on anything past the lowest settings you basically need a 1440p monitor since you won't see the subtle color shifts in that darkened doorway or window to spot someone sniping. I only have a 1080p monitor and I got sniped so many times both from indoors and further away outdoors since I simply couldn't see well enough, that's the Arma problem that gets worse with more modern games on lower resolution screens.

The flip side of that is that there's nothing preventing someone even on a top tier gaming rig from dropping their graphics to the lowest preset and getting an advantage almost over all other players - both those who need the low graphics to even be able to play the game and everyone else that's running higher graphical presets that have a visibility disadvantage.

On Reddit, as is often the case, the comments were all largely in favor of removing the "potato" graphics preset altogether. When I pointed out that it'd prevent many people from enjoying the game at all, I obviously got dogpiled:

I'm not sure whether it was just because my comment was a bit snarky as is the case with quick responses or what, but it's like people didn't even read the damn comment:

Aaaaand you now have 20 FPS now that shadows are forced on. There's gonna be some people that cannot run the game at higher graphics whatsoever due to their hardware. You'd have to essentially decide that you're okay with them not being able to play enjoyably at all.

It's not even an opinion, merely statement of fact - shadows and illumination in UE5 lead to more performance impact, no matter what you do. I wasn't even saying that we need to leave the preset, just that removing it would lead to some folks being essentially unable to enjoy the game. I guess I could backtrack further, but you know what?

No, let's have a Derek Smart moment. For those that don't know, he was a game developer that's known to be very stubborn and litigious, to a degree that was often described as unreasonable - give some of the videos about him on YouTube a watch, they're quite interesting.

But in the name of catharsis, let's channel some of that energy - that reaction was wrong and I was right. Let me tell you why.

The bad arguments

To start off, let's address some of the responses that I got.

For example, this one is pretty good:

Yeah this bs argument again... If you don't have modern hardware to run modern games you can still play a ton of older games.
Probably 5% of the players that use potato mode are using it because they have to. The rest is simply trying to get an advantage due to better visibility. It just doesn't feel right.
Edit: Example from this sub showing someone using potato shadows while his GPU is sitting between 60-70% most of the time - https://www.reddit.com/r/WarDogs/...
If you want to keep the potato mode, at least add potato mode servers which allow potato mode and some that don't. So the people that can't afford a recent mid class system can play roblox together... and i can decide if i'm fine with a few low setting sweats and "re-shade is not cheating"-Club members in the game.
OP just uploaded a handful of screenshots but there are many many more cases where the potato mode has a clear advantage... especially when it comes to bushes and dark corners. There are situations where the potato mode player can fully see you while you are unable to see them. That's simply not fair in an online pvp game.

Let's look past the tone and the made up percentages (if devs are running any telemetry, they probably have the real numbers, whatever they are).

The person says that others using the low preset to get an advantage doesn't feel right - that part I agree with. I could even agree with servers for people running on those low settings, though there it'd probably lead to an even more of an imbalance, where players who struggle to run the game would get destroyed by people who are trying to be really competitive.

They also bring up the issue of bushes and the possibility of people using ReShade to alter how the game looks to them, but at that point someone who's running a 4k high refresh rate monitor with maximum brightness and high contrast has an advantage anyways, the same how someone with a really fancy keyboard and mouse has over someone with more regular gear. Like, a player with an expensive flight stick will fly around me in circles because mine just isn't as good.

At the same time, why would the people with actually low spec builds have to suffer, just because they couldn't afford a better setup? The engine can support it (at least for them, with whatever other limitations might need to be in place to support fair play) and you don't even want to try to make things good for them? That's your solution?

So what is that example they mentioned?

Someone flying a chopper on low settings. This I'm torn about - like sure it's a chopper with weapons so they're doing PvP, but do you also think that people who are flying transport choppers should be forced to have worse framerates and worse responsivity, and get their teammates killed more often as a consequence of that? What about logistics runs being ruined because of that, and largely just disadvantaging the player themselves (vehicles in WARDOGS are bought with in-game currency) and then also the team?

I don't know about you but when I'm playing infantry and am in the chopper with like another 10-11 people, I sure as hell want the pilot to have as good of a framerate as possible. And let me tell you, I know what it's like to crash due to some stupid technical reason like lag - you wouldn't believe the amount of profanity I heard back when I was playing an Mi-8 on Arma 2 and was transporting a bunch of Russians to the AO, because all my mobile internet could handle at the time with passable ping was Russian servers (and even then it was like 300 with spikes up to 1000 in very unfortunate moments).

And what the hell is that about throwing shade at them only having 60-70% load on their GPU? Do you think recording and/or streaming doesn't increase the load? What about some people enjoying more stable frame timings and lower power usage and better thermals? Do you think that people on laptops also shouldn't be able to play the game at all?

It makes me angry that someone calls me reminding them of a simple thing bullshit and then doesn't address the actual point at all, makes some good to bad arguments and gets praise for it, while I get dogpiled for pointing out nuance in the unpopular opinion. This is the exact same thing that makes me want to not participate in online communities, though at least is still better than some of the players in the game that were straight up TKing others and trying to break choppers at spawn.

The honest arguments

Some other responses were at least honest:

Sorry but if that's what it takes for an egregiously unfair advantage to be fixed then so be it. There should be a middle ground and currently there isn't. And it isn't entirely on the devs. Folks should accept that their 10yr old hardware might need to be upgraded in order to play new games.

Then yeah they don’t get to play.

How about you have hardware capable of playing the game instead of crippling the game to let a few extra people play? I don't show up to a race track asking for my lil mazda to be made a custom track so it can compete with sports cars

We ARE okay with that

I'm not sure whether I'd call that being privileged, ignorant or just making a hard choice suspiciously easily. I still remember what it was like to play on my Intel Arc A580, before that there was the AMD RX 580 and before then there was Nvidia 650 GTX - none of which were high spec even at the time of coming out and anything but decently optimized games just ran plainly bad.

It feels somewhat dirty when people make the argument of "Just get a better PC bro.", but if nothing else I can at least appreciate the honesty. This does feel considerably more disgusting seeing the sort of backsliding in regards to video game performance though, in part due to moving away from baked static lighting and proper precomputed LODs and towards more expensive rendering techniques.

And then you get mocking responses like this, it disgusts me:

Oh no. Someone on a Pentium Celeron won’t be able to play the game, but the rest of us maintain a minimum setting that forces fairness.
I think that’s a trade that’s well worth it.

While there are still people out there thinking about game optimization and high fidelity visuals (like the controversial ThreatInteractive channel, with a similarly unpleasant tone but good technical arguments), what is clear is that game optimization is an expensive art and no studio truly wants to pick up the bill. Hell, by default Intel Arc cards had stutters in the game that could be disabled with a single launch flag (-nogpucrashdebugging) that apparently the devs themselves didn't notice.

What ends up happening is that the middle and high end enjoys games that look great and play okay (unless it's Borderlands 4), whereas the people with entry level hardware have to drop the settings so low that the games end up looking bad and still running worse - which in my experience has been the case for most modern UE5 titles. When you compare UE4 and UE5 I can pretty much guarantee that on the lower end of hardware the games will both look and perform better on UE4.

In other words, the people with low end hardware get neither good graphics, nor good performance and I think that's wrong.

The few people with nuance

There were also a few good takes that I noticed.

For example, this comment is a short one but I really liked it:

Yea, should at least have some baked shadows to simulate the sun.

Why couldn't you have two lighting systems in parallel? Seriously, just push for people using real time global illumination and use that in all of your marketing materials or whatever, but provide static shadows (baked lightmaps) for the people who need them.

Someone might say "Those two systems would look different." but that isn't really valid because the current "potato" preset already looks way different from the proper setup and I doubt that anyone would really care about dynamic shadows much either, as long as there wouldn't be as much of a competitive advantage. Nobody complains about different mesh quality or different texture resolutions, so why should lighting be any different?

Yes, it would be more work for the devs cause they'd need to bake the lightmaps and eventually things would get out of sync, but frankly, who cares - at that point real time GI is what you're optimizing and the baked lightmaps are just the fallback. They can be there, but deprioritized and nobody would expect you to push for a pixel-perfect setup anyways. It's staggering that this isn't the status quo, same as being able to disable Nanite and just use traditional LODs which often perform better. Like sure, making those takes time, but you could use any auto-LOD plugin or even do a basic decimate modifier in Blender for Chrissake, because again, it's just a fallback.

Sure, this would mean more work for the developers, but at that point, why isn't the engine itself providing facilities to do that automatically with a single checkbox and a longer build process?

Another person described some of the issues quite nicely:

If it’s a binary choice, then yes absolutely I’m fine with that. Minimum specs raise with time, that’s just how it works. Compromising the competitive integrity for the entire player base to enable a small number of people to run the game just doesn’t make sense. Of course the more logical solution is to just create servers where certain graphics settings are locked.
It’s the same logic behind why cheating isn’t allowed in games or why “peeker advantage” is such a hard line to balance. Dying because the other player had an unfair advantage absolutely sucks. Not knowing whether the other player had an unfair advantage or not also sucks. Except cheaters and peeker advantage are unavoidable issues. The former is a constant game of whackamole and the latter is a physical consequence of the fact that it takes time for data to be transmitted between players and servers. They can only be managed and kept to a minimum. These are both external problems that come from outside of the game. It’s simply something that has to be accepted as a fact of online play.
On the other hand potato mode is a problem created entirely by the developers themselves. It’s a problem internal to the game. They alone possess the ability to decide if and to what degree graphics settings affect fairness. It’s not like this is something new either. Lowering graphics settings to increase visibility or framerate has always been a thing in competitive games. However other games have found a balance that is acceptable. They’re not all the same, but players and developers have found a range between accessibility and fairness that is acceptable. The problem is that Wardogs falls so far out of that range that it is ridiculous. That’s why we’re seeing so much backlash. I cannot think of any other big shooter game where you can simply decide to turn entirely turn off shadows and apply a uniform extremely clear brightness to the entire map. Even PUBG didn’t have anywhere near this bad a difference.

One thing they're not considering is that the lowest quality presets could also be made available only to the people with actually weak hardware - avoid benchmarks because those are quite easy to game, but have a list of all GPUs and CPUs that actually need the option. You do have to be careful because of the streaming/recording overhead, but otherwise I can easily imagine that someone with an RX 580 8 GB would get the "potato" preset but someone on a 5060 Ti 16 GB most likely doesn't need it.

In addition to that, you should probably not frame it as the developers being powerless. Sure, they have time and budget constraints and are probably doing their best, but if they wanted to have a mixed lighting setup, they could. I wouldn't judge them for not having a more complex way to ensure both good performance and fairness, but telling them to just get rid of the lowest graphics setting feels like barking up the wrong tree.

Summary

I find it odd that we have games like GTA 5 that have good lighting and run well across a variety of hardware, yet somehow it's always the UE5 games running badly. To Epic's credit, they seem to be working on it and recent releases like 5.8 are bringing performance improvements, but in part it feels like it's only because the people who shout:

"It's not the engine's fault"

can only do it so loudly and for so long, when it kinda is.

It's the same as when BMW and Dodge cars are marketed a specific way and everyone is surprised when there's so much reckless driving going on by their drivers. If Epic tries to break into film more and markets themselves as having the most advanced graphics and pushes all the big studios towards using them, then both of these are correct at the same time:

• they're responsible for how their engine gets used due to their marketing
• you can't say that the engine itself is good, when so often it gets used badly

Bad defaults are still defaults. That's also why I'd critique Unity for pushing all sorts of fancy features while not having automatic LOD out of the box and expecting people who care about performance to buy an asset from the store - obviously that will just lead to most people not caring. Contrast this to Godot that does have automatic LOD, it's the same how Unity has the resources to make a good and performant terrain solution as well... and they just don't. The people developing such foundational technology as game engines, should make it easy to do the right thing.

Perhaps we're 5 years too early for Lumen and Nanite, hardware wise. Either that, or Nvidia is giving them bribes so they'd push expensive rendering techniques in pursuit of selling more GPUs - a modern form of forced obsolescence, with the loud gamer voices above only helping them and defending their bad practices. The gamers are already half-right, critiquing the performance impact of something like DLSS 5 (regardless of how it looks), but somehow overlook the GI and LOD technologies.

At the same time, I will always reject thought terminating cliches and don't enjoy the reactivity of Reddit. It can simultaneously be true that disabling lighting gives an unfair advantage to the people who don't need those settings to play the game, while at the same time the non-solution of throwing those graphics settings away altogether is lazy and leads to a despicable state of the gaming industry.

But what do I know, I got ratioed after all.