The Disrupt engine is pretty interesting. It's a combination of new tech, whatever Ubi Reflections was working on, AnvilNext (open world), and Dunia (vegetation, AI). I've really only seen PS4 and PC screens floating about. Practically nothing from last gen and the X1, which might be either a little odd or that I've been hanging around the wrong places (pretty sure it's the latter). Because of that, can't really comment too much about the cross-generational issues. Wouldn't mind grabbing a last-gen copy to play around with. It'd probably run smoother than my PC copy. Hell, might even look better, even though there won't be any cockpit driving (I suck at it, so it wouldn't matter anyways).
One of the things I really disliked about Watch_Dogs was the inconsistency of the character models. You have Aiden, who looks awesome due to all the detail, and then you look at the various NPCs and see something that could probably be rendered in the late PS2 era. Even other key characters like Nicky and Jackson suffer from this, which is really too bad since you see them alongside Aiden up close a fair number of times. The quality difference is jarring. You can also sort of come across this if you've been doing some model swapping. Saw a few pics of Aiden's casual wear during from one of the flashback scenes, and his hair rendering is pretty terrible. It looks rather plastic and layered instead of being a bit more hair-like and curly. The light bouncing off the strands was off as well. The textures on the inner layer of his jacket is quite low-res when compared to the leather texture on the outside. I get that it was part of the flashback scene where there's a lot of filtering involved, but it does make it look bad if that texture was used elsewhere.
Another thing that bothered me while playing: eyes. The pupils don't dilate or contract based on how much light is present in the area. Aiden's green looks somewhat unnatural. Not sure if that was intentional though. It's almost like we take him and dunk him in some mako. It's pretty, but strange... The way light bounces off them, it's just odd. Ah well. Graphical calculations and whatnot can always be tweaked with iterations. I'm not going to worry about it too much.
But hey! At least the water is amazing, minus it not reacting to gunshots. I think I already see some of the cloth physics in Assassin's Creed Unity. It's probably going to be shifted back to the next Watch_Dogs. And IIRC, animating women shouldn't be hard with this engine either, considering that someone on the Watch_Dogs team called out the ACU on that (internal drama! And to think I want to work for them).
I think they have a good engine on hand. Now if only the PC iteration didn't suck so badly when it's the lead platform. And everyone not being afraid of hair? That might have been more of a cross-generation issue. Not really sure. Even inFAMOUS Second Son tried to keep everyone's head either shaved, tied up, or otherwise hidden. I have high hopes of refinement, but not high hopes of execution. We'll see.
