Spider-Man “PuddleGate” Downgrade Controversy is a clear example of misinformation and overreaction

I think people assume you are using your comment as a joke. I actually fully agree that this is the difference between ray tracing being on, and ray tracing being off. I would imagine they ray traced the E3 trailer for obvious reasons, and the console release wont include it.

The above was followed by this gem of a reply:

Does ray tracing alter pools of water as well?

I also wanted to add this notable quote from a Twitter reply I came across earlier:

Insomniac Community Director James Stevenson also commented on the missing water and puddles issue.

It got moved. There’s other places with tons of water

— James Stevenson (@JamesStevenson) August 26, 2018

What people need to realize is that the game is in development, things change in development all the time. Debating over missing water and puddles is just plain stupid.

Discussions like these is why CDProjektRed were so hesitant at showing Cyberpunk 2077 to the public. Here are some snippets from the secret message they posted along with the gameplay a few days back:

…we think we owe you a few words of explanation on why we’re showing you this gameplay now. Some time after industry professionals and media saw it at E3 and Gamescom.

Each time we discussed the idea of showing the game to you (and we discussed this idea a lot), we were ending up in this ‘we’re not 100% sure’ limbo. Why? Because (for most people), when a game dev shows gemeplay footage from their game, It means that this is how the game is going to look or play like It’s not the case here. Cyberpunk 2077 is deep in development We haw a lot of design ideas, a lot of mechanics are being playtested, but we don’t know what we’ll end up with at launch. This makes publishing videos like what you Just saw risky — we don’t want gamers saying ‘but In that previous video that gun was shooting differently’, or ‘why did you change the interface?’ Change is Inherent to video game development and there’s a ton of things being modified each day. Our fear was (and kind of still is) that you’ll think what you past saw is how Cyberpunk 2077 will look like 1:1.

Developers being hesitant to show off their games isn’t a trend I want continued.

A downgrade in graphics

Moving on from puddles (finally), people have also been claiming that Spider-Man’s suit textures aren’t as detailed as before. There’s also the claim about downgrades to lighting and shadows.

The image being cited is this:

Now anyone with a bit of knowledge with how games work will know that these two scenes are under completely different lighting, rendering them useless for a comparison. This is a problem we often face with our own graphic comparisons trying to replicate situations that provided a 1:1 comparison.

There’s also the fact that both of the above shots are from a moving video. Also do note that they’re, from what I can tell, not even direct feed screenshots, so please avoid using compressed screenshots for comparisons as you can’t tell how compressed they are. One image could be compressed 1:8 while the other could be 1:4, obviously the latter would look better in a comparison if used in a vein similar to the image above even if the direct feed shot favored the prior.