I am playing with the standard PS4.
Almost every game out there nowadays will get "the patch downgraded it"-threads in the forums and usually it's ******** and people just try to convince themselves ... saying things like "I can see it clearly, literally, it's like PS2 graphics now"
Then they start posting screenhsots of some rough corners of the gameworld as proof ... but you can make ugly screenhsots even in the most beautiful games and those rough corners they discovered usually looked as horrible before the acclaimed "downgrade-patch" hit.
And becasue auto-suggestion is a really strong and mighty thing more and more peolke will jump on the train and start thinking "yes, it's clearly way more ugly then before, I see it, too".
But I am normally completely unaffected by those threads ... in this case I am not so sure ... I do get the impression somethings not quite "there" anymore, too. But I try to find any real evidence and this is where it gets tricky.
First of all: Running around in the gameworld while aiming with the bow does indeed get you some really ugly sights with low-poly models and low-res textures all over the place.
Like in the many examples already posted in here and I do have some of these as well.
BUT:
I must say that I never watched the actual gameworld seeking for ugly things like that in "bow-view" ... until now I only used the "bow aiming" to actually aim at a target and fire ... so I can't tell if this hasn't been a problem with the 1.02 version ... If I could roll back to 1.02 than I could check it ... but sadly that's not possible on consoles.
Someone with the disc version might at least try to rollback to a completely unpatched 1.00 and check if there are the same ugly spots while aiminig with the bow. Then we'd have some proof.
But even besides the most obvious problems while amining with the bow I do think graphically AC:O does not impress me as much anymore since 1.04 ... but again ... this might actually just be auto-suggestion.
But I am finding some really rough sights over and over now and I believe I never stumbled upon such sights before ... quite the opposite: Before I spent literally hours just walking through this game world in awe of all the beauty ...
So here some examples what I stumble upon now:
With 1.02 and 1.03 everything looked like this:
But then again ... this doesn't proove anything ...like I said ... you can take ugly screenshots in even the most beautiful games if you really want to ... noone can tell if the "ugly screenshots" would have looked as ugly with 1.02 and the better screenshots below still look as good in 1.04 without actually doublechecking it.
For example: I still do have "good looking" shots with 1.04:
So a real comparison of the same scenes is actually needed...
Sadly I didnt do much screenshots with 1.02 ... the most were done with 1.03 (where first claims of "downgrading" already started).
So I tried at least to recreate some of the shots I made with 1.02 ... the most obvious difference I could find is in the following comparison ... but since you can only skip from moring to beginning of night without an option to wait for a speciific amount of time ingame (seriously, Ubisoft, I want that feature! Witcher 3 and the Bethesda RPGs do have that ... there should be an international law that says every open world game should have that option^^) the scene is at completely different times and therefore completely different lighting.
And this alone will make the 1.04 way more ugly than the 1.02 shot ...
But there is something I found apart from the lighting ... look at this:
And I do think that some of the stones and structures do have a slightly higher resolution in their textures in the 1.02 shot, but this could as well just be becasue of the different lighting (the rim lighting in the 1.02 shot should naturally emphasize structures more so this could defintely be the case here).
I made another comparison where I tried to wait for a similar ingame-time ... but in this I couldn't really find any definitive difference ...
the left one is 1.02 and the right one is 1.04
But what I think is clearly visible now is some struggle with the texture streaming ...
I don't get many pop-ups in terms of "sudden popping in of buildings/trees/people in front of me" ... but a constant delay in loading/streaming textures ...
Do any of you remember the shooter "Rage" from ID Software with the horrible megatexture technology that resulted in super slow streaming textures? Where you could look left and everything was super low-res and literally took seconds to load the actual high-res textures and then look back right and everything starts again with the low-res/high-res problems?
Something like that is now in AC:O ... not nearly as problematic as it was in RAGE, but I do spot a small delay in texture-streaming very often now and can't remember seeing anything of this before 1.04.
And there might be some sublte changes to some of the shaders as well (and to show these differences with screenhsots would be really hard) ... for example a lot of the "magic" in the lighting came from the flowing sand/dust-particles in AC:O ... especially during sunrise and sunset where everything becomes this special golden touch ...
Things like this:
And if one where to tune this down a little bit it would be something that could improve fps a little bit while having a huge impact on the overall visual impression without actually beeing able to show it in a screenshot ...
So maybe something like that is at work here.
But in the end it might just alll be imagination and we are convincing ourselves of a downgrade that is actually not really there. Like I said ... auto-suggestion is a reallly mighty thing.