@ferret-gamer said:
@blues35301 said:
Saw some people in denial about the downgrade.
Straight from the Dev's themselves. Fucking mind boggling. The Witcher was a PC centered franchise from the start and sold 10x more on PC than it did on 360 last gen. This is pointless for them to hold the game back for shitty 2011 hardware for the sake of the consoles being able to run it. Also this means the consoles can't match a 2013 PC build lol.
2013 was a tough time for CD Projekt RED simply because we were trying to create an entire bulk of the game on the older DirectX 9 renderer that we had in place for The Witcher 2. Most of the assets were created during the time we were creating our DX11 solution render pipeline to bring the next-generation experience to everyone. A lot of the footage including the debut gameplay trailer was done when the consoles were not even out and we only had an idea of the specifications of the system. This landed itself into problem territory when we realized the next-generation systems could not simply meet our graphical output to the desirable level of quality that we needed. There were several options: build three different builds OR CONSOLIDATE TO THE NEAREST DENOMINATOR, WHICH IS WHAT WE DID. We took the specifications of the lowest performing throughput system which I don’t care to mention here at all to avoid that discussion, and worked our way up from there. As almost a 250 man team, we sequentially had to take out/turn down a lot of features not just from our NVIDIA GameWorks pipeline but our normal game solution scripts as well – these include the following:
Level of horizon detail (essentially the draw distance had to be completely tuned down to tax the consoles less)
Volume based translucency
Ambient occlusion and foliage density / tree count
Flexible water simulation / tessellation we resorted to a (script texture effect similar to most games than physical based simulation)
Ground/building tessellation
Forward lit soft particles (this is the fire, smoke, fog that you would encounter while going through thick terrain into open space)
Real-time reflections in the water are completely off and replaced with a cheaper render solution estimator (this is a primary reason blood splatter was also removed from water)
We just did not have the manpower, budget or the console power to produce the vision we intended before the consoles were released to create a more visually stunning game of higher fidelity like 2013 assets. The PCs themselves had more than enough power to achieve this vision, almost certainly. But working on the game across 3 platforms did not make it feasible to keep features included that could potentially break the game as we kept building around it. All the 2013 trailers were actually in-game footage (not prerendered or vertical slices) but essentially just not an entirely finished world running on a high-end PC at the time.
Straight from the devs? You mean straight from some random no name blog without a source. The game is definitely downgraded, but that blogger was just making shit up. The game definitely has ambient occlusion, we have seen PC settings menu with multiple AO options. Water tessellation settings are also shown in the games config files.
Exactly this. There's so much technically wrong with this supposed "insider" quote, it's clearly written by someone with no real technical knowledge and 100% certainly isn't a dev.
The game still has screen space reflections on the water. It also clearly has volume based translucency.
The tessellation thing was also confirmed by Nvidia in their recent Witcher 3 article.
"This tessellation prowess also proves useful out on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s dangerous seas, whose waves and ripples are rendered solely through tessellation." http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-is-your-system-ready
I'm not saying that some things in the game haven't perhaps been downgraded, I'm just saying that that supposed developer quote is bogus. The fact someone would go out of their way to write something like this and pass it off as a quote from the developer is simply shameful. The fact that so many people are willing to believe such an absurdity simply because it seems to support something they want to be true shows how utterly disingenuous much of this downgrade talk is.
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