This sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me. He says that there was nothing to downgrade since there was nothing that was playable at that time and then he talks about trailers and whatnot. What I am talking about here is comparing the original demos that we saw back in 2013 (namely the godling demo and some others) to the gameplay that we are seeing now. And goes on about how what they did was optimization, not downgrading. Again, that sounds liek a bunch of bullshit. And of course they are going to deny any claims of downgrading. Why wouldn't they? Even then though, he didn't come out and say that "the final build looks just as good if not better than the gameplay demos that we showed years ago." What he does is talk semantics.
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can we please just rate the game for it's final version and not some lame demo they just rendered?. everything will be fixed via enb mods so chill.
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I personally am still withholding judgment of the game till I play it next week. Only then can I make judgment of any kind.
Its a bit silly that it has to be modded to look like the preview gameplay trailers that got a lot of people interested in the game in the first place (lets not get into "fans of the series were interested anyway" arguments). Don't get me wrong its probably better for CD Project's bottom line that more PC's and the "next gen" consoles can handle the game but looking at the screenshots that were claimed to be in game rendering it does make a lot of people think it was a bait and switch.
Realistic game development is all about sacrifices, they are decided to focusing on a certain visual styles, a certain gameplay style and making practical choices about what to have and not have or sink the companies time, money and energies into means some things change but the difference is very noticeable and CD Project should be honest with its customers and fans, tell them what got cut and be honest why it was cut.
If those graphics were possible on only the tip tier cream of the crop money sink PC's I believe that there shouldn't be any reason to leave them out. Leaving it out doesn't do any favors because of the very obvious visual parity between the current console versions and current PC version leaves a lot of people feeling there was a significant downgrade.
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Why should I care?
As long it will play at 4K res.
I can get pong to play at 4k too.
yeah we didnt have the whole downgrade fiasco back in the pong days . . . or maybe we did and just dont know?! Perhaps pong was downgraded as well and would benefit from an ENB.
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4K gameplay on ultra.
And at the bottom of this page uncompressed 5K screenshots from the same gameplay. These do look like that fabled E3 trailer.
So now that the game seems (seems not for sure) to be able to actually deliver what was ¨promised¨ in that damn trailer from 2013 let´s see how many of us are able to have a 1000E Titan X so that we can actually play it like this (and that is the reason why this debate has no meaning).
You don't understand any of this do you?
We shouldn't let it slide when a game is advertized with what is claimed to be in game footage and then the released product is obviously different, we shouldn't ignore the obvious disparity between early previews and the current game. Some people you know, preorder (as stupid as it is to preorder imo) and the game had very long preorder period with discounts on various games stores. Buyers thought they were buying one thing but received another its a very shitty business practice. Lets ignore gameplay for a few seconds because we don't have a demo and say that games are sold mainly on their visuals, that is screenshots and videos of the gameplay. Now you can get all defensive and claim anyone who buys a game based purely on visuals is being extremely vapid (and youre not wrong) but high quality visuals do add to the immersion and gameplay. Long and short of it is a not insignificant number of people believed the Witcher3 would look a lot better than it does.
If you wanted your portrait painted, you'd go shopping around and see what you can get, some portrait painter shows off what he/she can do so you got really interested in his/her work and commissioned the artists to paint your portrait, if what you get at the end isn't up to the quality of their work that was shown off you'd be pretty dam pissed wouldn't you?
Lets be realistic here, sometimes things get cut from games for all kinds of reasons, sometimes time and money are a factor, sometimes the artists are a bit too ambitious, sometimes aspects of gameplay are just not fun or working out. The worst thing that a developer can do is pretend nothing has been changed. The situation has been miss managed.
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And why would we not want awesome graphics if it is really hard to push? That is terrible reasoning. Just because you can't afford the graphics horsepower to play it doesn't mean that no one would. And in a few years, it won't be hard anymore. Look at HL2. That game was a benchmark. Now? It can be played just fine with integrated graphics. Give it another ten years and this game won't be too hard to run either. So make something that has a longer half life ( ;) ), make something that will still be impressive years down the road. People on pc play games that are decades old all the time. So "it would be really expensive to get decent frames at those settings" is a completely asinine arguement.
Not to mention lower settings exist for a reason. A worn out rusted down poop box from 2010 or 2011 eh don't expect those to play new games at highest settings in the year 2015, expect them to be lowered if nothing else.
I do not know guys maybe I am naive and blind but I never took too much heed of that 2013 trailer. I thought it as a showcasing of the engine and nothing more.
I saw every piece of actual PC gameplay shown the last two years and I do not see any reduction in quality between them and the most recent PC gameplay I could find (the one I posted before). And the screenshots from that last one look (to me) even up to par with the in-engine trailer from 2013, which I never thought possible. If the final game is as it is being presented in to those gameplay videos I will feel that CDPR will have delivered exactly what they promised. If not then I would feel that they tricked their clients. Passing any other judgement before I even see the game goes into tinfoil hat territory for me.
And I really do not see the logic behind judging visual quality of a whole open world game from a old trailer showing just 30 seconds of footage that are not even gameplay especially when there were hours of gameplay presented afterwards.
Take that opinion as you will...
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Polygon review:
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt review: off the path
Some guys response to the review:
The Boy Who Cried White Wolf: On Polygonâs The Witcher 3 Review
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The guys at The Astronauts seem like some level headed people. Also, avoid Polygon and Kotaku et al like the plague.
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Ya, but doesn't a game designed for extremely high end hardware look kind of bad on low settings. Say compared to if you optimized it more mid range cards that people have now ? I too, kind of would prefer what you're talking about, but at the end of the day, their going to go with whichever gives them the best visuals for people's hardware.
Then again, maybe I'm wrong about this, what do I know.
There is no reason that they couldn't, theoretically, have a game that both looked great on ultra and also looked good on low with the appropriate performance differences. Realistically, I guess that they would have to lean one way or they other as they wouldn't have the resources to really optimize well on the low end settings as well as make the higher end look outstanding. So, in a sense, this COULD be why they would do somehting like that. However, I assume that it has something to do with console parity as well as them overselling what they were going to make. I think they made it look too good in the demos because that was what they thought they would be able to attain, and that goal wasn't realistic. The problem here is that the graphics sold a lot of people on the game. As shallow as that may sound, it is the truth. Hell, I wouldn't have been interested in the game either if I didn't see the cinematic, deep atmosphere in the demos that I did. It is just dishonest and false advertising.
The validity of this claim depends on the source of the screenshots. If you are going to compare xbox to pc then yes you have a point but if you are going to claim pc graphics will be downgraded by showing consoles screenshots I'd think you were an idiot.
Apparently the Dev's are claiming they "turned off a feature that caused eye strain" to which I call bullshit (for PC users, we are a vastly different breed to the console peasants). The sad thing is the number of people who've already admitted to buying the game before it's out, who are defending it.
By all means, have at them, because they're either defending incompetence, or "parity" http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/367994-the-witcher-3-developers-assures-textures-remain-the-same-from-2013/page-3#entry4983102
I got it for free with a GPU, which I later returned. So, hopefully you can mess around with an ini file to get it to look like the gameplay trailers.
Maybe it'll be another Watch Dogs, in terms of messing with the graphics.
The great Wendell has spoken.