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The Witcher 3 Graphical Downgrade?

I think it's fairly obvious that the *one* low-fidelity, blurry Witcher 3 trailer I've seen is indicative of either nothing (just a sorry, hastily thrown-together trailer from someone who really didn't know how to do it), or else it's what people can expect from xBone consoles--the low end of the gaming market--or when running 5-10-year-old GPUs in a PC. That blurry trailer that I saw--not recently but a few months ago--was really, really *bad* looking graphically. If that's the way the final, ultra-settings PC version looks CDPR is going to have a riot on its hands, but...

I'll be shocked beyond belief if the game for PCs isn't highly scalable in terms of texture size, detail, lighting, and the rest of it. Scalability has been with us for--well, forever, in terms of the current market. CDPR would have to be the dumbest developer in history to put out a PC version that looks awful just because they thought it was important to make console owners "feel good" about being dimwits...;) But I've never known CDPR to be dumb so I don't believe a word of this at the moment. The proof will be in the pudding, as they say...
 
I think CDPR will have made a good game regardless of any parity with consoles.

I am sure there are a plethora of settings PC Gamers can modify to increase fidelity and that's enough for me.
 
Funny how all these AAA titles keep doing this, save one. GTAV. RS went balls deep to deliver the very best PC game it could.

Did not expect this from these guys though.
 
schizrade said:
Funny how all these AAA titles keep doing this, save one. GTAV. RS went balls deep to deliver the very best PC game it could.

Did not expect this from these guys though.
Click to expand...

Money does that to small companies. They felt the lust of console profits and went full consolification.
 
Litfod said:
It's a non-issue just like it was with Watch Dogs, turned into some sort of scandal by people with nothing better to be outraged by this week.
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WatchDogs was a different animal. In that, they had made an E3 specific map with E3 specific settings. When the trailers came and they were asked about it, instead of owning it and saying "yes, we had to scale back graphically" they lied and tried to hide it.

I mean the graphic settings were labeled "E3".
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Maybe, but if it lowers system requirements for PC owners, that makes the game more broadly playable for people who don't waste their time with staying keep up with upgrades or prefer to buy more sensible computer equipment.
Click to expand...

Leave an option in for the highest end PC gamers. They should know that the minority is always the loudest when it comes to these things.

If anything announce Ultra Gfx as a patch coming later. It may cost a bit for the dev but will make that back 10 fold by having countless screenshots, Youtube videos & gaming sites down the line of people maxing the game out on the crazy/uber settings promoting the game and getting many others to buy it regardless of platform & PC specs. /thread
 
Domingo said:
While not the end of the world, they are pushing and selling pre-orders for the game...so in a sense they are selling a product based on their trailers. If a game were to have no pre-order option or incentive then I suppose it would be different.
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That is a good point, people are not getting what they thought they were. However even without pre-orders this is still a bait-and-switch scheme here.
 
runudownquick said:
Leave an option in for the highest end PC gamers. They should know that the minority is always the loudest when it comes to these things.

If anything announce Ultra Gfx as a patch coming later. It may cost a bit for the dev but will make that back 10 fold by having countless screenshots, Youtube videos & gaming sites down the line of people maxing the game out on the crazy/uber settings promoting the game and getting many others to buy it regardless of platform & PC specs. /thread
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, that is a lot easier said than done. From the rumors that we've heard, this isn't a matter of just missing particle effects and lower quality textures. They apparently went in and re-did a lot of the rendering code. Entire features were hacked from the rendering pipeline in order to optimize the core as much as possible. Going back and adding those, and then making sure that it all played nicely with the current build, would be a monumental task.
 
Hopefully the video was a calculated move to lower expectations for PC gamers with heavy hardware. That would also mean it's a given that, yes, they are underdelivering compared to what was expected, but the silver lining would be that there are settings beyond "Ultra" that can be enabled.

Maybe the settings are buried in a config. It's also possible that a later patch will expose the settings.

Long story short, most of their income will come from console sales right after release. Following from that, they might have decided that allowing cards like nVidia's Titan to be able to extract all the visual quality its hardware is capable of would cost them many millions of dollars in lost console sales.

Hopefully, like in the past with Crysis 2, a patch that contains content for those with expensive cards will be coming. It might truthfully be the case that such a patch is being worked on as we speak. That would eliminate any possible bad feelings over the content being there, but inaccessible at the moment.

If I had to bet, I'd say it's a bit of both. I think there will be settings in the config we can use, and that a patch with IQ goodies will be coming.

They will certainly be feeling the heat.
 
Dan_D said:
Here is an idea, have graphical settings in your game so that people of varying system configurations can play and enjoy the game. Oh wait..................:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

That idea's so crazy it just might work!
 
Quix said:
In most countries blatantly inaccurate marketing is illegal. It's mostly a US thing to allow totally unrepresentative marketing and it's utterly repugnant.
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We're pioneers!

WaltC said:
CDPR would have to be the dumbest developer in history to put out a PC version that looks awful just because they thought it was important to make console owners "feel good" about being dimwits..
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Have you not played many multi-platform games in the last decade?
 
I really hate this crap.

The fact that backroom deals with Microsoft are behind console parity is particularly disturbing.
 
You know when PSX game would come out like FF7 or FF8 and you'd see the glorious FMV scenes during the advertisement? Everyone knew that was not realtime footage, it was just icing on the cake. Then PS2 came along and you had developers like Killzone using FMV footage and *claiming* it was realtime. When confronted they backpeddled and said "well what we meant was the FMV scenes were supposed to *represent* what real-time *would* be like, but no it's not actually real-time but we promise it will look like this when it comes out!" Which turned out to be total horeshit obviously, hence why so many review sites grilled them on it.

From what I gather the Witcher 3 scenes really were real-time footage, no FMV, no pre-render. Just because it was all done on high end workstations meant to hit a target performance rate for future systems does not detract from the fact that they actually had a real game with those graphics running in real time. If it was real time back then then what the hell happened? Consoles happened. They realized they could not get it to look like that on a console. They could on a PC, but they didnt want the PC to outshine it, so they dumbed it down so console kids wouldnt question why they are still playing those damn things.

You know what got me into PC games? The first time I saw Doom. I was like "holy fucking shit this is possible?! Why the hell am I still playing these cartridge things!" Console dev's dont want to let that happen again. PC games must not be allowed to look too superior to a console game.
 
people are over-reacting...if there is any downgrade with Witcher 3 it won't be on the scale of Watch Dogs...it'll just be different from the videos from a few months back...a game can still look gorgeous even after a 'slight' downgrade
 
schizrade said:
Funny how all these AAA titles keep doing this, save one. GTAV. RS went balls deep to deliver the very best PC game it could.

Did not expect this from these guys though.
Click to expand...

GTA V PC was released year and half after ps3/xbox360 version
and half a year after ps4/xbone version

they had plenty of time / money / manpower to get things right
 
HardUp4HardWare said:
I really hate this crap.

The fact that backroom deals with Microsoft are behind console parity is particularly disturbing.
Click to expand...
Microsoft (1995): We've released an operating system with protected memory to protect our users. Here is a closed source proprietary API that works with our model and no one else's. You heard about OpenGL? Well we forced them to advertise it as a workstation API so it wouldn't compete against DirectX, or else we wouldn't have supported it in our development environment.

Microsoft (2007): We support PC gaming. Here is a program that forces you to have an Xbox Live account and pay for multiplayer.

Microsoft (2015): We support PC gaming. Xbox Live will be integrated into Windows 10 and allow you to stream Xbox ONE games to your PC.

Microsoft has been (not so) subtly trying to make gaming their sole proprietary domain for a long time.
 
What the BLEEP is this bullshit the game is unreleased for BLEEPS sake leave them be.

News flash for the uninformed; developers do pretty demo's to show what they are capable of and what a game engine is capable doing. the developers doing this is not meant to be a BLEEPING visual feature check box or any representation of what the final game is going to look like. Till a game has shipped guess what stuff can change if this makes you angry then dont waste your time complaining.
 
chockomonkey said:
No child left behind. Really tugs at your heartstrings until you realize that everyone is being held back by the r-tard in the class.
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Seems they're only talking about the two consoles. Who knows, maybe they'll actually put out a PC version which looks like the gifs
 
Looks fine to me, not sure what you guys are bitching about:
geralt_8bit-460cx160.jpg


Its the GAMEPLAY that matters, not PC-grade graphics.
 
Ducman69 said:
Looks fine to me, not sure what you guys are bitching about:
geralt_8bit-460cx160.jpg


Its the GAMEPLAY that matters, not PC-grade graphics.
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Gameplay does matter, that is not the issue.
The issue is that the DEVs purposely avoided using console features that could have made the game look better without compromising gameplay.

And let be blunt it is because is would have made the PS4 look better than the XB1. Bottom line and I don't see any reason to ignore that fact.

Why hold back gaming? Money, power, that is why. Devs do not want to get on MS shitlist.
 
Making games for 2 different platforms work as one has worked just fine.
Look at Microsoft, windows 8 and on has worked beautifully for both desktop and tablet users. :)


Seriously I would rather have a game made for my PC rather than some hacked up crap.
 
polonyc2 said:
people are over-reacting...if there is any downgrade with Witcher 3 it won't be on the scale of Watch Dogs...it'll just be different from the videos from a few months back...a game can still look gorgeous even after a 'slight' downgrade
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I'm sorry... have you seen the pics and vids of the "slight" downgrade?

What i am hoping is going on here is that we are comparing the high-end PC from 2013/14 to the xbox 720 lower res video of 2015.

I hope. Else.... I'll be peeved.
 
HardUp4HardWare said:
And let be blunt it is because is would have made the PS4 look better than the XB1. Bottom line and I don't see any reason to ignore that fact.

Why hold back gaming? Money, power, that is why. Devs do not want to get on MS shitlist.
Click to expand...
I know, I was being facetious with my 8-bit graphics! ;)
 
I'd be more concerned about shitty gameplay than a visual downgrade myself.

Everyone has different priorities though I guess.
 
If I may cross-post into this Witcher 3 thread too:
I am behind here. Is there any actual evidence that this downgrade happened due to decisions that were made to make it easier to develop/port for consoles (or easier to develop/port for PCs)? Meaning, has anyone at CDPR actually said "we can't do this with the PC build because of consoles" or something that clearly indicated that.

The reason I ask is: what if someone tests the game on a machine with a stable high-end X99 motherboard, a 100% stable highly-overclocked i7-5960X, four 100% stable overclocked Titan Xs in quad-SLI, 32GB of high-speed DDR4 running in quad-channel, and a high-end SSD with both the OS and the game itself installed onto it. Nothing else besides the OS/game is running in the background. And on this machine, at the absolute maximum possible graphic settings, the game only barely runs at 1080P 60FPS (or less), and the CPU/Titans/RAM are clearly being utilized without any poor coding causing a bottleneck, and with the release-build, at those settings it ends up looking better than any other open-world game on the market at maximum settings.

Assuming that poor optimization or intentional limitations are not found/identified, would it then be reasonable to say that it was not the consoles and simply a failure to achieve, with current hardware limitations, what they originally set out to achieve? Which in that case, you cannot blame them for giving it a shot, and it is good giving it a shot.

Of course, if/when that happens, and the game is clearly not even trying to use un-utilized power from the CPU/Titans/RAM, we know what actually happened even if they say otherwise. If it turns out the PC build was in ANY way limited by console considerations, I will definitely be boycotting CDRP with my wallet. But is there actually any evidence (and not just 100% speculation) right now that consoles are the cause of this downgrade?
 
One of the effects dropped from the game is apparently Ambient Occlusion, which seems insane to me since we've had that in some form since F.E.A.R back in 2004. Still at least that's something simply enough to inject into the game, Nvidia will probably have driver level HBAO inside a month.
 
I guess the question is are they able to run something effectively using DirectX 11 and 1080P ... if they can do that then they would satisfy 70+% of the market ... very few PC users need more than 1080P (except for multimonitor gamers ... and multimonitor support in games is spotty at best, even for PC only titles)

We can whine all we want but a game that can do 1080P effectively will satisfy 100% of PS4, 100% of XBox One, and 70+% of PC Gamers ... we can laugh at those economics all we want but they make sense
 
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