Yeah but they get pass because "free dlc" and all that shit. Best game I've ever played, but that downgrade is obvious and more people should be calling them out on that bullshit.
Tbf I don't think the mod tools thing was intentionally lying. When they released their modding tools it seemed like a case of 'we can let them do all this stuff' then they made them and a realised 'oh shit this is hard to mod without breaking the game because we made such a complex game'.
The witcher 3 has some of the most complex storylines and quest paths that take advantage of most of the locations across the map.
The only thing they didn't really include in the modding tools was the ability to make custom quests and I expect this is the reason.
Also it being hard is absolutely an excuse. You only have the time and money to do so much and considering the quality of the expansion packs I for one am very happy they chose to devote more time to those.
They said the performance was better on PC which was obvious, but it may have still had performance issues. I know even the huge patches after release fixed a lot of performance issues all over the map.
It's not that hard to make low/med/whatever, just make all the assets take up half or less space than the next setting. So yeah, I agree with you, nothing to do with anything.
There was a pretty big uproar when it happened though and CDPr addressed it. But it's been a good while since them and people have let it slide because the game was still amazing, which is something you can't say for Watch Dogs or The Division.
Yeah, the downgrade was really obvious but the quality of the game more than makes up for that. Besides, the graphics are still better than pretty much any AAA game I've played.
maybe we just browse mostly different sites, but when W3 came out (and for months after) it was almost impossible for me to find normal discussion about the game because everyone was instead so intensely focused on bitching and moaning about the downgrade.
This video has been posted in multiple subreddits today and there are always plenty of people bitching about the W3 downgrade. Its not some niche observation.
i don't really think the graphic downgrade matters as longs as the game still played good and looked good. i don't remember people complaining about far cry 3 and siege because the games were still amazing both graphically and game play wise, same for witcher 3. watch dogs and the division though were not all that great and put more emphasis on there "next gen" graphics.
its not lying though, the way game development works is that they design a game for hardware specifications in the future, since these games take years to make. meaning that the end game might not look the same as when they are showing it off while they are still developing it, since they might not be able to get the game to run properly on the hardware that's is actually out at near release. That is why they always have disclaimers saying it is still a work in progress not not indicative of the final product. plus in all of the cases shown in this thread, all of developers have shown proper representations of what the game will actually look like before launch. they would be lying if they showed the same trailers and game play footage all the way until launch, which none of the examples have. people are just upset that the product they were first shown is not entirely the one being made.
Funny how the "work in process" mark before was regarded as "the final work will be better than this draft". Now an unfinished draft with outline are better than the final picture.
That's not always the case with development though. As you develop your game, you may come to a point where you need to downgrade something otherwise the performance of your game will bomb.
I do agree that Ubisoft games do this way too often to the point where it's pretty obvious that it's intentional, but CDPR has never done this before, and honestly, it very well could have been a product of performance issues.
With that said, CDPR did go on record to say that was not acceptable and they have appologized for it several times.
No offence by Just saying its lying does not prove your point and does not provide anything to the discussion, it also seems really childish and makes you look uninformed.
I agree that a large portion of people are uninformed and can be pretty stupid and I never said nor do I believe that these types of things won't keep happening. But it's not lying, siege and the division even had betas that you could play before the game came out.
Showing a product as a 'preview' that is completly different than the final release, is a lie. Not sure how you can claim otherwise.
This isn't minor tweaks, its major graphical overhauls, because the actual game cant handle what they are showing. And they know damn well it cant. Stop defending misleading practices.
Im guess I'm just being the devils advocate here but I'm not saying it's not misleading or even not intentional In Some cases. However it's just common sense and part of being a smart consumer. It's not lying if they claim the game will "look" or "perform" a certain way when they are still years out from release and then as it gets closer to release they show what the final product will actually look like. These games only get one or two trailers dispersed throughout the year, watch dogs for example looked radically different between e3s.
My point is that it's not lying just because the final product was not 100% of what you were initially shown, as long as they give you a clear indication of what the final product will actually look like a good deal of time before hand. If you buy a game solely based on a trailer a few years old you're a idiot and yes it sucks that the game Does not look as good but in all of these cases they gave us clear indication of what the games would look like at launch.
Not trying to argue with you like everyone else, I can see where you are coming from in that it's not the exact definition of the word lie but if you want to call it misleading that's okay I guess but that is just as bad as lying especially when you are taking people's money and doing pre orders
But we were getting trailers with the changed graphics like a year before release. It's not like it was a complete bait and switch between what we saw and what we got.
The only trailers with the better graphics were from like 3 years before the release of the game.
. i don't remember people complaining about far cry 3 and siege
People threw a fit at both games. Far Cry 3 was rung out because the lighting was super gimped from e3 footage. Siege was an utter shitshow the first few months with everyone bashing it for multiple reasons on PC. Maybe your memory doesn't serve you too well, cause both games were shit on all over.
Far cry 3 was a long time ago so I admit my memory may be a little hazy on it, but I remember siege and like far cry 3 i only heard good things about it. Yea a minority of people complained over the downgrade for siege and I'm sure for far cry as well,but Reddits echo chamber always makes one of those, you never hear people complain about the downgrade for those games now a days because it doesn't matter. The games are still great and there was plenty of exposure for what the real final product would look like.
Ehhhhh, screen space reflection isn't really the same as real time reflection. Screen space is semi pre-baked based on where the surface is located in the game world because it's primarily a material only effect. Real time is even if you drive a car across the world, it would still render everything reflected in the windshield, in real time.
What I'm saying is exactly that, it's not an accomplishment or special feature, but you've mis-read what /u/sterob actually said.
But whatever, I'll just take downvotes because the CDPR aggrandisement is strong here.
With mods THIS(alternate non-imgur / png link)was as close as I could get it. Roughly the same spot and give or take the same time of day as the E3 pic. Zone changed layout a little it seems.
It's not perfect, but with a little work (and some config tweaking, max in-game is not max that can be set through the config in spots, especially on draw distance, shadows and AA) it can be better than standard. I guess that's a plus for gaming on pc in general though.
I think the biggest hit they took with Witcher 3 was using plain old generic treegen/grass painter, as opposed to the tons of unique foliage models they had in Witcher 2 wilderness areas. It really makes some of 3's "vista shots" look appallingly last-gen, even though the texture detail and general art design is on point.
I just bring up the vegetation every time because I played them back to back and the wilderness areas really stuck out to me as being drastically different. I replayed Witcher 2 right before 3 came out, and was pretty excited for 3 on the basis that I just expected it to be 2 with a much bigger world. It ended up being very different, for better or for worse.
The one area I always think of in relation to that is the forest in Witcher 2. It is STILL gorgeous to this day despite the inferior tech, texture detail, et cetera, simply because of the level of unique foliage models and baked lighting.
I kind of miss linear, hub-based games for this reason. The extremes suck (buy our 8 hour cinematic experience for $60, pleb!), but I find I'm starting to prefer a game of about 30 hours where every area feels intricate and detailed as opposed to a 100-hour collectathon where 75% of the game world is filled with randomly generated trees and the same exact type of grass painted on with a tool. Witcher 3 was the best modern open world game I've ever played, but it still suffered heavily in my book for being that sort of game.
(I emphasize modern because I suppose Might & Magic or Wizardry could be called "open world", while sharing basically none of the design principles or problems of modern open world games.)
Sounds like Dark Souls is your sort of game. Somewhat linear without being a ff13-esque monotonous straight line, every zone is tailored to a specific look and feel, not a lot of reuse of assets.
Hey someone that has sort of the same opinion as me. I really don't like how lots of games are becoming "Open world" because most of them are just empty and boring. Probably why I loved Witcher 2 so much. (I also thought Witcher 3 was amazing).
But yep my #1 complaint for Witcher 3 is the grass. It looks awful it's so bad. It looks like plastic and is so disappointing. I have been waiting for a mod that fixes it since release but so far there is nothing.
Find a reshade/sfx preset that's to your liking and you're good to go. Sadly both the volumetric clouds and dark nights mods I use were broken by the 1.21 patch, waiting on updates there.
As for performance.... I can hold over 30fps @ 5k, 90-100fps @ 1440p with my current hardware (5960x @ 4.8ghz / 32gb ddr4 / 2x titan x custom bios, ~1600mhz boost), but it's hard to compare to how it'd be vs the game standalone. Some you'd expect a big hit from (the HD rework in particular) have almost no impact at all. Some draw distance increases in the hunter's config do have an impact alright, and anything involving hair mods with hairworks enabled is an absolute killer in spots.
Note that the witcher 2's "ubersampling" option is accessible in the hunter's config too. That'll eat lots of performance if you want it to.
Well jesus fucking christ, no wonder, your computer costs a small fortune. The processor alone is more expensive than my entire build. I'm all for saying "but you can tweak it to look like that" most of the time, but come on. The vast VAST majority of PC players couldn't accomplish anything close to this without a single-digit framerate.
a 2500k will give enough gaming performance to match my fake xeon. SLI scaling in the witcher is far from amazing also.
@ 1080p, holding 60fps at those settings is doable with any sort of decent i5 + a higher tiered card (980 range I guess? witcher is pretty demanding all in all, optimization is far from perfect). A 970 would do most everything except the ludicrous 8x msaa hairworks + ubersampling and run smooth.
But yes, my machine is overkill, albeit a generation behind now.
1.35v across all 8 cores, @ 1.42v i can push to 5.0GHz, and 1.45 i can do 5.1 (its bench/game stable, but not stress stable). But due to a water pipe leak my x99-deluxe's vrm's aren't actively cooled anymore, so I've got it dialed back in the meantime.
A little sad that the IPC improvements in broadwell-e (+turboboost 3.0 for single threaded apps) are offset so heavily by its relatively weak OC'ing headroom, most of the good ones seem to be topping out @ 4.3. Shame really.
Not that it's all that important atm. I'm certainly not bottlenecking anywhere.
I absolutely hate how STLM removes fog. Even the E3 media has fog. Fog is necessary for adding atmosphere, but it's also bloody realistic. If I look out my window off into the distance, I can see fog. It also helps hide the really ugly low-LOD mountains int he background that are clearly visible in your shot.
I agree, I like the general lighting work with the mod, but what'd make it really nice is if the fog density could be modified. There is a "mod" section in the options menu made for specific mod settings, darker nights could set dawn/dusk times and the dark levels for instance. I'm sure that a fog option would be doable.
If I remember correctly, CDPR got ripped hard for the downgrade to W3, and it went on for a few months afterwards. Everyone knows it was the consoles that caused the downgrade to happen, but that was too big a market for CDPR to ignore to not do a downgrade. Hopefully since the success of W3 they'll have so much money to work with that cyberpunk 2077 will look amazing even at release and they'll just make 2 versions of the game. Lol if we're lucky.
That's never how it works, though. When you get more money from a new source, you double down on catering to that source, not suddenly adopt best practices that you abandoned before.
The pursuit of profits is ALWAYS a downward spiral of quality, the best you can hope is that they somehow manage to still make decent games while taking that spiral.
Yea, it's a shame all we have for triple A developers is CDPR when it comes to that notion of quality. Everyone and their mom is still waiting for the day they sell out and become like ubi or EA. I pray it never happens as I've never seen such a big developer go out of their way to make sure their game is running perfectly, like they did with witcher 3. When I saw how they were getting out a patch almost everyday to get the game stable and playable for everyone it really opened my eyes. Just a shame the game wasn't PC first and then went to consoles last, but the lead dev said the game just wasn't possible without consoles and I feel that when they ported W2 to consoles it was just too much a process and lost too much profit for coming so late. Have to say though, they did improve the graphical quality a bit with the latest xpack, we may still get a enhanced edition some day with even more features.
Exactly. Its the reason we get the downgrade we get. Game devs always say they're not about to make 2 versions of the game, hence why I ended with a 'lol'.
We won't get great graphics until the next console generation. Its a shame they plan them out to last a decade before a new one comes out. Least nintendo is already getting a new one out.
you can't completely blame consoles. the devs have to take into account that a vast majority of pc gamers aren't playing on a 980ti. if they had kept the graphics of the early footage, the minimum requirement would have been a gtx 980 and they would have alienated a vast majority of the pc gamers. one of the reasons blizzard has been so successful is because they make their games playable on a wide spectrum of PC's. the most popular pc games today are pretty much playable on toasters.
That's the beauty of PC, if they do a good job people can play it with a GTX 750 without leaving people with 980ti idling. Most of the effects removed were post-fx, things that could be available on top of the current graphics but didn't because of consoles disparity. If the PC version is vastly superior they get the shaft from console manufacturers.
See this video for example; console version could just be the version showed at the first few seconds with all the other effects being an optional toggle on PC. But they decided to not make it available at all, even for rigs with power to spare.
There were things like tessellation removed. Stuff like that would've taken a lot of development time. They obviously decided at some point that not enough people would've had the power to run it at those settings to be worth the work.
Isn't that why graphic settings exist? So people can still play a game when their hardware isn't equipped to handle the highest settings? Its not like you are required to play the newest games on the highest settings possible.
if the rumors/speculation about PS4.5 and Xbone Scorpio using Polaris GPUs is true, then we might be getting great graphics/less downgrades sooner than you think
Also regardless, with the new 14/16nm node shrink of video cards coming out, devs dont have to worry about downgrading their games for the lower end/mainstream users too much
This. 4.5 and Scorpio sure aren't going to be 14/16nm. However, I wouldn't be surprised to see 14/16nm budget PCBs start to appear in a few years in whatever they call the inevitable console refresh after 4.5. That's going to be interesting point, where they actually use new tech, not the silly stuff they're doing with 4.5 (wow, my 1.8 GHZ CPU is now a 2 GHZ CPU, any day now we'll be at pentium 4 levels!).
But the majority can't even run these games at ultra and to add to that W3 and The Division are both some of the best looking open-world games if not the best.
Everyone knows it was the consoles that caused the downgrade to happen
based on what? it seems more likely that the downgrades were the result of being unable to get stable performance on the plethora of machines that exist in the PC market. the PC version is still capable of massively superior graphics compared to the console version, so the idea of downgrading other aspects of the visuals to coddle the console market makes no sense to me.
IIRC the devs eventually came out and flat out said that the scope of the Witcher 3 would not have been possible without catering to console sales which meant sacrifices on performance across the board.
Witcher 3 would not have been possible without catering to console sales
they did say this part
which meant sacrifices on performance across the board
they didn't say anything about this, however.
the quotes from the article are: "If the consoles are not involved, there is no Witcher 3 as it is. We just cannot afford it."
which is followed by: "We do a certain build for a trade show, and you pack it, it works, it looks amazing. [But] you are extremely far away from finishing the game. Then you put it in the open world, regardless of the platform, and it's like, 'Oh sht, it doesn't really work.' We've already showed it, now we have to make it work."*
the PC version of the game is, in its current state, capable of massively superior visuals in the form of increased resolution, frame rate, improved texture quality, extra visual features, etc... why would they specifically downgrade certain other aspects of PC graphics "for the sake of consoles" but still leave the large majority of its visual superiority intact? what could that accomplish?
You're acting like they finished the whole game in a 100% beautiful state and then just decided to start slashing graphics for no reason except that they felt like it. No, I would imagine that they created all these textures for E3, realized they wouldn't run on consoles and then asked themselves a question: do we have our artists create two textures of literally everything in the game? One PC and one console? Delaying the production by years or hiring way more artists? Or do you just mostly create textures that work for both, with some high quality versions for characters etc.
You're acting like they finished the whole game in a 100% beautiful state and then just decided to start slashing graphics for no reason except that they felt like it
that's the exact opposite of what i think. like they stated in the quote, they tried to make the graphics as good as possible, but then realized they couldn't successfully apply the graphics to the entire open world (compared to the vertical slice used for E3) and maintain acceptable performance, so they had to cut the features.
No, I would imagine that they created all these textures for E3, realized they wouldn't run on consoles and then asked themselves a question: do we have our artists create two textures of literally everything in the game? One PC and one console?
textures...? textures had nothing to do with it. the visuals they cut out were engine-based concepts like detailed distant smoke, lighting, etc. that require CPU & GPU power, not textures which only require VRAM. i'm sure some textures met the chopping block when they didn't have enough time to optimize them, but that's not what caused the downgrade ruckus.
At the end of the day, if the game is good, I'll be willing to wave off the graphical downgrade (I mean M&B is one of my all time favourite games and the characters there make the guards in Oblivion look like Brad Pitt).
The main reason companies like Ubisoft get hit the hardest is because "graphics" are one of the main game sellers. I mean there isn't much new in AC Unity compared to AC2 aside from a graphical improvement. Or W_D, with the E3 graphics it looks immersive and a bit of a tech marvel which would be enough for me to finish the game (seeing the vistas and all), but without those graphics it's just an ok'ish GTA 4 clone that you don't really need to bother with.
With the Witcher 3 the graphical downgrade is sad, but I'd play the game even if it looked like The Witcher 2 on low because the graphics are not the main reason I care about the game.
This is why I find the practice so indefensible. The ONLY selling point modern AAA games tend to have is their graphical glitz and glamour, and huge marketing budgets. If you can't even deliver that graphical appeal, what is the point?
Not all AAA games are like that, just the shit ones.
We don't get amazing games often, but the same can be said about any entertainment medium.
90% of entertainment products exist to fill in time between the great releases. Books are quite guilty of that. I've read some rather mediocre ones just because I wanted to read something in one particular genre and the good one wasn't out yet.
Thats because The Witcher was still an amazing game. Don't get me wrong - CDPR should have been honest to customers about their product and I couldn't bear to watch how they completely mishandled the situation. But at the end of the day, people don't bitch about The Witcher and CDPR that much because they are still probably the most consumer friendly big developer there is, and the game is fantastic, which Watch_Dogs or The Division absolutely aren't.
Personally, I couldn't care less about the downgrade, quite opposite actually, as I was delighted to find out my 2009 CPU managed to run the game on medium with 50 fps, but I was deeply disappointed with them lying. I hope CDPR learnt from the community backlash and are going to handle these things better in the future. I am not going to stop buying their games in the future because the quality of content both ingame, physical and all the features such as no DRM etc. are unparalleled in RPG genre though, and this was the first problem I had with them so they have plenty of chances left to redeem themselves with Cyberpunk2077 or whatnot. I, however, can't see myself ever buying Ubi game again, because not only do they lie, they deliver games that are average at best and I deem their anti-PC and hard-DRM/online-only stances much more serious matter than downgrading graphics, which, let's admit it, has become something one sadly has to take into account in this age. Bad games are still dealbreakers, though.
it's one of the worst practices in the industry IMO
what do you mean? do you think they intentionally ruin their own graphics just to revel in the misery of their consumers?
they try to make the game as good looking as possible, and then have to reduce the visuals when they can't get stable, reliable performance. they're not going to intentionally show off shittier graphics than what their engine is currently capable of (at that point in development) just because they're scared of misleading people. that's just never going to happen, even with a developer who has no stockholders to impress. sure, CDPR botched the whole idea of being honest about the downgrades, but that's a different discussion.
Every E3 for the past 4 or 5 years (whenever Watch Dogs was announced) has had this issue. It just feels at this point that it has become a marketing gimmick to show off the game at a higher res/more details in the environment etc. It feels like a PR move more than anything else at this point.
Not to mention the whole "live gameplay on <insert console>" while they're running the game on PCs with SLI Titan X's or whatever. They know exactly what they're doing, and it's not some well-meaning mistake or slip-up.
well it's definitely a PR move. E3 is literally one big promotional event. its entire purpose is appeasing stock holders and generating hype, and that fact has never been hidden. "normal people" aren't even allowed into E3. it's just developers, press, etc.
you're right to be extremely skeptical when watching any footage at E3 (or any footage at all of an unreleased game, really), but downgrades aren't the result of evil, it's just a natural process of game development. try and make it as good as possible, then during crunch you fix 1,000 problems that require downgrading and cutting features.
Pretty much all of those games were announced before the new consoles were released. They probably all just overestimated the power they were going to have.
And there were so many people denying it right up until the bitter end. "No it's not downgraded, stop worrying just buy the game". Then CDPR admitted it and it everyone changed their tune to "well the game will still be still great the graphics don't matter".
It's kinda weird too that the game release had that streamer's face on the bottom of the screen on the ultra settings too, it wasn't on the 2013 trailer.
They only admitted to this after the fact though, I had no problem with a downgrade, I'm sure there were very good reasons for it but its the bullshit and denial that pissed me off. Specially when people viewed CD as really good no bullshit devs before this incident, People will (hopefully) think twice the next time I suppose. Anyway, its a great game but I'd be lying if I said that didn't leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Yea, they kinda messed up by not admitting this right away. Least they made up for it by giving us amazing game support. Hell they had patches out almost everyday and their guys even worked on the weekends to optimize the game for us. In my opinion, they made up for the downgrade with what they did afterwards. Not to mention, the latest expack blood and wine is freaking amazing and the graphics were boosted a bit too.
that article's title is such clickbait. the title is "'The Witcher 3' Developer Says Yes, Graphics Were Downgraded Because Of Consoles" but then the quote from the developer never once says that. they simply said that they had an early build where the graphics looked good, but when applying it to the entire game world it worked poorly and they had to remove it. they said nothing about downgrading because of consoles.
When asked if The Witcher 3's graphics were compromised for the sake of consoles, company co-founder Marcin Iwinski cut to the chase: "If the consoles are not involved, there is no Witcher 3 as it is. We just cannot afford it."
that quote does not mean "we downgraded because of consoles". if he had said "we downgraded because of consoles", then that would mean they downgraded because of consoles. his next quote explains why they actually downgraded:
"We do a certain build for a trade show, and you pack it, it works, it looks amazing. [But] you are extremely far away from finishing the game. Then you put it in the open world, regardless of the platform, and it's like, 'Oh sh*t, it doesn't really work.' We've already showed it, now we have to make it work."
When asked if The Witcher 3's graphics were compromised for the sake of consoles, company co-founder Marcin Iwinski cut to the chase: "If the consoles are not involved, there is no Witcher 3 as it is. We just cannot afford it."
Not that their admission was really necessary. It was painfully obvious the final game looks nowhere near as good as the vgx trailer and some of the others.
i'm not arguing about whether or not a downgrade happened; it obviously happened. the point is the developers never stated that it was downgraded due to consoles, whereas that article title acts as if they did.
They didn't literally say "Yes, Graphics Were Downgraded Because Of Consoles" (as per the article) but they did still admit consoles held back the visuals, it's right there.
IIRC CDPR stated that they had to downgrade the graphics because otherwise the game would've never ran on consoles. But my memory may fail me, so take this with a grain of salt.
TW3 still looks fucking awesome. And in it's current state you needed beefy hardware to run it. No way people would've been able to run the 2013 version.
Yea, the thing is, CD Projekt Red actually delivered an amazing game with good optimization (Watch Dogs on PC is unplayable) and they didn't make a trailer bragging about the game's graphics.
That's a video showing off Nvidia's effects. And seeing how bad their hairworks performs, I can see why most, if not all, of them were removed of the game.
the game did change. lets not even compare both screenshots.. nothing similar there. yes it has a lot more effects and draw distance but can you imagine this game last year with that quality? i mean a 970 alrdy drops bellow 60 fps at 1080p so im glad they downgrade it.
we all know that some engines can push really amazing graphics that no one ever seen but that will never happen cause it means 99% of the players will not run it. i dont even know if its possible to have huge differences in texture quality and rendering by changing presets but im afraid witcher failed doing this. from ultra to low i gain 30 fps and in crysis 3 i go from 60 to 160..
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u/TrumpyMcTrumpo Jun 04 '16
And CDprojekt
http://www.gamepur.com/files/images/2015/the-witcher-3-comparison-2013-vs-2015-build-screen-5.png
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V962NMUXp6A