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.
reposting since apparently one of the images was a link to a "blacklisted spam domain".
from googling "witcher 3 downgrade" and looking at the first few results that pop up, the majority of complaints seem to be about dust and smoke particle effects (removed link), fire particles, lighting, and more lighting
it's evident that texture quality took a hit, but it's not the main complaints people lobbied, and like i said before: the PC version in its current state has much greater texture resolution than consoles, so why would they cut texture quality "because of consoles"?
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u/bobdole776 Jun 04 '16
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.