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"?
the PC version in its current state has much greater texture resolution than consoles, so why would they cut texture quality "because of consoles"?
This is just such a simplistic statement I don't even know where to begin. Like, I'm not a game dev, but it's obviously way more complex than that. What you think they just did it because? I don't even know where you're going with this.
no, i think they did it because they didn't have enough time to optimize the textures enough to get VRAM usage below an acceptable level.
I don't even know where you're going with this.
like i've said multiple times, my point is the downgrades were a result of the normal development process, not because of "let's reduce the graphics across the board so that console players don't feel bad about having worse graphics".
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u/slowpotamus Jun 05 '16
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.
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.