The Witcher 3 Discussion Thread!

The Witcher 3!



The successor of the (god damn awesome!) Witcher 2 brings several new features to the table, including:

• A mature, non-linear story drawn from player decisions, full of unexpected events and beliveable, memorable characters, with their own motivations and ambitions

• Multi region open world. The world map is up to 30 times bigger than the map of Witcher 2 (which as already pretty god damn big)

• Sail trough the wind-swept and rugged islands off the coast of the Northern Kingdoms

• Explore multiple human settlements and villages including the thriving port city of Novigrad

• Uncover mysteries that lurk behind each tree and corner in the territories still soaked with blood from the recent war

• Dynamic and tactical combat. Unique, intuitive combat system blending a wide range of tactical elements with the most spectacular and dynamic combat sequences ever seen in a computer role-playing game

• Living ecosystems. Communities behave with realism, the flora and fauna form a living ecosystem, and they all react to in-game events...

• The best looking RPG to date (agreed, even heavily modded/ENB'd Skyrim/Fallout doesn't come close to this), competing with games in other genres in which the standard of visuals has traditionally been superior

... and much more! (I also dare to bet that mod support will be back like in previous titels!)

Trailer: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Debut Gameplay Trailer - YouTube

Awesome cinematic (they also have a realy awesome one for the Witcher 2): The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Killing Monsters Cinematic Trailer - YouTube

Site: The Witcher® 3: Wild Hunt

Developer: CD Projekt Red

Platforms: XBOX ONE, PS4 and of course, the PC!

Release date: Soon

This game looks realy promising to me, and knowing CD Projekt Red, I expect a fully polished game at launch (CDPR is probably the only developer I know that that properly polish their games before they release them).

 

Release date is is somewhere around Q3 2014, if I remember it correctly, so I guess no point in buying the new rig before that .
Really looking forward to this game. I loved the first one and enjoyed every minute I managed to struggle through the second game, but unfortunately it's unplayable on my laptop.

You are joking, right?

 

Hehe, I gues that gives me some time to save up for a new GPU.

Euhm, no. I have never had anny issues with their games.

 

Good for you (no sarcasm intended)!
But they didn't release those "Enhanced Editions" for nothing.

 

I had the same experience - hoping the third game is better optimized than the second.

 

I wouldn't count on Witcher 3 to run any faster than Witcher 2 did on the same hardware. In fact, quite the opposite. Witcher 2 was not a poorly-optimized game, it's splendid visuals (my favorite to date) just came at a high price, which is to be expected, not to mention it had a built-in supersampling option. Witcher 2 looked absolutely gorgeous and played fluidly on a high-end PC. Witcher 3 looks to be even more impressive in the graphics department with equally steeper hardware requirements to boot. This is one of those games that's worth upgrading your PC for in my opinion.

 

The Witcher II system requirements don't seem that high.

The Minimum Requirements

Processor: Core 2Duo 2.2 GHz or dual core AMD 2.5 GHz
RAM: 1GB Win XP/ 2GB Vista/7
Graphics: GeForce 8800 512MB or Radeon (HD3850 512 MB)
HDD Space: 16 GB

The Recommended Requirements

Processor: Quad Core Intel or AMD
RAM: 3GB Win XP/ 4GB Vista/7 Graphics:
GeForce 260 1GB or (HD4850 1GB)
HDD Space: 16 GB

 

Maybe for minimum,

But IMO Witcher 2 is still be the best looking single player game to date and to me it's the game that taxes hardware the most. I get higher framerate in BF4 at very high settings than Witcher 2 at high settings.

 

Haha I challenge you to actually play Witcher 2 with those systems. The minspec might get you 40 FPS at 720p Low if you're lucky, and recommended will get you 35 FPS at 900p Low.

6670 is minimum, GTS 450 is recommended:



And that's not taking into account that dual-core CPU's are a big no-no:



Witcher 2 is another one of those games where the developer grossly underestimates the hardware requirements. I'd expect whatever system they list under recommended requirements to be able to hit 900p or 1080p High, but clearly that's not the case.

Witcher 2 is the most taxing game I have, and I've got some heavy-hitters in my collection. Even BF4 in Beta ran faster than Witcher 2 does. But Witcher 2 also has the best graphics I've ever seen, and unlike twitch FPSes it doesn't require a perfect 60 FPS at all times to be enjoyable.

 

The jury is still out on what the minimum specs will look like for upcoming "next gen" games, but I hope W3 will be better optimized than W2 to make use of modern quad core CPUs instead of requiring a flagship GPU to run smoothly. If I understand correctly, some of these upcoming 2014 games will be 64-bit and more CPU intensive than older games, less bottlenecked by the graphics card.

Witcher 2 might have looked great at 1080p on your desktop, but in my case, after dropping down to 720p and minimum settings it looked pretty bad on my laptop and was still too laggy to play. I pre-ordered the game back in 2010, long before the release date and was eagerly awaiting it, but it was so laggy that I've never played it beyond the first couple of areas.

Among all the folks playing PC games, there are many with quad core CPUs and mid-range graphics cards, but those with a super high end desktop and flagship GPU are a somewhat smaller minority. Currently, the most popular graphics card in Steam's hardware survey is the Intel HD4000, and the No. 2 is the HD3000. As you mention Witcher 2 was only playing fluidly on a high-end desktop PC, in my view that is the exactly the sort of game that can benefit from better optimization, to make use of the faster CPUs and more scalable settings to be at least playable at 1080p without a super high end desktop graphics card.

More recent games like Far Cry 3, Bioshock Infinite, RAGE, Dishonored all run much better on my laptop at 1080p than Witcher 2 runs at 1280x720. Even the Crysis 3 multiplayer beta was playable at 1080p, but the frame rate was better at 1600x900.

At any rate I look forward to Witcher 3, but I'm certainly not going to pre-order this time. I'll wait to see initial reviews and if it turns out to require a flagship desktop GPU, then perhaps I'll wait a few years to buy the game at some point in the future whenever a mid-range laptop will run it. Also hoping the Cyberpunk 2020 game will not require a high end desktop.

 

Well, I should clarify that what I meant by a "high-end" desktop was actually a $750 tower I built around an i5-2500K and Radeon 6950 in 2011. It was a mid-range system back in its day and ran Witcher 2 fine, getting 40-50 FPS at High/Ultra settings with Ubersampling disabled. Nothing about that system was "flagship." I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a cutting-edge game to require a mid-range desktop or high-end laptop GPU to run well at 1080p and high settings as long as it scales well to the low-end, which Witcher 2 does if you turn everything down to Low at 720p.

And you keep referring to Witcher 2 as "unoptimized" but I simply don't find that to be the case. There is a difference between a game being very demanding and a game being unoptimized. Just because those games you listed run better than Witcher 2 doesn't necessarily speak to its poor optimization, because in my opinion Witcher 2 has better graphics than every one of them. I actually find the game to be quite optimized despite the sheer amount of work the engine is doing at any one time.

Witcher 2 does in fact take advantage of quad-core CPU's as benchmarks will attest to, but it is primarily a GPU-bound game. I actually prefer that to a CPU-limited game as the bottleneck is much easier to control on my end. Unlike extremely CPU-heavy games such as BF3 and PlanetSide 2 in which you are almost required to overclock your CPU to prevent large FPS dips and to get the most performance out of your GPU, Witcher 2 is pegged at 99% GPU usage almost constantly and will scale linearly to the amount of GPU power available. If I need better FPS, fine, I can easily overclock my GPU or upgrade it without having to worry about the finicky process of CPU overclocking or tossing out the entire mobo to upgrade the CPU. And in the case of laptops, most CPU's can't be overclocked or have very limited overclocking ability, while GPU's can be overclocked pretty easily, so you'd want games to be GPU-bound even more. I can tell you for a fact that I have never gotten BF3 and PS2 to run anywhere close to 99% GPU usage on any system with any amount of overclocking, but Witcher 2 maxes out the GPU right out of the box and I consider that to be a very good thing.

In fact, low GPU usage caused by the CPU being the primary limiting factor in performance has come to be known as a sign of a poorly-optimized game or a console port. See PlanetSide 2 (single-threaded), older Unreal Engine 3 games (only use two cores), GTA IV, or any Ubisoft console port (need I say more?) Cross-platform PC games in the last few years haven't pushed the GPU much because developers ran out of graphics horsepower on the aging GPU's of the current-gen consoles long ago. Instead, console ports have become a lot more CPU-dependent because developers have had to turn to leveraging the existing multi-core CPU power of the consoles. Considering the tri-core Xenon in the Xbox 360 and the 6-core Cell in the PS3, the CPU is clearly the component which can provide greater potential performance, hence the CPU being put to greater use in games by developers until the next generation of consoles.

Which is where the Xbox One and PS4 come in. Many PC gamers are excited about what they could mean for the optimization of future PC games, especially console ports, because the extremely weak per-core performance of the 8-core Jaguar will force game devs to code proper multi-threading into their games. This will make PC games less bottlenecked by the CPU and more bottlenecked by the graphics card, essentially reversing the troublesome trend we began seeing toward the end of the current-gen console lifecycle. In fact, some of the most exciting benefits of Mantle are how they relate to CPU performance. By enabling 9X more draw calls per second compared to other API's, Mantle will significantly reduce CPU overhead and allow perfectly parallel rendering that scales up to 8 CPU cores to avoid bottlenecking the GPU and the rest of the system.

 

I found Witcher 2 to be quite well optimized, too. There were a few weird things going on, though, such as shadows which on Low or Ultra resulted basically in the same fps (this is also verified on the Geforce tweak guide through charts). A better scaling performance-wise could have helped less powerful pc. Its high basic requirements also helped make it look good even on lowest setting (well, except if you also put the textures on lowest, but at the time VRAM wasn't a problem any more), which can't be said about other games that look horrible on lowest settings and become a waste of the engine and artistic ideas.
As for multi-threading, I hope they will improve CPU usage, but judging by Watch Dogs' recommended CPU (Core i7 3770 @ 3.5Ghz) for example, they seem to be going for raw power instead of proper optimizing. Overall, PC gaming has been suffering from the desire of pushing requirements just for the sake of buying new hardware (plenty of newer games require more than what they're worth graphic-wise), rather than properly benefitting from the true power.
All in all, I hope Witcher 3 won't go overboard with the demands and that it will be using the PC platform the best it can.

 

Yeah I was also suprised how fluently Witcher 2 runs on my single 780M. Everything at ultra except ubersampling is off (not that it makes a difference visually).

 

Yeah, I've discovered that as well. Witcher 2's built-in AA is the best post-process AA I have ever seen. Not only does it not blur the image at all unlike most FXAA and MLAA implementations, but it does a splendid job of nearly eliminating jaggies and even sharpens up the textures.

AA off vs. on.

Ubersampling further cleans up jaggies and sharpens up textures and the overall scene even more, but the effect is somewhat subtle and definitely not worth the astronomical performance hit.

Uber-sampling off vs. on.

 

Yes, that in-game AA is fantastic. I guess it's similar to SMAA fused with LumaSharpen.

 

You were surprised that your flagship Nvidia GPU (which was not even released until two years after Witcher 2) was able to run this game smoothly?

 

lol. yeah in 5 years they will be like crysis 3 suprisingly runs maxed on my brand new 3000 dollar laptop, kudos crytek for doing such a good job at optimizing. these young kids are slowly killing nbr with their unfounded unthoughtful opinions

 

Well, from what I heard it was realy demanding, and the game looked beautiful too, so I had no idea what to expect.

 

This was my exact same setup at that time. It was great with witcher 2 except for the dragon boss fight in the tower. MY god, the lag.

 

Weird, I had the lowest fps during the Draug boss fight. All the fire was more intensive than the dragon fight.

 

Not cool. .

 

I know that remark was pointed at the guy with the 780M, but what I can say is that back in 2011 I played The Witcher 2 on my Toshiba with the Mobility 5650 and while it definitely crushed it, I could play it at a somewhat acceptable level with a few effects turned on. However, games like Spec Opc The Line and Darksiders 2 ran pretty terrible on that card and I don't think I need to say which of the three games looks the best. So, I stand by my claim that it was "quite well optimized" for the level of graphic prowess presented. Not the best optimization out there for sure (one example of an issue mentioned in my previous post), but sadly I find the days of truly optimized PC games are long gone and that ain't changing any time soon.

 

It sounds ridiculous when you put it that way, but don't lose sight of the fact that Witcher 2 is still one of the prettiest and most demanding games today, even compared to the likes of BF4. I say kudos to CD Projekt RED for breaking the mold with a gorgeous-looking game that really pushes high-end PC hardware and making it completely DRM-free at a time when everybody else is catering to the lowest common denominator and saddling their games with crippling DRM.

 

I am a big fan of games that push the graphics limits. Kind of like movies with great special effects. People still play Crysis to this day.

As for optimizing the game, I can't think of any game that was truly 100% optimized. You have to make sacrifices someplace.

 

Agreed. Crysis never get's old by the way.

 

Delayed. 2015 release now. It was my most anticipated GOTY :'(

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Release Date Delayed to 2015 - IGN

 

nooooooooooooooooo. ahem. I too was really looking forward to it this year.

 

Damn this delay.

But hey, at least we should have Maxwell cards by the release, and will have a chance at maximum graphics settings.

 

Can it run Witcher 3?™

 

Incredibly awesome trailer for those who haven't already seen it!

 

This is one epic trailer! Do want! Where do I insert cash?
Oh, but wait, I still need to play Witcher 2, and by that I mean buy a new rig and play it .

 

You mean the rig that you use FSX with isn't powerful enough?

 

Nope, simply because my lappy isn't enough for my modded FSX as well...

 

Well then I guess another excuse to buy a monster gaming laptop.

 

Fixed it for you.
But let us not discuss it any furher, simply because it will turn into off-topic very fast.

 

Well we have until February 2015, it's not like we won't have time to discuss.

Spoiler

 

The griffin hunt gameplay footage at E3 conference was great!

 

Dat stutter doe. Ewww Xbone. Anybody wanna take a gander at the resolution and frame rate? :laugh:

 

Damn, Youtube vids lag again on Firefox.
But dat game... Although combat looks kinda bleh (I'm a fan of the first game combat, yes, there are few of us). Also, why didn't he make sweet love with that babe. I call betrayal!!!
Still, I want it... Nao!

 

It hitches for everyone.

 

Especially for Xbone users.
BOOM! Nailed it!

(nah, it's OK, the game still isn't finished yet)

 

This is literally my favorite game series of all time. I love the books too. They bring back happy memories too I remember the time I was reading them and hanging out with my gf.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

As much as I want to rag on the 'bone, the incessant stutter is actually due to the low-quality video stream.

 

Just to annoy the Ubisofts and EAs of the world, it seems CDProjekt has decided to give away 16 free DLC with purchase of the game:

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will include 16 free DLC releases - PC Gamer

 

If only my lappy could run it - I would already pre-order the crap out of this game!

 

Will 780M SLI run Witcher 3 max settings 1080p with 40 to 60fps?

 

They haven't released specs yet. I'm guessing "max" settings will likely include some sort of DSR/SSAA, so you would be rendering at higher than 1080p

 

I think CD Projekt Red are the only company that "get it". They are still making money hand over fist and don't flip off the customer with every release.

 

To be fair, most game companies don't have some hugely successful venture on the side like GOG to rely on for capital, but yeah, good for CDPR.

 

No, but $8 Indie games offer a ton of content for free too, it has nothing to do with having a side business and using overly annoying DRM.