The Witcher 3 Discussion Thread!

Ulch. I'm hoping that this isn't true.
Still, even if it is true, what I've seen so far of PC footage isn't disappointing, and once CDPR releases the developer tools for mod makers it shouldn't be difficult to bring the game back up to that level assuming CDPR themselves don't give us a patch for it.

 

I LOL'ed

Denial is a long river...

 

Any chance my Macbook Pro Retina could run Witcher 3?
i7, 8GB, 650m 1GB GGDR5

 

A snow ball's chance in hell.

 

You probably could, but it won't be pretty

 

Figured. Looks like it's a console purchase for me. Thanks.

 

Macbooks are all about being pretty... /sneaks away/

 

...pretty slow

 

Video from PC stream running Ultra settings:

please rewind to beginning

 

QQ

 

360p only right now. Will probably be until tomorrow before it processes to 1080p

 

There's live stream on Twitch:
IGN - Twitch

 

Eh? It's 1080p for me.

 

no you cant play at all.Witcher 3 demands 2gb vram at least if the requirements are to be trusted

 

will probably be playable for me at 1080p30.

 

It is now. But was only 360p when I tried.

 

It was 1080p for me even when it was still live streaming. Weird.

 

It looks good on the consoles... Cant wait to see it running on my PC!

 

Right. I first watched the stream on my phone (One M8, FHD @ 441 PPI) and it looked quite good. Then I wanted to see it on a bigger screen, and watched it on a desktop with a 21" screen, and man, is YouTube's compression crappy. It looks terrible.

The game at first glance looks pretty decent, but after some time, I found some shortcomings and I very quickly turned my attention to graphical fails. Here are three screen captures I made, with some comments:

 

Im not boycotting games due to downgrading, though its sad if it happens.

That said, I dont understand why they cant create a game with wicked graphics and just keep all sliders to minimum on consoles? Or as a suggestion I saw:

Surely it must be technically possible without three different builds. Or are they afraid to loose console sales?

 

It looks kinda crappy. I'm not a "graphics guy", I prefer gameplay over looks, but that really looks crappy...

 

@octiceps could probably find several more. I only watched the first hour or so.

 

One reason $$$$$

 

Launch Cinematic:

 

I barely watched it. Skipped through a lot, saw that nothing changed (still downgraded), and turned it off.

 

Quick trivia. Which is old, which is new?

 

It's not that simple. The three platforms are different. For example, PC has discrete system and video RAM while Xbone and Piss4 each have a single RAM pool shared between system and video. And while PC and Xbone share more or less the same SDK and libraries, Piss4 has very different development and runtime stacks.

 

Admittedly they did a good job on the console versions. Can't wait to play on PC. Already have it preloaded on my 17r2

 

Like I've been saying all along, I don't see anything wrong with the game.

 

The one that's more green-tinted and darker - older. And holy crap, it looks so much better.

You have got to be joking...

 

You don't see anything wrong with misrepresenting a product to generate hype and guaranteed sales (pre-orders)? This cancerous pre-order culture has been killing AAA for years but really came to a head with the current-gen consoles due to their underwhelming capabilities.

 

This happens with practically every game ever released. The game is running with everything maxed in the test shots and is later optimized to actually run on consumer hardware.

 

Simply not true. This practice only became widespread very recently. Pre-release footage of just about every game before the current wave of consoles looked just as good as the real thing.

 

Nothing mods like Ice-enhancer/ sweet fx cant fix. Enb has done miracles for skyrim and it will do the same here if people really want it bad enough.

 

And a Witcher equivalent of SMIM. As opposed to effects, I prefer better meshes and textures. And those garlic wreaths in the pictures I posted look worse than some of stock Skyrim's stuff. They literally look like brilliant-cut diamonds, but with a garlic texture applied. Yucky.

 

You really think a little post process color correction is gonna reinstate all the assets CDPR ripped wholesale from the engine? LOL

 

You do remember a game called watchdogs right and a similar controversy of the game not measuring up to its earlier footage demos dont you? And you remember the mod that made it look closer to its conceptional promos right and basically fixed all that while making the consoles look very bad right?

 

Could you clarify?

 

LOL you're essentially proving my point. What did TheWorse Mod do for Watch Dogs? Adjusted color grading & bloom and turned DoF to 11. All of which could be more easily accomplished with ReShade without reducing performance. TheWorse didn't "re-enable E3 2012 graphics" despite what the mod author would have you believe because those original assets had long been removed from the game. The only mod worth installing was the repacked MaLDo textures because those improved stuttering significantly and allowed people with lower amounts of VRAM to run the game's Ultra textures without having a hissy fit since Ubisoft sucks at optimization.

Witcher 3 won't magically transform back into its 2013 self just because you added a little ReShade on top. You could paint all over a portrait of your grandma but it won't turn it into the Mona Lisa.

Read this again: http://whatifgaming.com/developer-i...-from-2013-list-of-all-features-taken-out-why

Which is all very apparent if you examine the subtractions between old and new builds. Vegetation density, translucency, and shadowing. Screen space reflections. Particle effects. Water, ground, and building tessellation/mesh quality--remember those awful building corners/rocks and the simple flat shader effect for water?

And read this too: http://www.dsogaming.com/news/cd-pr...nfair-to-compare-trailers-and-gameplay-demos/

So the CDPR artist claims they've switched to physically based rendering since 2013, yet the game looks significantly worse instead of better, esp. in the area of light-material interaction which PBR is supposed to improve? Smells fishy.

Lastly, this backtrack:

With the VGX trailer in question (note "in-game footage" at the beginning):



Again, just look at the vast difference in quality between these images and the recent Ultra settings gameplay we've seen. Here is much better lighting, richer colors, more dense particle effects, sharper textures, longer draw distance, nicer reflections, and just much more detail overall:

Spoiler

Not only CDPR won't admit what's obvious to all of us, but worse yet, seems to have come down with a serious case of foot-in-mouth, a highly contagious disease last seen afflicting Ubisoft.

 

@octiceps Thanks for the great explanation. And the godforsaken moderators at the CDPR forums are deleting every single post that mentions "downgrade", even before you can say "downgrade". That VGX trailer looks amazing, and it's a pity that CDPR chose to go with the lowest denominator *cough cough XB One cough* across the board. Terrible decision and they 100% deserve to be called out for it.

I was just playing The Witcher 2, and with a texture upgrade and a mod to decrease the plant/rock pop-in, it looks nearly like that VGX trailer - and obviously, much better than the final release of TW3.

Several of my friends were considering buying it but either cancelled their pre-orders or began thinking twice about buying it at all.

So much for CDPR being PC- and consumer-friendly - they get money, they end up behaving like any other company. Sigh.

 

Even though I got my Witcher 3 free from a promo, I flipped it for $40. Not buying it again until it's dirt cheap to ensure that CDPR gets as little of my money as possible. Let this be a lesson to them.

 

Eh, well. I got mine from G2A anyway, so they aren't directly getting my money.

 

So focused on cherry-picked minutia that you're blind to how good everything else looks.

Look, if you don't like it then don't buy the game. Simple as that.

 

" Cherry-picked minutia"? Are you kidding, or are you just refusing to accept fact?

The whole game's renderer has been changed. Meshes, polygon and vertex count throughout the entire game has been dialled down massively. The "gemstone garlic" I posted a while ago is but a small example. The draw distance has been massively muddled. A huge number of extra effects like tessellation, atmosphere and particle effects were sliced down because those are also CPU intensive and the consoles' CPUs suck, i.e. Intel Bay Trail-level of computational performance. There is no cherry-picking, these are changes on a very large scale that impact the whole game.

At this point, GTA V looks good, and that's two and a half years old. Heck, for and old game, Rockstar has made it look and behave pretty darn good (except for the crashes).

 

No. I'm exaggerating as far in the other direction as I can in a (vain, it seems) attempt to demonstrate how silly this whole discussion is. Yes, the game has flaws. Every game ever made has flaws. Deal with it and wait for the inevitable enhanced edition.

 

Flaws are one thing, but downgrading a game for consoles, but then across all platforms is something different altogether. The Witcher and The Witcher 2 were initially PC-only games, until the latter got ported to the Xbox 360. The Witcher 3 was developed for all three simultaneously, and instead of developing one high-end version for PC and then downgrading for consoles, they chose to gimp the game for all platforms.

The worst thing is that the game still requires a GTX 980 for Ultra to run at 60 FPS. I would expect after such a downscaling, that a GTX 960 would get the job done, since they removed so much.

 

Look pal, I was never disagreeing with you LOL all I was saying is that mods may improve the graphics. It wont magically make it like the early promos yes sir I agree but its better than nothing right?

I actually noticed the differences right away and pointed it out in other forum threads and I am no stranger to getting backlash from angry devs and fans who can't accept the truth. It does suck its downgraded and its probably because of those godawful weak consoles true. I was just offering some encouragement because mods can still improve certain things and that's what I do.

What I can recommend to you and others upset is to keep your expectations a bit lower and not think everything you see you will get. This is not the first time things expected weren't delivered and guess what...it wont be the last time either. I despise the consoles on the market today but this will happen with consoles or not and I know better than to get all hyper over a game and other things the world since my trust is only in the Lord.

 

You can look at a slice of gameplay from the earlier videos and go "hey those 5-15 minutes of gameplay from a build that only had 5-15 minutes of gameplay looks way better than the build that has 20-200 hours of gameplay." In development it's easy to demo something incredibly awesome in a small segment but once you try it in the grand scheme of things it doesn't work out regardless of how powerful the system is.

Its easy to blame console parity because a final product doesn't look like a demo of the alpha build, but chances are once everything was put together the glue didn't hold, so duck tape was used, and when that didn't hold, cement was used.

 

What's really silly is how some ppl seem to be OK with being played for fools and are even trying to justify it

Ah, good old TW2 EE. Don't remind me. XB360 version released with improved lighting but existing PC version didn't get it. Who knows why.

PC vs. 360

PC vs. 360

No, you're just overthinking. Read what I said again, slowly.

It's easy to blame console parity because those are the CDPR's own words

 

No those are the words of an anonymous insider "source" relayed to journalistic website. For instance, how do you know that I don't work at CDPR and have more insight on the matter and can say that the information in that is inaccurate.

Spoiler

1. Obviously I do not work at CDPR.
2. I would be putting my job in jeopardy had I acknowledge and violated my NDA by making these claims, even if I was an anonymous insider.
3. I have worked at game companies (NDA no longer valid) and have have seen this jibberish before where the story printed is not what actually happened.