• The forum will be offline Monday from 10am until approximately 3pm for maintenance and upgrades.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Soldato
Joined
20 Dec 2004
Posts
16,060
. If consoles never existed we'd have graphics like W3 7 years ago, but then again if consoles never existed would gaming be as popular/profitable as it is, and warrant the level of investment from companies to create amazing games? Meh. :D

Well, there's the rub. Without the money that consoles generate for developers, a lot of these games wouldn't exist. There's a reason why there are virtually zero big-budget PC only titles these days, it's too risky.

Q, would people be happy if CDPR announced they were doing a Rockstar and delaying the PC version for 4-5 months to produce a properly optimised version with the enhanced visuals? Assuming they had the funding to do it of course.
 
Associate
Joined
9 Jul 2009
Posts
1,008
Well this is disappointing. I did wonder how a game that looks as good as all the screenshots we've seen can be just 23GB when i started pre-loading it last night. I was expecting 50GB-60GB. I guess this explains it.

The only consolation is that the devs did release enhanced edition patches for the witcher 1 and 2 to improve graphics and add some extra features in. Hopefully we'll get something similar for the PC version eventually.
 
Soldato
Joined
4 Jun 2003
Posts
9,941
Location
Fraggle Rock
Thing about CDPR is that they probably will issue an 'enhanced version' patch in about 6 months, like they did with no. 1. You can't fault their after-launch support.

Edit - Jeps beat me to it :D
 
Associate
Joined
20 Dec 2008
Posts
1,380
Why isn't there any statement from the developers on the comparisons? There's so much internet traffic on the subject it's become a new meme where people who had no idea about the situation or showed any interest prior now parrot the downgrade meme.
 
Soldato
Joined
6 Oct 2004
Posts
18,534
Location
Birmingham
Q, would people be happy if CDPR announced they were doing a Rockstar and delaying the PC version for 4-5 months to produce a properly optimised version with the enhanced visuals? Assuming they had the funding to do it of course.

Very. Or even better, release as planned next week, with the announcement that they were releasing an enhanced patch in 4-5 months with the properly optimised version with the enhanced visuals, that way people who think the current graphics are acceptable can crack on, and the people who want what they were promised are happy as well :)
 
Associate
Joined
23 May 2006
Posts
346
This is because the majority of people who are prepared to pay full price for the game will have done so at/close to release anyway.

Yes, indeed. But I believe that will lessen if people continually feel duped. TotalBiscuit often talks about a video game market crash is possible due to anti-consumerism. I don’t really think it’s all that likely, but I do think at some point there will be repercussions. Surely, mass market consumers won’t swallow the same nonsense forever and be happy to carry on forking out on pre-orders and BS dlc.

The latest MK game, Goro being a pre-order exclusive, I mean c’mon. A character that has been synonymous with a game for around 20 years all of a sudden turns into pre-order bonus or you can pay extra for him. Surely, consumers will wise up at some point.
 
Associate
Joined
23 May 2006
Posts
346
It's not the PS4 screen shots worrying me, it's all the rumours and gossip while CDPR remain silent. If you go on their forums, they have said nothing themselves and several threads have been closed that were full of people talking about the possible downgrade. Don't get me wrong, I have not sharpened my pitch fork just yet. But, I have got it down from the mantelpiece.
 
Soldato
Joined
14 Aug 2009
Posts
2,971
Can we hold judgement until we actually see some release day footage of the pc version running on Ultra gfx? :)

As at the moment we are all dissecting PS4 screenshots!

It was already tested, check youtube.

Why isn't there any statement from the developers on the comparisons?

They've said it waaay back: no downgrade, you can achieve the trailers graphics in game. Based on Ultra videos posted by some youtubers, that was a lie. Which they don't mind sticking with. Besides, there should be the same on all platforms, as they've said as well. One way or another, CDPR lied!
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
8 Sep 2012
Posts
4,036
As the guy explains, the difficulties in supporting all three platforms weren't apparent until later on in the development cycle.

Sorry but this is just a load of cobblers. If the devs were dead set on releasing the game for all three platforms from the very beginning, then why, pray, did they decide to release 35+ mins worh of gameplay that's clearly not representative of the final product without prior assessment of the consoles' computational power? Who in their right mind would've done that (except for Ubisoft and a bunch of other shady devs, that is)?

I'm not upset because the latest build doesn't quite match up to the trailers we've been shown. I knew the game wasn't going to look like that. I'm upset because the final product appears to look significantly worse than the 2014 Gamescom gameplay which, in turn, looked worse than said trailers. And that gameplay was running on a high-end PC, which clearly indicates anyone with a machine powerful enogh could expect simiar visuals form the PC version.

But now they announce that they had to scale things down "to the lowest common denominator"... Surely they could've known that not being upfront about the entire issue would backfire on them sooner or later, especially that you don't have to be awfuilly perceptive to notice a downgrade of such scale? Honestly, this makes Watch_Dogs gate almost insignificant.
 
Soldato
Joined
20 Dec 2004
Posts
16,060
Sorry but this is just a load of cobblers. If the devs were dead set on releasing the game for all three platforms from the very beginning, then why, pray, did they decide to release 35+ mins worh of gameplay that's clearly not representative of the final product without prior assessment of the consoles' computational power? Who in their right mind would've done that (except for Ubisoft and a bunch of other shady devs, that is)?

Because development doesn't work like that. I know the gamer community like playing spec sheet top trumps but there's far more to it than that when it comes to what you can actually achieve with the given hardware. Game dev process is typically a case of making something work first, then making it work at an acceptable framerate for the target hardware later. If you can't manage it then you dial things back/drop features whatever.

The worst I can see these guys are guilty of is being too optimistic with regards to what they would manage to get out of the hardware. They couldn't afford to do a completely separate pipeline for just the PC version so they developed to a single baseline.

It's like the endless crying from people about the vault in Destiny being too small, all these armchair devs saying how it's just a matter of changing a variable, so easy, why don't they do it. Then Bungie explain they are smack on the memory limit on PS3/X360 and in order to show a few more items in the vault they have had to remove a bunch of useful GUI elements. Not that simple!

Really I think some devs are going to start thinking twice about whether developing for PC is worth the hassle given the amount of grief they get.
 
Back
Top Bottom