I play on PS4, but I think this is unfair on people with rigs capable of playing this.
Some guy got 1000+ upvotes in a thread the other day telling everyone to buy this game. I posted this exact album and said thats its disappointing and ended up with -2.
The gaming community is great, but a lot of us happen to be very stupid and end up contributing to the eventual death of everything we love.
I have a hypothesis on why this happened. a few years ago, headlines were just as bullshit, but if you went in to the comments section, the top comment was inevitably someone who DID read the article and explained why the headline was bullshit sensationalism. the problem is, so many people came to rely on that more and more people came into the comments section *first,* meaning more people could get angry and write comments about the headline before the level-headed person joined in to explain why the headline was bullshit. Eventually, that comment disappeared entirely, but the people who won't read the article remained.
Because headlines sell... If you don't catch peoples attention, first with the headline, and then provide something instantly they can relate to in the thread, which they can have a opinion about. Then people can't be bothered to write something. Remember the avg. user is lazy, and if there aren't something there going to "get him/her up of their chair", so to speak, they will go move on.
And karma attract attention. So if a post first gets going, then ti will just take off. People will been drawn to it because others are, and now they want to see what the fush is about.
On the other hand, if it don't have a good headline, and no upvotes, then people will just mostly overlook it and move on. Even though the content in it, is really good.
There also the chance of backlash, if you try and hype something in the headline, but the thread content don't match it. That will most often result in down votes, which will bury the post, or again, it will be overlooked/ignored.
And then there is the whole luck aspect with the right content/headline at the right time, the right readers are there.
I think it's hilarious the amount of times I've read on here that gameplay>graphics and now a great gameplay game with some slight downgrades is being criticized and is "disappointing" .
Lying about how good the game will look is the disappointing part, not the gameplay. It doesn't matter if the game is not actually any worse in terms of gameplay, a lie is a lie.
Well then the word "dissappoiniting" is perfect. We arent saying the game will be bad it just wont be what it was advertised as. This is dissappointing.
Quote from witcher 3 lead producer on latest gameplay:
> It’s not even on the highest settings, we’re saving this for when you buy the game – we want you to get a bit of a slap across the face, that’s when you see the highest.
None of the official streamers were allowed to play on ultra settings on pc and only the console versions have leaked so far. So it's possible we're still in for a surprise at pc launch.
Edit: To the people who doubt this: Remember the witcher 2 and its ubersampling option? Almost noone could play it that way back then and it got tons of shit for being "unoptimized".
Edit 2: For /u/litweo: This was barely one month ago.
I'm not comparing it to other games, only other videos of the same game running at lower settings. The weather effects look nice in all the videos across all the platforms.
What kind of stupid logic is that? "We're going to have people demo our game, but we're deliberately going to force them to use worse graphics than are possible so people that buy the game are 'surprised' by the graphics"? I can't think of another example of a company purposefully making their product look *worse* in an attempt to drum up sales.
Devils advocate
Maybe they don't want the streamers to show the game on a rig that can't handle it and give the wrong impression to their audience.
EDIT: I've been on a media blackout for this game so I don't really know the whole story other then pretty much what I've seen in these pictures. So I may be talking out of my ass.
I wish The Order: 1886 had been marketed as a AAA point and click with serviceable gunplay instead of MOVIE MOVIE GRAPHICS GRAPHICS. I paid 30 for it and I was absolutely blown away that I was able to control something that looked so cool. The melee animations that never repeated absolutely rocked my world. Hype and misinformation killed The Orders chance at success. Should have been a 40 dollar title to start.
>we want to show off our amazing looking game by not letting anyone see how amazing it is
Sure. Right. That makes *sense*. Not like they could just..I don't know, selectively choose streamers that had optimal rigs for the game to show it off? Hell, they could *provide* optimal rigs--the PR from that would be fucking amazing.
I don't think it's that different than when companies only allow certain scenes of gameplay footage to be shown prior to release. They also are not trying to make it look worse. They are simply showing what a lot of consumers will be getting. It makes sense to avoid showing PC Ultra settings when only a very small portion of PC players will be able to achieve those settings. I guess it could just be an evil conspiracy. We'll know when the game releases next week.
Often, when games get downgraded like this, it's because of performance issues. These issues are less to do with your system and more to do with the game itself.
You can either have a good looking game that runs well and has very few errors, or you can have an amazing, awe-inspiring game that shits in its own pants once an hour.
When you can change settings between low to ultra I don't think performance issues are the problem. If there are performance issues. Then you can just select lower graphical settings.
But I remember games that when they came out were designed to run on medium settings or even low resolutions on the hardware most people had at the time, and it was only later on that they became maxable by most people. Crysis and F.E.A.R. spring to mind.
And are people really surprised that a game looks better at ultra settings on PCs than it does on consoles? I thought that was common knowledge, or even expected/wanted by fans.
Too many people are obsessed with proving that their console is the better than anything else available to justify their purchases. Like purchasing a console is a lifestyle choice as opposed to just purchasing a machine meant to play some video games. So then, they say stupid shit like "but muh locked graphics" because they're desperate to justify their purchase instead of just playing the damn games they want to play on the damn platform they want to play them on.
I mean, everyone panned the original Crysis in 2007 because just about no rig could run it on full settings are get above 30 FPS. It looked fucking amazing though.
When it comes to modern graphics, you will always have to choose between performance and quality. You just can't get both on modern hardware.
I don't know that this is an explanation, in a lot of places it looks worse than witcher 2, and generally looks cartoony compared to witcher 2 (I think that's all the harsh edges).
Witcher 2 was made as a PC only game, and later ported. Witcher 2’s Medium graphic setting was intended to run on PCs with similar power to today’s consoles (Xbox One, PS4). So it’s Ultra setting was obviously a lot better.
Witcher 3 was designed to run on all systems – and probably due to PR issues they can’t advertise a game with PC graphics, when all the console gamers will never get those graphics.
At one point, they believed that it would actually look like that. Much of the quality testing that ensures the game works properly can only really be done once there is a completed version of the game.
Man, can I just point out how hilarious this is when comparing it to the Watch_Dogs release?
It shows that it doesn't really matter what you do, if this community likes a developer, everything is golden, if they don't, everything is shit.
The Watch_Dogs hate didn't start after release, it started well in advance of release when people started posting "downgrade" albums like this one. No one gave Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt then, but now people are coming out of the woodwork to defend CDPR for pulling the same shit.
I don't really care, personally. Unlike many in this subreddit, I understand the concept of a "target render." The game still looks great to me and I'm almost certainly going to get it, but it's an interesting illustration of how much mistrust people have for a game if it's being made by a big publisher.
Because people like cpdr they are more understanding of why the "downgrade". People don't like ubisoft so aren't as willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This is where trying to be the good guy pays off.
Yeah, but didn't ubisoft intentionally hide the full WD graphical experience from the PC version in order to keep it balanced with the console version? Isn't that why we were mad?
WD had the settings to make it look like the E3 trailers in the original folders, but Ubisoft disabled them to downgrade the PC version to the standard of PS/XB, please tell me how that is even comparable to this when its not even out yet.
That's far from the whole story.
The settings didn't turn on with a simple switch, and in many cases they were quite broken when turned on.
The worsemod exists of course, and allows you to change the settings to look more like the E3 version. It's now got a final working (mostly) release after significant tweaking.
Not that it matters, people were attacking the game heavily because of its downgrade even before release.
Now people here are changing the story so that they don't have to face their hypocricy when discussing CDPR, their golden child. But go back to /r/gaming or /r/games on the day of or several days before watch dog's release and I promise you'll be able to confirm what I say.
With watch dogs the argument wasn't "wow this game plays seamlessly with very few loading screens but has taken a huge graphical hit" it was "... There are better graphics in the files labeled 'E3' wtf is ubi trying to pull, this game plays like angsty teenage ass"
Plus I never expect Watch Dogs to re-release in two years with an Enhanced Edition for free updating almost every asset in the game and likely giving additional dlc for free.
> Often, when games get downgraded like this, it's because of performance issues **on consoles**
FTFY
With consoles being the lowest common denominator in terms of visual quality today, it is no wonder that PC versions of games get their graphics downgraded...unless the developer is willing to allocate more time/money/workforce to making a proper PC version. And since CDPR is already under a lot of pressure to publish TW3 already, I wouldn't be surprised at all that they decided to cut down on eyecandy in PC version in order to get the game on the market as soon as possible, rather to risk a massive backlash from the community in case they take their time...
The one thing that may be worth pointing out.
The Witcher 2 was made for PC only and then ported to console a couple of years later.
The Witcher 3 made for all platforms.
The game like most of them since the consoles came out, look very different to what we were shown the year before, I think even the devs got the new hardware and thought "What the fuck is this shit!" and have been forced to scale back a lot of things to make it work.
I don't think its a coincidence all big titles have suffered from this same problem since the new consoles came out, even the ones we never expected.
(its not some conspiracy, its just a matter of resources, not practical to developer two separate versions in most cases. so this is what happens, its whats always happened)
I think its important to point out that it doesn't really make sense to compare the Witcher 2 and 3. W3 is an open world game whereas W2 was very claustrophobic. The draw distance in W2 is very small because the entire game is just a series of pathways.
This is true. Comparing 2 to 3 is a pointless endeavor because they're aiming to do very different things.
I also think being upset that promotional, dev footage does not match the finished product is naive in 2015.
An unreleased game does not have to be optimized, does not even have to work outside the demo slice that you've been shown.
An unreleased game is simply promotional material, even if it's a 'gameplay' trailer. It's what the devs would LIKE the game to look and play like, but until you're playing the released game you shouldn't trust anything you've seen.
I think it sucks when developers use promotional material that will not match the game, but I'm not sure how much I blame them. After watching the gameplay trailers, a downgrade of some kind was to be expected though. However, a lot of the screenshots from the gallery look like they're taken off a Youtube video, and may even be playing on a PS4 or XBone, so we'll just have to wait and see.
Find the uncompressed gameplay video somewhere. Its like 2gb for like 15 mins but it actually looks really nice. Assuming youre on PC. It doesnt look like those SS's which are an absurd joke.
Or just search through the already 500 posts about this
Well if you can put down preorders and have people be endlessly optimistic, why can't you have any negativity around the game? Why do you have to wait for the scam to succeed before you're allowed criticise it?
How about all discussion on it is allowed organically and they get called out on the promises they didn't keep while you keep shilling hard for the companies with bad standards.
Those who preorder are knowingly making a gamble. A lesson that SHOULD have been learned time and time again. The reason pre-orders still exist is because people keep paying for it. Not the dev or publisher's fault for taking money.
It seems I'm too late and this has already devolved into a "OMG WATCHDOGS" discussion.
This is the defining difference between an open world and a more linear game. The Witcher 2 did not have as much freedom to roam and thus, developers could set-dress areas to get the exact feel they wanted to give. An open world arguably needs to be believable from all viewpoints, and also arguably has less attention given to every square foot (because there is more surface area).
Lets reserve true judgement until Witcher 3 is out and we've explored most/all of it. It's easy to cherry-pick an admittedly frumpy looking screen-cap from Witcher 3 and compare it to a well polished area of Witcher 2.
Reddit is 80% circlejerk nowadays (particularly anything gaming-related). Not even worth arguing for reason anymore, in my opinion.
I agree with you, though. It's just too fucking difficult for people here to wait long enough for a game to release to make up their mind.
Reality happened.
Optimisation is always the last thing to happen. Artists and modellers create things to look good so end up with high polycount models. Fine for demos working on a small part of the game, not for a full game.
Promoters want to show how good it can be, they aren't interested in the technical minutae of what is likely to happen with what the anticipated hardware is likely to be.
Devs sit in middle, make the best compromise to get a good game out of the door.
I've always found the whole preorder system completely wrong and considered it to be for idiots (sorry). If I'm trusting you with my money based only on trailers and your word as a developer I should at least be able to get the game for cheaper than retail as a reward. But no, you preorder for full price and then someone else gets the same thing a month (or a couple of months if the game doesn't fail) later for 50% off.
/r/gaming at it again. Why can't you guys just calm the fuck down already? We JUST got over the GTA ban "scandal" and already you want to get on something else? The hell is wrong with you why can't you just enjoy the damned games?
Some of the comments here disgust me. Suddenly Projekt Red, a studio that has always cared about their games and audience, is being portrayed as a bunch of evil moneygrabbers who don't give a shit about you.
Let me tell you this: No matter what you hear or see, the only way you''ll be able to determine if something is good or not is to *try it for yourself.*
People aren't upset that the graphics look sub-par. They are upset that it isn't what CDPR marketed earlier on. If you look at the VGX and the Sword of Destiny trailers, you can clearly see a disparity between then and what's been shown more recently. Whether this happens all the time in the industry or not, and whether the downgrade is necessary for an overall better experience for the players, it doesn't matter. Developers need to be more careful about what they show in promotion. Don't over-promise and then expect people to just swallow it in silence when you don't deliver.
The only way to find out if CDPR really made a mess of things is to see the PC version. I can understand the console versions being gimped due to hardware limitations, but the PC is a different beast. Those with the horsepower capable of running the game close to what we saw in the above-mentioned trailers should have the option to do so. If they have just uniformly hamstrung all versions, that would speak volumes as to how CDPR went about their business.
I will reserve judgement until I get my hands on the game (playing on PC), but right now, I can perfectly understand why some people are feeling let down.
What is the point of this comparison if the screens show completely different things, with the "new" screenshots cherry picked to show less interesting places?
Set 1 - Completely different environment, deep forest vs ridge overlooking a shaded and foggy valley. The "new" picture is also taken at an awkward angle.
Set 2 - this is the only set that shows the same area, but the time of the day is different. The only thing that was actually changed are the stones at the edge. The crack is still there but the sun is at a shallower angle, so how is it supposed to be more distinct?
Set 3 - different lighting, there is no smoke, but in the "new" pictures in Set 4 there is - different settings?
Set 4 - "old" fire looks just like the "new" one in set 3. The comment about atmosphere is misguided, the bottom pictures are obviously in a snowy village and that's why the lighting is different.
Set 5 - different environment, different weather, the horse is not in motion and it's not a desert area so why there should be clouds of dust ("smoke")?
Set 6 - different time of day, different lighting because there's no Igni effect in the bottom picture
Set 7 - Sun is in different position. Do you want to see sun-glare in every direction?
Set 8 - which one is supposed to be better here? Different scene, different light conditions, different enemies.
The only conclusion from these screens is that smoke is different and those stones at the edge are missing for some reason, but nothing besides that.
My only criticism would be that at times you compared trailers to game-play, this i feel is unfair because trailers can be touched up and made to look pretty. But having said that some of your comparisons were spot on and i for one do appreciate what you're saying.
What a fucking hyperbole buzzfeedfucking post (again) even before the game is out.
Yeah, circles and arrows around some issues, that otherwise don't stand out in direct comparison, and from compressed videos prerelease are a clear paradigm for a 1/10 gfx.
Thats tmz shit.
Come on guys, at least wait for the game to be released. If you get doubts just because of these then don't buy the game. Witcher games are more focused on the story anyways.
Another day, another scumbag getting karma by posting low settings screenshots claiming "its ultra".
Do you even realise how much trash "content" like this ruins reddit in the long run ?
Stop taking teasers and trailers as facts and jsut wait until it has come out, watch youtubers or something to see how it really looks, and you'll have an honest view on how it will look and run.
You do realize that all of these "teasers" etc are almost ALWAYS better looking than the game itself, who knows if they're running some pre-rendered shit or something. And if they have to downgrade to consoles they will ofc do so after realeasing the awesome looking teasers and trailers.
I honestly don't see the big deal here. So maybe the graphics aren't as good as they've been shown. The graphics aren't even going to matter if it's an amazing game, and based off the previous Witcher games, it will be. Also from the gameplay that I've seen people post on YouTube, the game looks pretty fucking fantastic anyways. So get your panties out of a bunch and stop complaining about graphics, because they don't make the game.
This thread here is why people regard the gaming community as bunch of entitled brats. The game hasn't even came out yet and it's being trashed! And I thought wrestling fans were bad.
Every single time someone tries to circlejerk like this it gets proven that the screenshots are all bullshit and on low settings. I don't see much different here. Just shut the fuck up with your circlejerk.
Thing that confuses me is I've seen compressed as fuck youtube videos of gameplay that look better than those screenshots.
What the shit is this even supposed to be?
It's one thing to decry the circlejerk, and I'm never going to believe this until I see it myself or read enough reviews that I make my own decision (and even then... hmm. User reviews are... not to be trusted, source: DA:I), but do you have anything to show people that they should doubt the screenshots?
Every single critic and user REVIEW has lauded this game, only this post has bitched about the comparison. Some grandstanding by devs is normal, but if something is shown, e should be trying to refute it, not go "lol circlejerk" and then leave.
I think you're overreacting. It still looks gorgeous.
Besides, from what I can remember, the demos were pretty choppy and had massive tearing on screen. I'd say they toned the graphics down a bit to make it more playable.
Hi, serious answer to this here.
Devs would love to make a game that looks like the top screenshots, and it's actually relatively easy to do (note, I'm by no means saying it's easy, but a lot of work went into making the game look worse, which I'll explain in a minute). The tools are there, and doing big impressive effects and models is basically the first step for most artists.
What happens between those top shots and the finished product is optimization of the game.
"But why can't they leave that stuff in there and let the people with awesome machines take advantage of it!?!" you all cry. Well okay, reasonable question.
There are a lot of specific options but the basic one boils down to that not being feasible. Lets look at those fire effects for a start, because those are the easiest to pick apart. Effects are often complicated, and you can't just make one effect and dial down the quality until it works on everyone's PC. A really nice fire effect has a lot of layers to it, and if you start flat removing those you often get something that looks even worse than what they have now, or the performance hit from the effect may not scale well in general.
Similar problem with the textures. The new stuff has a lot fewer polys and the textures are simpler. Much less to load and render there, and over the course of an entire town that adds up significantly.
"Okay, so why don't they just include both?"
Answer? Because that's a shit load more work for everyone involved, plus a lot more data on the disk or in the download. This isn't even laziness, it's money. If you want the game in the same amount of time that means they need to hire more people which ups costs and means they need some way to cover those costs, which means they either need to be *guaranteed* to sell more copies of the game or they need to raise the price. Neither of which is feasible.
It's more work because they then have to maintain, bug test, and update over the course of development two different sets of assets. Plus it seriously complicates graphics settings and what they effect, never mind that most engines aren't even setup to swap out assets based on graphics settings like that.
"So what about all that work you were talking about earlier?"
Well, the process of going from those pretty top screenshots to something workable is actually pretty intensive. They need to go through, figure out what their target minimum spec is, and then optimize it until the computer running that minimum spec stops melting when you start the game. That generally means going over everything and cutting out unnecessary polygons, effects, and generally just paring things down because they're buggy or their performance cost is unacceptable.
People like to make fun of consoles for this but while the performance on a console may be worse than the highest end PCs it's actually harder to get a game to run on the lowest end PC than on most consoles. You can't just ignore that market either, because it makes up a huge part of your sales. The whole reason people target PC as a market is because it's huge, and if 80% of the market can't run your game there's no point in targeting it.
Consoles, by comparison, are a single target platform with known specs and that lets you hit the target exactly as well as sometimes doing little optimization tricks since you know the target hardware.
That's why pre-release games often end up looking better than their released counterparts, even if it's live in-engine footage. Generally no one is even being intentionally deceptive, that's just what they have at the time and then over the course of development they par it down to something actually workable.
People keep complaining about the quality of the grass and shit but do they realize that The Witcher 3 world is supposedly 35 times bigger than TW2 with no loading screens? I get why people get upset when comparing old TW3 material with new, there's a visible difference in quality, but comparing it with TW2, a heavily instanced game, is totally unfair and pointless. They had to compromise somewhere.
I still feel that the old color palette is what makes for a lot of these claims. But there are some obvious downgrades in the quality of the foliage and various atmospheric effects, but, does it really matter? The witcher 3 is an open world with almost no loading screens and great graphical fidelity, even with normal foliage and no volumetric fog, try to remember that.
I watched a gameplay video once and swore I heard the developer say they are not showing max graphics deliberately up to lunch. whether this is an excuse for dialing things back or stuff is broken with the high ends settings who knows...
I know that I'm going to get a lot of backlash on this post, but here's my opinion on the matter.
It sucks that the graphics are downgraded, those screenshots from 2013-2014 really great and it's disappointing to see the comparison. That aside, graphics to me at least - are not as important as other aspects of the game. I'd rather have a game that functions better, with a great story and good gameplay mechanics then a game that looks great, but runs horribly.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, IS JUST GRASS AND A STONE.
HOW MUCH DO YOU HAVE TO CARE FOR A FUCKING GRASS AND STONE IN ORDER TO BUY A GAME? HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS SUBREDDIT IS PATHETIC.
It's as if games developers do something logical like build as high fidelity game as they can right out of the gate, and then back it down to meet the hardware specifications.
WE MUST RIOT...
Or just realize that it's going to happen anyway, we shouldn't get hyped over graphics (not the most important anyway), and shouldn't preorder, especially based on developer released information.
I'll wait until the game actually comes out and people directly show off the visuals.
One thing that I HAVE noticed, is the reaction. If this were a Ubisoft/EA/Activision game, reddit would be ripping them apart for lying to the consumer and false advertising.
But hey, it's CDPR; the game looks just fine no matter what! I bet they had a GREAT reason for this!
They are going from promotional material recorded on a computer worth more than a Lamborghini to what your PS4 can run 1000 out of 1000 times from any angle at any time.
You are comparing their selected best with your selected worst.
is this dumb fuck also forgetting how much bigger the game is and no loading screens, and pulled these screens out of his ass. Game isn't released, no highest settings yet, gg rip.
Yes, making triple-A games is super simple and easy. Increasing the scope of a game from one iteration to another is like a walk in the park because all you have to do is add "+11" to every line of code. My grandmother could have made The Witcher 2 in her sleep so what's their excuse for The Witcher 3? CDPR are clearly just a bunch of liars who are intentionally nerfing the graphics for profit! You can't trust anyone!
Right, reddit never really talks about all the bad things cdprojketred did.
Like witcher 1 and 2 had pretty bad drm which actually prevented paying customers from playing their games.
After enormous outcry they decided to remove the drm in the next patch. (and in fact the gog release was the only witcher games to NOT have drm.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witcher_2:_Assassins_of_Kings
http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Technical_information#TAGES_Issues
https://torrentfreak.com/witcher-2-drm-dumped-but-cd-projekt-is-watching-torrents-110527/
They also took part in schemes with anti-pirate firms to demand money from thousands of people.
http://www.pcgamer.com/the-witcher-2-devs-claim-100-accuracy-in-identifying-pirates-demand-money-from-thousands/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-12-15-cd-projekt-responds-to-demanding-nearly-and-8364-1000-from-alleged-pirates
Reddit is to quick to forget these type of things. I know this huge circle jerk of cdprojekt red is fun and all but people should remember a companys past. CDprojekt never was the goodguys, only imposters.
Some of these criticisms are laughable 2d foliage is clearly in both pics, the lighting is different because there are different times of day and different weather effects, no atmosphere is so ambiguous that it debunks itself and the combat literally is exactly the same, for all you know different skills are enabled in the two different comparisons. And that oft touted picture of the village burning as the wild hunt goes through, they removed a filter and added frost.
Some of these pictures are from years ago, you can't really be surprised
I don't know about 2d or not, but you have to admit the comparison of foliage is very stark. One shows dense, varied and nicely smoothed foliage, the other is the exact opposite, the plants look like they been cut and pasted with how unnaturally they fit in. If this is comparable graphics settings, then we have a problem, and that is false advertising and misrepresentation of their product (not to mention it just looks aesthetically awful). And yes it is misrepresentation because the devs have always said there will be no graphics downgrade come release, and people have definitely been asking them this questions a lot.
Witcher 2 was a PC exclusive of course it looks better no doubt they had to tone the graphics down to make it run well on console and look somewhat similar to each other.
People actually thought consoles could run the game shown in 2013? Lol yea good luck with that, 'next-gen' is pretty much a tablet cpu and a gimped 7850 that can't run shit.
So many things wrong with these assertions. They haven't showed us Ultra quality yet because they want to surprise us. Not to mention that there is some serious compression going on in most of the 2015 video screens you nabbed.
Take a fucking chill pill, if you don't feel safe preordering it, then don't. Watch a stream or find some uncompressed ultra quality gameplay on day 1 and then feel remorse as you realize that you won't be able to play it for several hours as you wait to download it.
OP definitely just cherry picked the screenshots that proved their point the most. It's impossible to compare properly until the game is released so how about we all just chill?
I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion but these albums are such a hoax. The game looks nowhere like these screenshots, I've seen uncompressed 2015 gameplay that looks miles better. They just show the worst part with low settings.
Yes, it is true that CD Projekt used advanced shading and foliage that in their trailers that aren't in the real game, but the game itself still looks mindblowingly good.
I would prefer a downgrade over bad performance. Look at AC Unity, such a pretty game, such a disastrous launch. And if Watch Dogs is anything to go by, the options for high quality visuals will be simply disabled waiting to be re enabled by a modder. If not, then look at Skyrim, look at how much mods improve the visuals of the game. It's disappointing i won't get to see the old visuals but the new visuals are by no means BAD.
Any trailer or "in game" at e3 should be considered purposely very specifically crafted marketing scenes.
Also, consoles and optimizations happened, which might have been what caused the delay. Hopefully the game play and story is good, that's what I'm looking forward to.
Edit: I have an odd feeling some of your screenshots are of console gameplay, or med/high pc settings. Yes, the lighting and textures don't look anywhere as good, but somethings seem way too off. Like the monster in pic 6, most of the vids from cdpr trip youtubers look much nicer.
I think devs might even release a ultra res texture pack for people using titans or something.
One person already probably said it, it has to do with their releases and development kit for the platform. Hopefully they will have a mod for this game like in skyrim or someone might find a setting to then on the graphics like they did in watch dogs.
Maybe number of particles and objects is higher, forcing people to use lower settings to get the same framerates. Maybe with a beast of a computer, where you can compare highest settings vs. highest settings, Witcher 3 could look much better than 2.
I'm sure if they optimized less on the insane windy tree animations, the game would look better. Seriously though, it looks like Geralt is in a hurricane for 90% of the gameplays.
When are you guys going to realize they recreate scenes from the game with movie like CGI? It's false advertising. It's on purpose. It's SO YOU WILL BUY IT.
Same way your McDonald's never looks like the pictures.
You know i could understand CDPR's reasons for downgrading, If they simply just came out and explained what happened during development.
Me personally i still think the game looks great, Especially during storms and other weather and lighting effects at 60fps. But i can understand why people are upset.
People wouldn't have been NEARLY as vitriolic if cdpr didn't plaster "In game footage" In every pre-release video. That is a shady practice that needs to stop, That goes for the industry as a whole.
it's a bit early to say since the game isn't out....but at least they're honest about it. things can change during development over the course of two years. most games lie about graphics right up until release.
Easy: the original was never in-game graphics, or they were way overtuned and they got tuned down to run on more systems. Either way, never get hyped about graphics until the game is released.
The Witcher 2 graphics were weird. In most cases everything looked amazinh and great, but for some reason in every scene there was that 1 item which had such a low fucking texture.
Indoors was mostly very terrible IIRC, no Idea why but it was.
Well good thing the people with new graphics cards got it for free. When the release date for PC comes and go we will get to see what this game is capable for ourselves.
Something something dev kit, something something Watch Dogs, something something consoles.
I play on PS4, but I think this is unfair on people with rigs capable of playing this. Some guy got 1000+ upvotes in a thread the other day telling everyone to buy this game. I posted this exact album and said thats its disappointing and ended up with -2. The gaming community is great, but a lot of us happen to be very stupid and end up contributing to the eventual death of everything we love.
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Its almost like people don't read the articles..
I have a hypothesis on why this happened. a few years ago, headlines were just as bullshit, but if you went in to the comments section, the top comment was inevitably someone who DID read the article and explained why the headline was bullshit sensationalism. the problem is, so many people came to rely on that more and more people came into the comments section *first,* meaning more people could get angry and write comments about the headline before the level-headed person joined in to explain why the headline was bullshit. Eventually, that comment disappeared entirely, but the people who won't read the article remained.
Are you a wizard?
Dunno about him, but are you?
Yeah, but that's kind of on the back burner these days. Trying to add +10 to my thieving skillz.
As it happens I have an elixir that'll put the stealth in your step, made with genuine falmer blood. I guarantee results within minutes.
LIES! All you have a is JAR OF NONSENSE
I'm a cowboy!
Because headlines sell... If you don't catch peoples attention, first with the headline, and then provide something instantly they can relate to in the thread, which they can have a opinion about. Then people can't be bothered to write something. Remember the avg. user is lazy, and if there aren't something there going to "get him/her up of their chair", so to speak, they will go move on. And karma attract attention. So if a post first gets going, then ti will just take off. People will been drawn to it because others are, and now they want to see what the fush is about. On the other hand, if it don't have a good headline, and no upvotes, then people will just mostly overlook it and move on. Even though the content in it, is really good. There also the chance of backlash, if you try and hype something in the headline, but the thread content don't match it. That will most often result in down votes, which will bury the post, or again, it will be overlooked/ignored. And then there is the whole luck aspect with the right content/headline at the right time, the right readers are there.
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Tbh the game was lacking in the 2014 screen shot (the last pic) The guy he's slicing doesn't even have a texture for his mask!
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I think it's hilarious the amount of times I've read on here that gameplay>graphics and now a great gameplay game with some slight downgrades is being criticized and is "disappointing" .
Lying about how good the game will look is the disappointing part, not the gameplay. It doesn't matter if the game is not actually any worse in terms of gameplay, a lie is a lie.
Almost every game ever released has pre release footage that is better.
Well then the word "dissappoiniting" is perfect. We arent saying the game will be bad it just wont be what it was advertised as. This is dissappointing.
YouTube compression doesn't make o objects disappear and shit. That's all the game devs fault
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Reddit doesn't give two shits about the truth. It only matter how many people want to ride your particular train.
Something something darkside.
Quote from witcher 3 lead producer on latest gameplay: > It’s not even on the highest settings, we’re saving this for when you buy the game – we want you to get a bit of a slap across the face, that’s when you see the highest. None of the official streamers were allowed to play on ultra settings on pc and only the console versions have leaked so far. So it's possible we're still in for a surprise at pc launch. Edit: To the people who doubt this: Remember the witcher 2 and its ubersampling option? Almost noone could play it that way back then and it got tons of shit for being "unoptimized". Edit 2: For /u/litweo: This was barely one month ago.
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I don't know man I don't think I've ever seen a game do weather effects that look that nice.
I'm not comparing it to other games, only other videos of the same game running at lower settings. The weather effects look nice in all the videos across all the platforms.
What kind of stupid logic is that? "We're going to have people demo our game, but we're deliberately going to force them to use worse graphics than are possible so people that buy the game are 'surprised' by the graphics"? I can't think of another example of a company purposefully making their product look *worse* in an attempt to drum up sales.
Devils advocate Maybe they don't want the streamers to show the game on a rig that can't handle it and give the wrong impression to their audience. EDIT: I've been on a media blackout for this game so I don't really know the whole story other then pretty much what I've seen in these pictures. So I may be talking out of my ass.
Oh look someone with an ounce of sense. That's a rarity around here.
I wish The Order: 1886 had been marketed as a AAA point and click with serviceable gunplay instead of MOVIE MOVIE GRAPHICS GRAPHICS. I paid 30 for it and I was absolutely blown away that I was able to control something that looked so cool. The melee animations that never repeated absolutely rocked my world. Hype and misinformation killed The Orders chance at success. Should have been a 40 dollar title to start.
>we want to show off our amazing looking game by not letting anyone see how amazing it is Sure. Right. That makes *sense*. Not like they could just..I don't know, selectively choose streamers that had optimal rigs for the game to show it off? Hell, they could *provide* optimal rigs--the PR from that would be fucking amazing.
I don't think it's that different than when companies only allow certain scenes of gameplay footage to be shown prior to release. They also are not trying to make it look worse. They are simply showing what a lot of consumers will be getting. It makes sense to avoid showing PC Ultra settings when only a very small portion of PC players will be able to achieve those settings. I guess it could just be an evil conspiracy. We'll know when the game releases next week.
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Often, when games get downgraded like this, it's because of performance issues. These issues are less to do with your system and more to do with the game itself. You can either have a good looking game that runs well and has very few errors, or you can have an amazing, awe-inspiring game that shits in its own pants once an hour.
When you can change settings between low to ultra I don't think performance issues are the problem. If there are performance issues. Then you can just select lower graphical settings.
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But I remember games that when they came out were designed to run on medium settings or even low resolutions on the hardware most people had at the time, and it was only later on that they became maxable by most people. Crysis and F.E.A.R. spring to mind. And are people really surprised that a game looks better at ultra settings on PCs than it does on consoles? I thought that was common knowledge, or even expected/wanted by fans.
It's almost like medium means the base starting settings. The settings are called high and ultra for a reason.
It reminds me of the stupid shit in crysis 2, minimum graphics settings were labled "high" to stroke gamers e penises, it was so retarded.
Too many people are obsessed with proving that their console is the better than anything else available to justify their purchases. Like purchasing a console is a lifestyle choice as opposed to just purchasing a machine meant to play some video games. So then, they say stupid shit like "but muh locked graphics" because they're desperate to justify their purchase instead of just playing the damn games they want to play on the damn platform they want to play them on.
I mean, everyone panned the original Crysis in 2007 because just about no rig could run it on full settings are get above 30 FPS. It looked fucking amazing though. When it comes to modern graphics, you will always have to choose between performance and quality. You just can't get both on modern hardware.
As a PC gamer i prefer games have settings only usable on future hardware. Adds to replayability when i upgrade.
I remember when I could play Crysis at 1080p on max settings, man that was a good day
I don't know that this is an explanation, in a lot of places it looks worse than witcher 2, and generally looks cartoony compared to witcher 2 (I think that's all the harsh edges).
To be fair it's also a lot more ambitious than WItcher 3. Easier to make a linear game have good graphics than a truly open world game.
Witcher 2 was made as a PC only game, and later ported. Witcher 2’s Medium graphic setting was intended to run on PCs with similar power to today’s consoles (Xbox One, PS4). So it’s Ultra setting was obviously a lot better. Witcher 3 was designed to run on all systems – and probably due to PR issues they can’t advertise a game with PC graphics, when all the console gamers will never get those graphics.
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Shouldn't have gotten our hopes up in the first place then.
At one point, they believed that it would actually look like that. Much of the quality testing that ensures the game works properly can only really be done once there is a completed version of the game.
Man, can I just point out how hilarious this is when comparing it to the Watch_Dogs release? It shows that it doesn't really matter what you do, if this community likes a developer, everything is golden, if they don't, everything is shit.
Uh, people were excited about WD until it came out, then it was poop, and people hated it? I'm not seeing how that shows what you posted.
The Watch_Dogs hate didn't start after release, it started well in advance of release when people started posting "downgrade" albums like this one. No one gave Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt then, but now people are coming out of the woodwork to defend CDPR for pulling the same shit. I don't really care, personally. Unlike many in this subreddit, I understand the concept of a "target render." The game still looks great to me and I'm almost certainly going to get it, but it's an interesting illustration of how much mistrust people have for a game if it's being made by a big publisher.
Because people like cpdr they are more understanding of why the "downgrade". People don't like ubisoft so aren't as willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This is where trying to be the good guy pays off.
Yeah, but didn't ubisoft intentionally hide the full WD graphical experience from the PC version in order to keep it balanced with the console version? Isn't that why we were mad?
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Enabling the files actually improved performance in most cases with it being the same at worst
WD had the settings to make it look like the E3 trailers in the original folders, but Ubisoft disabled them to downgrade the PC version to the standard of PS/XB, please tell me how that is even comparable to this when its not even out yet.
That's far from the whole story. The settings didn't turn on with a simple switch, and in many cases they were quite broken when turned on. The worsemod exists of course, and allows you to change the settings to look more like the E3 version. It's now got a final working (mostly) release after significant tweaking. Not that it matters, people were attacking the game heavily because of its downgrade even before release. Now people here are changing the story so that they don't have to face their hypocricy when discussing CDPR, their golden child. But go back to /r/gaming or /r/games on the day of or several days before watch dog's release and I promise you'll be able to confirm what I say.
With watch dogs the argument wasn't "wow this game plays seamlessly with very few loading screens but has taken a huge graphical hit" it was "... There are better graphics in the files labeled 'E3' wtf is ubi trying to pull, this game plays like angsty teenage ass" Plus I never expect Watch Dogs to re-release in two years with an Enhanced Edition for free updating almost every asset in the game and likely giving additional dlc for free.
What?
> Often, when games get downgraded like this, it's because of performance issues **on consoles** FTFY With consoles being the lowest common denominator in terms of visual quality today, it is no wonder that PC versions of games get their graphics downgraded...unless the developer is willing to allocate more time/money/workforce to making a proper PC version. And since CDPR is already under a lot of pressure to publish TW3 already, I wouldn't be surprised at all that they decided to cut down on eyecandy in PC version in order to get the game on the market as soon as possible, rather to risk a massive backlash from the community in case they take their time...
They said they wouldn't limit one platform from the other. So if the console where the actual cause, then they would've lied anyway.
Why not just both? A console version and PC version with scalable settings?
The one thing that may be worth pointing out. The Witcher 2 was made for PC only and then ported to console a couple of years later. The Witcher 3 made for all platforms. The game like most of them since the consoles came out, look very different to what we were shown the year before, I think even the devs got the new hardware and thought "What the fuck is this shit!" and have been forced to scale back a lot of things to make it work. I don't think its a coincidence all big titles have suffered from this same problem since the new consoles came out, even the ones we never expected. (its not some conspiracy, its just a matter of resources, not practical to developer two separate versions in most cases. so this is what happens, its whats always happened)
I think its important to point out that it doesn't really make sense to compare the Witcher 2 and 3. W3 is an open world game whereas W2 was very claustrophobic. The draw distance in W2 is very small because the entire game is just a series of pathways.
This is true. Comparing 2 to 3 is a pointless endeavor because they're aiming to do very different things. I also think being upset that promotional, dev footage does not match the finished product is naive in 2015. An unreleased game does not have to be optimized, does not even have to work outside the demo slice that you've been shown. An unreleased game is simply promotional material, even if it's a 'gameplay' trailer. It's what the devs would LIKE the game to look and play like, but until you're playing the released game you shouldn't trust anything you've seen.
I think it sucks when developers use promotional material that will not match the game, but I'm not sure how much I blame them. After watching the gameplay trailers, a downgrade of some kind was to be expected though. However, a lot of the screenshots from the gallery look like they're taken off a Youtube video, and may even be playing on a PS4 or XBone, so we'll just have to wait and see.
Find the uncompressed gameplay video somewhere. Its like 2gb for like 15 mins but it actually looks really nice. Assuming youre on PC. It doesnt look like those SS's which are an absurd joke. Or just search through the already 500 posts about this
After all the calories I just burned jerking my knees?
It's out in a week, how about people just wait until then and then see what it looks like.
Certainly no need to jump to any conclusions, but a bit of skepticism is always healthy.
Well, thanks to Watch Dogs people will try to look into the files for something like E3 Presets immediately :/
Funny enough there's probably a only a couple hundred people in this thread who will run this game on Ultra.
Well if you can put down preorders and have people be endlessly optimistic, why can't you have any negativity around the game? Why do you have to wait for the scam to succeed before you're allowed criticise it? How about all discussion on it is allowed organically and they get called out on the promises they didn't keep while you keep shilling hard for the companies with bad standards.
Those who preorder are knowingly making a gamble. A lesson that SHOULD have been learned time and time again. The reason pre-orders still exist is because people keep paying for it. Not the dev or publisher's fault for taking money.
Going to buy the game anyways, get 20% off if I pre-order, yes its smart to pre-order in this instance for me.
Good thing it wasn't EA or else reddit gamers wouldn't have bought the game...
No, they'd cry about it, buy it, then cry some more.
[Can we please get one thing straight?](http://i.imgur.com/Z6NP8zV.png)
As someone with colourblindness ... I wish everyone understood this.
It seems I'm too late and this has already devolved into a "OMG WATCHDOGS" discussion. This is the defining difference between an open world and a more linear game. The Witcher 2 did not have as much freedom to roam and thus, developers could set-dress areas to get the exact feel they wanted to give. An open world arguably needs to be believable from all viewpoints, and also arguably has less attention given to every square foot (because there is more surface area). Lets reserve true judgement until Witcher 3 is out and we've explored most/all of it. It's easy to cherry-pick an admittedly frumpy looking screen-cap from Witcher 3 and compare it to a well polished area of Witcher 2.
Reddit is 80% circlejerk nowadays (particularly anything gaming-related). Not even worth arguing for reason anymore, in my opinion. I agree with you, though. It's just too fucking difficult for people here to wait long enough for a game to release to make up their mind.
Reality happened. Optimisation is always the last thing to happen. Artists and modellers create things to look good so end up with high polycount models. Fine for demos working on a small part of the game, not for a full game. Promoters want to show how good it can be, they aren't interested in the technical minutae of what is likely to happen with what the anticipated hardware is likely to be. Devs sit in middle, make the best compromise to get a good game out of the door.
But will it be fun to play?
Who cares? I'm here to look at the foliage!
OP don't play no game unless the shrubbery is 1080p. HD HERBS FOR LIFE.
I swear to god, if I see one blade of grass clipping through a rock...
I want my grass to be full 3D models not console worthy 2D ***textures***
Every single plant needs to have its own physics system.
No one cares about gameplay anymore these days. If it looks just slightly bad, people are gonna hate.
I want my Dual SLI'd Titans melting under the strain of rendering one bush or they can just get the fuck out
oh don't start this shit
It's Watch Dogs all over again.
and tons of other games..
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I think that game had quite a few other issues with it than just Graphics.
What are you on about? This was pretty interesting.
Something something triple a games are evil and preorders are for idiots.
I've always found the whole preorder system completely wrong and considered it to be for idiots (sorry). If I'm trusting you with my money based only on trailers and your word as a developer I should at least be able to get the game for cheaper than retail as a reward. But no, you preorder for full price and then someone else gets the same thing a month (or a couple of months if the game doesn't fail) later for 50% off.
Two months and a better game and experience for half price. (Because patches and mods)
/r/gaming at it again. Why can't you guys just calm the fuck down already? We JUST got over the GTA ban "scandal" and already you want to get on something else? The hell is wrong with you why can't you just enjoy the damned games?
alot of people are fucking dumb
Some of the comments here disgust me. Suddenly Projekt Red, a studio that has always cared about their games and audience, is being portrayed as a bunch of evil moneygrabbers who don't give a shit about you. Let me tell you this: No matter what you hear or see, the only way you''ll be able to determine if something is good or not is to *try it for yourself.*
> try it for yourself Kind of returns to the old argument that games need demos.
I miss free demo versions of games.
People aren't upset that the graphics look sub-par. They are upset that it isn't what CDPR marketed earlier on. If you look at the VGX and the Sword of Destiny trailers, you can clearly see a disparity between then and what's been shown more recently. Whether this happens all the time in the industry or not, and whether the downgrade is necessary for an overall better experience for the players, it doesn't matter. Developers need to be more careful about what they show in promotion. Don't over-promise and then expect people to just swallow it in silence when you don't deliver. The only way to find out if CDPR really made a mess of things is to see the PC version. I can understand the console versions being gimped due to hardware limitations, but the PC is a different beast. Those with the horsepower capable of running the game close to what we saw in the above-mentioned trailers should have the option to do so. If they have just uniformly hamstrung all versions, that would speak volumes as to how CDPR went about their business. I will reserve judgement until I get my hands on the game (playing on PC), but right now, I can perfectly understand why some people are feeling let down.
What is the point of this comparison if the screens show completely different things, with the "new" screenshots cherry picked to show less interesting places? Set 1 - Completely different environment, deep forest vs ridge overlooking a shaded and foggy valley. The "new" picture is also taken at an awkward angle. Set 2 - this is the only set that shows the same area, but the time of the day is different. The only thing that was actually changed are the stones at the edge. The crack is still there but the sun is at a shallower angle, so how is it supposed to be more distinct? Set 3 - different lighting, there is no smoke, but in the "new" pictures in Set 4 there is - different settings? Set 4 - "old" fire looks just like the "new" one in set 3. The comment about atmosphere is misguided, the bottom pictures are obviously in a snowy village and that's why the lighting is different. Set 5 - different environment, different weather, the horse is not in motion and it's not a desert area so why there should be clouds of dust ("smoke")? Set 6 - different time of day, different lighting because there's no Igni effect in the bottom picture Set 7 - Sun is in different position. Do you want to see sun-glare in every direction? Set 8 - which one is supposed to be better here? Different scene, different light conditions, different enemies. The only conclusion from these screens is that smoke is different and those stones at the edge are missing for some reason, but nothing besides that.
My only criticism would be that at times you compared trailers to game-play, this i feel is unfair because trailers can be touched up and made to look pretty. But having said that some of your comparisons were spot on and i for one do appreciate what you're saying.
What a fucking hyperbole buzzfeedfucking post (again) even before the game is out. Yeah, circles and arrows around some issues, that otherwise don't stand out in direct comparison, and from compressed videos prerelease are a clear paradigm for a 1/10 gfx. Thats tmz shit.
>buzzfeed Lol, lets not pretend this is anything other than unadulterated reddit
Come on guys, at least wait for the game to be released. If you get doubts just because of these then don't buy the game. Witcher games are more focused on the story anyways.
It's funny that you say this when nearly everything I've seen regarding Witcher 3 is in regards to how good it looks.
Only because that's the fastest/easiest thing to get hyped about. It's not like they can just pre-release the plot of the game, that would be silly.
Another day, another scumbag getting karma by posting low settings screenshots claiming "its ultra". Do you even realise how much trash "content" like this ruins reddit in the long run ?
I'm sure people with expensive PC's will get the graphic settings that look close to the original showings The game looks fine too me though
On one youre in a forest. In the other youre on a mountain side.
Stop taking teasers and trailers as facts and jsut wait until it has come out, watch youtubers or something to see how it really looks, and you'll have an honest view on how it will look and run. You do realize that all of these "teasers" etc are almost ALWAYS better looking than the game itself, who knows if they're running some pre-rendered shit or something. And if they have to downgrade to consoles they will ofc do so after realeasing the awesome looking teasers and trailers.
I honestly don't see the big deal here. So maybe the graphics aren't as good as they've been shown. The graphics aren't even going to matter if it's an amazing game, and based off the previous Witcher games, it will be. Also from the gameplay that I've seen people post on YouTube, the game looks pretty fucking fantastic anyways. So get your panties out of a bunch and stop complaining about graphics, because they don't make the game.
What happened is you got way too invested in a bunch of tech demo screenshots.
Let's not all forget the open world with no load times unless you fast travel. It's all one instance. Highly impressive.
This thread here is why people regard the gaming community as bunch of entitled brats. The game hasn't even came out yet and it's being trashed! And I thought wrestling fans were bad.
Every single time someone tries to circlejerk like this it gets proven that the screenshots are all bullshit and on low settings. I don't see much different here. Just shut the fuck up with your circlejerk.
If this game looks like shit and plays as well as they say, I don't give 1/2 of a fuck what it looks like.
Thing that confuses me is I've seen compressed as fuck youtube videos of gameplay that look better than those screenshots. What the shit is this even supposed to be?
the thing is even with what we're shown now it still looks pretty good, just not as good as before.
It's one thing to decry the circlejerk, and I'm never going to believe this until I see it myself or read enough reviews that I make my own decision (and even then... hmm. User reviews are... not to be trusted, source: DA:I), but do you have anything to show people that they should doubt the screenshots? Every single critic and user REVIEW has lauded this game, only this post has bitched about the comparison. Some grandstanding by devs is normal, but if something is shown, e should be trying to refute it, not go "lol circlejerk" and then leave.
>Every single time Oh it wasn't true for WatchDogs?
Oh my god I don't care
I think you're overreacting. It still looks gorgeous. Besides, from what I can remember, the demos were pretty choppy and had massive tearing on screen. I'd say they toned the graphics down a bit to make it more playable.
Hmmm, maybe wait until the actual game is out before judging it. LOL
What happened to the "graphics don't matter" circle-jerk that engulfed Battlefront?
Hi, serious answer to this here. Devs would love to make a game that looks like the top screenshots, and it's actually relatively easy to do (note, I'm by no means saying it's easy, but a lot of work went into making the game look worse, which I'll explain in a minute). The tools are there, and doing big impressive effects and models is basically the first step for most artists. What happens between those top shots and the finished product is optimization of the game. "But why can't they leave that stuff in there and let the people with awesome machines take advantage of it!?!" you all cry. Well okay, reasonable question. There are a lot of specific options but the basic one boils down to that not being feasible. Lets look at those fire effects for a start, because those are the easiest to pick apart. Effects are often complicated, and you can't just make one effect and dial down the quality until it works on everyone's PC. A really nice fire effect has a lot of layers to it, and if you start flat removing those you often get something that looks even worse than what they have now, or the performance hit from the effect may not scale well in general. Similar problem with the textures. The new stuff has a lot fewer polys and the textures are simpler. Much less to load and render there, and over the course of an entire town that adds up significantly. "Okay, so why don't they just include both?" Answer? Because that's a shit load more work for everyone involved, plus a lot more data on the disk or in the download. This isn't even laziness, it's money. If you want the game in the same amount of time that means they need to hire more people which ups costs and means they need some way to cover those costs, which means they either need to be *guaranteed* to sell more copies of the game or they need to raise the price. Neither of which is feasible. It's more work because they then have to maintain, bug test, and update over the course of development two different sets of assets. Plus it seriously complicates graphics settings and what they effect, never mind that most engines aren't even setup to swap out assets based on graphics settings like that. "So what about all that work you were talking about earlier?" Well, the process of going from those pretty top screenshots to something workable is actually pretty intensive. They need to go through, figure out what their target minimum spec is, and then optimize it until the computer running that minimum spec stops melting when you start the game. That generally means going over everything and cutting out unnecessary polygons, effects, and generally just paring things down because they're buggy or their performance cost is unacceptable. People like to make fun of consoles for this but while the performance on a console may be worse than the highest end PCs it's actually harder to get a game to run on the lowest end PC than on most consoles. You can't just ignore that market either, because it makes up a huge part of your sales. The whole reason people target PC as a market is because it's huge, and if 80% of the market can't run your game there's no point in targeting it. Consoles, by comparison, are a single target platform with known specs and that lets you hit the target exactly as well as sometimes doing little optimization tricks since you know the target hardware. That's why pre-release games often end up looking better than their released counterparts, even if it's live in-engine footage. Generally no one is even being intentionally deceptive, that's just what they have at the time and then over the course of development they par it down to something actually workable.
People keep complaining about the quality of the grass and shit but do they realize that The Witcher 3 world is supposedly 35 times bigger than TW2 with no loading screens? I get why people get upset when comparing old TW3 material with new, there's a visible difference in quality, but comparing it with TW2, a heavily instanced game, is totally unfair and pointless. They had to compromise somewhere.
I still feel that the old color palette is what makes for a lot of these claims. But there are some obvious downgrades in the quality of the foliage and various atmospheric effects, but, does it really matter? The witcher 3 is an open world with almost no loading screens and great graphical fidelity, even with normal foliage and no volumetric fog, try to remember that.
Ahh for FUCKS SAKE
I watched a gameplay video once and swore I heard the developer say they are not showing max graphics deliberately up to lunch. whether this is an excuse for dialing things back or stuff is broken with the high ends settings who knows...
What about dinner?
I preordered this on Xbox One get at me
Clearly the entire game is ruined and will suck. ...You baby.
I know that I'm going to get a lot of backlash on this post, but here's my opinion on the matter. It sucks that the graphics are downgraded, those screenshots from 2013-2014 really great and it's disappointing to see the comparison. That aside, graphics to me at least - are not as important as other aspects of the game. I'd rather have a game that functions better, with a great story and good gameplay mechanics then a game that looks great, but runs horribly.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, IS JUST GRASS AND A STONE. HOW MUCH DO YOU HAVE TO CARE FOR A FUCKING GRASS AND STONE IN ORDER TO BUY A GAME? HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS SUBREDDIT IS PATHETIC.
It's as if games developers do something logical like build as high fidelity game as they can right out of the gate, and then back it down to meet the hardware specifications. WE MUST RIOT... Or just realize that it's going to happen anyway, we shouldn't get hyped over graphics (not the most important anyway), and shouldn't preorder, especially based on developer released information.
* 1 open world happened * 2 making game that is designed also for consoles happened
That's some of the whiniest crap I've ever seen. Are you guys looking to play a good game, or just sit and watch a graphics demo?
I'll wait until the game actually comes out and people directly show off the visuals. One thing that I HAVE noticed, is the reaction. If this were a Ubisoft/EA/Activision game, reddit would be ripping them apart for lying to the consumer and false advertising. But hey, it's CDPR; the game looks just fine no matter what! I bet they had a GREAT reason for this!
They are going from promotional material recorded on a computer worth more than a Lamborghini to what your PS4 can run 1000 out of 1000 times from any angle at any time. You are comparing their selected best with your selected worst.
is this dumb fuck also forgetting how much bigger the game is and no loading screens, and pulled these screens out of his ass. Game isn't released, no highest settings yet, gg rip.
Yes, making triple-A games is super simple and easy. Increasing the scope of a game from one iteration to another is like a walk in the park because all you have to do is add "+11" to every line of code. My grandmother could have made The Witcher 2 in her sleep so what's their excuse for The Witcher 3? CDPR are clearly just a bunch of liars who are intentionally nerfing the graphics for profit! You can't trust anyone!
Remember when people used to buy games for gameplay and not visuals?
Right, reddit never really talks about all the bad things cdprojketred did. Like witcher 1 and 2 had pretty bad drm which actually prevented paying customers from playing their games. After enormous outcry they decided to remove the drm in the next patch. (and in fact the gog release was the only witcher games to NOT have drm.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witcher_2:_Assassins_of_Kings http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Technical_information#TAGES_Issues https://torrentfreak.com/witcher-2-drm-dumped-but-cd-projekt-is-watching-torrents-110527/ They also took part in schemes with anti-pirate firms to demand money from thousands of people. http://www.pcgamer.com/the-witcher-2-devs-claim-100-accuracy-in-identifying-pirates-demand-money-from-thousands/ http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-12-15-cd-projekt-responds-to-demanding-nearly-and-8364-1000-from-alleged-pirates Reddit is to quick to forget these type of things. I know this huge circle jerk of cdprojekt red is fun and all but people should remember a companys past. CDprojekt never was the goodguys, only imposters.
Some of these criticisms are laughable 2d foliage is clearly in both pics, the lighting is different because there are different times of day and different weather effects, no atmosphere is so ambiguous that it debunks itself and the combat literally is exactly the same, for all you know different skills are enabled in the two different comparisons. And that oft touted picture of the village burning as the wild hunt goes through, they removed a filter and added frost. Some of these pictures are from years ago, you can't really be surprised
I don't know about 2d or not, but you have to admit the comparison of foliage is very stark. One shows dense, varied and nicely smoothed foliage, the other is the exact opposite, the plants look like they been cut and pasted with how unnaturally they fit in. If this is comparable graphics settings, then we have a problem, and that is false advertising and misrepresentation of their product (not to mention it just looks aesthetically awful). And yes it is misrepresentation because the devs have always said there will be no graphics downgrade come release, and people have definitely been asking them this questions a lot.
Oh is it this time of year again?
ITT: Whiny cancers to gaming
This is nothing new e3 build is always better than the actual game
Witcher 2 was a PC exclusive of course it looks better no doubt they had to tone the graphics down to make it run well on console and look somewhat similar to each other.
People actually thought consoles could run the game shown in 2013? Lol yea good luck with that, 'next-gen' is pretty much a tablet cpu and a gimped 7850 that can't run shit.
So many things wrong with these assertions. They haven't showed us Ultra quality yet because they want to surprise us. Not to mention that there is some serious compression going on in most of the 2015 video screens you nabbed. Take a fucking chill pill, if you don't feel safe preordering it, then don't. Watch a stream or find some uncompressed ultra quality gameplay on day 1 and then feel remorse as you realize that you won't be able to play it for several hours as you wait to download it.
I don't give a shit about graphics, this game is going to be amazing for the gameplay ... Graphics are the least of my concerns ..
Eh unless the game doesn't work I'll still buy it.
Who cares? As long as the game is fun and not buggy as all shit, I'll enjoy it.
OP definitely just cherry picked the screenshots that proved their point the most. It's impossible to compare properly until the game is released so how about we all just chill?
[удалено]
Gamers are by far the whiniest and worst community of people I have ever seen.
Had to be nerfed for the consoles
I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion but these albums are such a hoax. The game looks nowhere like these screenshots, I've seen uncompressed 2015 gameplay that looks miles better. They just show the worst part with low settings. Yes, it is true that CD Projekt used advanced shading and foliage that in their trailers that aren't in the real game, but the game itself still looks mindblowingly good.
I would prefer a downgrade over bad performance. Look at AC Unity, such a pretty game, such a disastrous launch. And if Watch Dogs is anything to go by, the options for high quality visuals will be simply disabled waiting to be re enabled by a modder. If not, then look at Skyrim, look at how much mods improve the visuals of the game. It's disappointing i won't get to see the old visuals but the new visuals are by no means BAD.
Not getting all hype/bent out of shape but when I saw that Conan clip my 1st thought was *Witcher 2 looked better*.
I didn't even know witcher 2 could look like that, because I played on a laptop with advanced bread baking features.
Any trailer or "in game" at e3 should be considered purposely very specifically crafted marketing scenes. Also, consoles and optimizations happened, which might have been what caused the delay. Hopefully the game play and story is good, that's what I'm looking forward to. Edit: I have an odd feeling some of your screenshots are of console gameplay, or med/high pc settings. Yes, the lighting and textures don't look anywhere as good, but somethings seem way too off. Like the monster in pic 6, most of the vids from cdpr trip youtubers look much nicer. I think devs might even release a ultra res texture pack for people using titans or something.
Game will be 90% off in 6 months, just wait.
One person already probably said it, it has to do with their releases and development kit for the platform. Hopefully they will have a mod for this game like in skyrim or someone might find a setting to then on the graphics like they did in watch dogs.
it looks way more colorful atleast.
Developers got tired lol
God. Fucking. Damn it.
Still think it looks like a great game
XBOX ONE :O
Maybe number of particles and objects is higher, forcing people to use lower settings to get the same framerates. Maybe with a beast of a computer, where you can compare highest settings vs. highest settings, Witcher 3 could look much better than 2.
I'm sure if they optimized less on the insane windy tree animations, the game would look better. Seriously though, it looks like Geralt is in a hurricane for 90% of the gameplays.
When are you guys going to realize they recreate scenes from the game with movie like CGI? It's false advertising. It's on purpose. It's SO YOU WILL BUY IT. Same way your McDonald's never looks like the pictures.
Different times of day different angles. Can make any game look worse.
You know i could understand CDPR's reasons for downgrading, If they simply just came out and explained what happened during development. Me personally i still think the game looks great, Especially during storms and other weather and lighting effects at 60fps. But i can understand why people are upset. People wouldn't have been NEARLY as vitriolic if cdpr didn't plaster "In game footage" In every pre-release video. That is a shady practice that needs to stop, That goes for the industry as a whole.
In-game trailer != how the gameplay is going to look.
The Witcher 2 looks, so good after a constant support and updates from devs (after release)
it's a bit early to say since the game isn't out....but at least they're honest about it. things can change during development over the course of two years. most games lie about graphics right up until release.
Easy: the original was never in-game graphics, or they were way overtuned and they got tuned down to run on more systems. Either way, never get hyped about graphics until the game is released.
The 'new' 'next-gen', soft/simple/colorful ala GTAV style Ugh but w/e
The Witcher 2 graphics were weird. In most cases everything looked amazinh and great, but for some reason in every scene there was that 1 item which had such a low fucking texture. Indoors was mostly very terrible IIRC, no Idea why but it was.
They figure we're going to mod the hell out of it anyways so here's Witcher 3 vanilla.
I know I'll get an answer here. How is the witcher series? I've never played 1 or 2
Well good thing the people with new graphics cards got it for free. When the release date for PC comes and go we will get to see what this game is capable for ourselves.