This is not the first time that a game turned out to be less visually impressive when compared to its original gameplay trailer. Remember Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs? However, when it comes to the Witcher 3, its makers over at CD Projekt RED actually came out and told everyone what happened. Basically, they admitted that consoles held the game back a bit, but they had to adapt it accordingly for these platforms because they simply could not afford to make Witcher 3 a PC only title. When asked about these particular issues, Marcin Iwinski stated the following:
“If the consoles are not involved there is no Witcher 3 as it is. We can lay it out that simply. We just cannot afford it, because consoles allow us to go higher in terms of the possible or achievable sales; have a higher budget for the game, and invest it all into developing this huge, gigantic world.”
The team also admitted that they changed the game’s rendering system after they showed off the VGX trailer, which may have been a bad decision.
“Maybe it was our bad decision to change the rendering system, because the rendering system after VGX was changed. There were two possible rendering systems but one won out because it looked nicer across the whole world, in daytime and at night. The other would have required lots of dynamic lighting and with such a huge world simply didn’t work.”
As for the notorious smoke and fire effects, CDPR stated that these would bring any PC to its knees, and that without the implementation of DirectX12, these particular effects won’t work well in all games. The team also apologized to gamers that purchased Witcher 3 based on the 2013 trailer, and said that they are currently working on ways to make it up to them. There’s a new patch in the works for the game’s PC version, which is meant to improve visuals. Don’t expect anything too major though.
What do you think about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s visuals?
Thank you Eurogamer for providing us with this information.
I think its great that CDPR choose to communicate with consumers. The practice of releasing teasers/trailers that hype up the game, lowering the graphics, selling the game and than letting people know of the scale back is horrid. I don’t commend any company that does this. We need to take a stance on this that shows we will not pay for these titles. When we do, we want our money back.
Also, it’s about time we let game developers know that telling us of the scale backs before the sales is a good thing. We get that most devs are hushing this up so being the stand out dev stating lowered graphics looks bad. We’re not blaming you though, it’s console devs fault. So realize that. Or we might just stop buying your games and start asking for money back.
Aliens: Colonial Marines comes to mind here.