Interview: Inside Xbox One X Enhanced: The Witcher 3

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Interview: Inside Xbox One X Enhanced: The Witcher 3

For those interested, Xbox Wire chatted briefly with RED Development Lead Jakub Kutrzuba about enhancing The Witcher III for Xbox One X:

Many of gaming’s most compelling stories come from those who’ve helped to create our favorite Xbox One games. In our Inside Xbox One X Enhanced series, these creators will share the behind-the-scenes accounts of the work involved in enhancing these epic games for Xbox One X, how they’ve helped chart the course of the world’s most powerful console, and what that means for the future of gaming. Today, we’ll be chatting with CD Projekt RED’s Jakub Kutrzuba, Development Lead on the epic RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

What specifically is your development team doing to enhance The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for Xbox One X?

With the additional power of the Xbox One X, we are able to deliver The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in 4K, while providing numerous visual tweaks such as higher-quality shadows, ambient occlusion & texture filtering, as well as higher resolution textures, and an all-around performance boost.

How do these enhancements impact the gaming experience, and why did your development team choose to focus on these enhancement areas?

Beautiful visuals are one of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s standout features, breathing life into the game’s open-world full of places to see, secrets to uncover, and adventures to embark on. When enhancing the game for Xbox One X, we wanted to use the additional power of the console to deliver an even more visually stunning experience. When playing the game on Xbox One X, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s visuals are sharper and the overall presentation more vivid than ever before on Xbox.

How do you expect fans of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will respond to seeing/playing it on Xbox One X with these enhancements?

We think Xbox users who haven’t played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or who are looking to relive Geralt’s final adventure on the new console will be happy to see what we’ve achieved with the game’s visuals on Xbox One X.

How has the process been to get the game up and running on Xbox One X?

With Xbox One X being part of the Xbox One family of consoles, we didn’t have to worry about compatibility and were free to focus on what we could do to enhance the game. The implementation process for the new visual features was also rather hassle free and something Microsoft assisted us with all the way.

What enhancement were you most excited about to explore leveraging for The Witcher 3 on Xbox One X?

Thanks to 4K, we can show everything our artists created with more detail. And it’s not just owners of a 4K TV who will benefit from the higher resolution. Thanks to supersampling, the leap in quality will be visible even on a 1080p screen.

What does 4K and HDR mean for your game, games in the future and development at your studio?

With the technology becoming more widespread, 4K is looking like the next step for the gaming industry to achieve more in terms of visuals.


Thanks to Jakub for taking the time to chat with us about Xbox One X Enhanced. We’ll be bringing you more interviews with more developers in the future, so stay tuned to Xbox Wire!
 
Would be good if they really enhanced the game and not just the graphics. You know, plot holes, missing characters... That's enhancing for me
 
Sam2305;n9807671 said:
Would be good if they really enhanced the game and not just the graphics. You know, plot holes, missing characters... That's enhancing for me

Hopefully, in 5-10 years, there will be a Witcher 3 "Enhanced Edition" or something along those lines. For now, all work on gameplay elements have reached their end. But I feel the burn, too. If only the world would allow for endless money to be spent polishing up every last little detail. Such is a truly gargantuan undertaking, however. I use the Unofficial Patches for Bethesda games as examples. It's been almost 6 years since Skyrim was released (which was in production at least 5 years before that, and was officially supported for nearly 2 years after its release). That's 11 years of regular, ongoing work, much of it being performed by two dedicated teams at the same time...and there are still updates being made to the Unofficial Patch...

...and there are still literally thousands of bugs in the game.

The nature of programs this complex is that there are 3 elements that add massive, nigh-insurmountable challenges:

1.) Programmers come and go. And leaving notations in code is critical...but it often contains holes that any programmer that takes over needs to fill in. That often means they can't figure out exactly how something was done or what the prior programmer intended. That often creates unexpected issues down the road, and fixing it can be brutal.

2.) Technology changes. Truly, the only way to make a game this size 100% flawless is to build it for specific hardware, and then never change that hardware, drivers, firmware, etc. Ever. As new stuff is released, it doesn't play nicely with older code. And the problem above begins to apply again.

3.) Human error. As long as there are humans...there will be errors. Somewhere. Always. Keeps us all busy.
 

sv3672

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Sam2305;n9807671 said:
Would be good if they really enhanced the game and not just the graphics. You know, plot holes, missing characters... That's enhancing for me

Simple graphical enhancements on the consoles do not cost much, they are like increasing the settings on the PC version. Patching content into a years old game after the original production team moved on to different projects (and some people even left the company) is not easy. Developers would have to work on content created with now outdated tools, possibly written and designed by different people, and from the struggles with quest bugs in the patches, I get the impression that quest logic is not easy to understand in the game. Even voice actors get older and sound different after a few years. If more TW3 content enhancements (other than what we already got in the patches and expansions) were to be made, 2016 would probably have been the best time to do them, but after Blood and Wine, Cyberpunk 2077 and GWENT became the main focus, and right now there is also another AAA game already in some stage of development.

Full remakes of the older games could also be an option at some point in the future.
 
sv3672;n9809021 said:
I get the impression that quest logic is not easy to understand in the game.

That's the crux of it right there. Quest logic...especially with multiple options...especially, especially when those options alter exclusive future options...especially-especially, especially when present options or future options are also dependent on a web of exclusive options based on past choices, many of which alter the exclusivity of certain options depending on combinations of past choices.

Yeah, finding "the bug" is like looking for the one card in the house-of-cards with a different serial number on it. Fixing it can be like removing that one card without the rest of the cards toppling, then sticking the correct card back in its place. If the offending card is at the bottom of the house...forget it.


sv3672;n9809021 said:
Full remakes of the older games could also be an option at some point in the future.

I have a dream of the entire Ultima Series being remade. And Ultima 8 being done with proper attention to Ultima-style mechanics. And Ultima 9 adhering to Garriott's original story.

And TW1-3 being done as one, continuous, game. :smiling2:
 
Xbox updates post release when everyone supposedly moved on to other teams - fine. Promised Linux version - "no one is home" to make it.
 
Hi guys, many of us are looking forward to the patch! How much longer do we have to wait? I think it was a mistake that I was not ready for the release of Xbox One X like other developers.

We all expect many of you, and with the power of XboxOneX we hope to see it great.

Also, without a power-only patch, the XboxOneX moves the game to stable 60fps. I hope that at least they have 2 game modes:

1080p and 60fps.
4K - 30 fps more visual improvements.

But do not make us wait any longer! We want to enjoy the patch now!

CAN YOU GIVE DATE?
 
Xikipeke;n9816241 said:
Also, without a power-only patch, the XboxOneX moves the game to stable 60fps. I hope that at least they have 2 game modes:

1080p and 60fps.
4K - 30 fps more visual improvements.

I second this request, it would be amazing if we could get different game modes, like those in Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of War, but above all I'd absolute dig the 1080p-60fps option.
 
Cant wait anymore, i almost beat this game on base ps4, but now i want start this game on xbox one x, 1080p 60 fps with enchaced grafics would be better solution
 
eskiMoe;n9821701 said:
The GPU in X could probably handle the load, the CPU can not.

There's a video on youtube of running unpatched release version of the game on Xbox One X. What's interesting about it is that the initial version of the game ran at an unlocked frame rate, at ~35 fps on original Xbox One. So on the enhanced console those 35 turned into mostly solid 60 fps in the wilderness, but tanked at around 45 in busy areas like Novigrad and the bog.

This kind of proves your claim about the CPU inability to handle the game @60, but that's a pre-patched and arguably unoptimized code we're talking about here. Maybe with a little bit of optimization those 45 can get to 60, but I personally doubt that. In any case we'll see what'll come out of it soon.
 
iCake;n9821961 said:
There's a video on youtube of running unpatched release version of the game on Xbox One X. What's interesting about it is that the initial version of the game ran at an unlocked frame rate, at ~35 fps on original Xbox One. So on the enhanced console those 35 turned into mostly solid 60 fps in the wilderness, but tanked at around 45 in busy areas like Novigrad and the bog.

This kind of proves your claim about the CPU inability to handle the game @60, but that's a pre-patched and arguably unoptimized code we're talking about here. Maybe with a little bit of optimization those 45 can get to 60, but I personally doubt that. In any case we'll see what'll come out of it soon.

It goes as low as 37 fps at roughly 5:30-> and seeing that frame time graph going full V-fib it means the CPU is the culprit here. No amount of optimization can close that gap.
 
I don't really want 4k, that thing costs so much that not even the gtx 1080ti can handle it all the time at 60 fps. I prefer better lighting, volumetric fog, better particles, better everything specially AO to make a soft shadows like effect. Texture resolution is a great steps and that means probably better textures than the actual PC versions without the mods.
 
SageFox.326;n9872091 said:
Texture resolution is a great steps and that means probably better textures than the actual PC versions without the mods.

I do not think there are actual higher quality textures (that is, new assets) in the enhanced version, more likely it changes settings like anisotropic filtering and TextureMipBias.
 
SageFox.326

As the post above states, 2K / 4K resolutions do not alter the graphics in any way. It only alters the number of pixels that the final image is rendered in. This will create, well, the "illusion" of cleaner lines, sharper textures, more finely detailed effects, etc.

While it's still a bit clunky (mostly because present-gen hardware really isn't built for 4K), the end result is that it will be very good for gaming. It does away with the need for processor-intensive features such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, drastically increasing overall performance and allowing for much more complex scenes. It also allows for games to focus more on raw triangles-per-second and less on "post-processing" features that are needed to "tidy up" the final image. But most importantly, it means that every frame can be "finished" in fewer "passes". (For example, using 8x AA in a game now basically means that the single frame will be rendered "8 times"...each pass blurring the edges of the geometry and blending the pixels a little more. If the image can be rendered at a resolution high enough that the eye can't detect the jagged edges to begin with, then there's no need to do any AA passes. 2K / 4K would produce an image as clean or cleaner than 8x AA, with no blurry effect, while simultaneously increasing performance by 700%.)

We want 2K / 4K resolutions. But it will still be 2-3 years before they're mainstream.
 
Tomiwalkee;n9813331 said:
Got my Xbox One X yesterday :). When can we expect the enhanced patch to be released? Can't wait!

Yes please, when I bought my xBox One X, I was under the impression that this was done already, what with all the videos. Is there any chance this will be done in 2017?
 
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