I think the #downgradegate thing is, 'imo', both a misunderstanding and a lack of communication on how the game and the footage (from 2013 mainly, which was used for comparison on a lot of forums) was not gonna be the retail game that we'd have at home on PC. Clearly the game as of 2013 was in a state where the implementation of all the stuff we have now was just prototyped, the game development routine. They showed us what they had to show, what they could at least.
Surely the draw distance for the land and all the assets was insane, but I'm really doubting our computers could handle all the things as of now. At least with the software, the hardware, and the APIs already implemented. They talked about the new API DirectX 12, maybe we'll get really close to the 2013 footage in the near future (Enhanced Edition ?). The API was benchmarked with several specific softwares, and it showed some great improvements on both the CPU and the GPU load, and how visually we could go further with what the current generation of hardware.
There's surely some optimizations magic on the way. There's also bugs to fix, the inventory crash, staying too long in the inventory and you get 2 fps until you relaunch the game, that kind of things. Maybe modders will tweak some things to enhance our experience. There's always room for improvements. And they're listening to the community, not like some others companies. They're not done with the Witcher 3 ;d
I don't get why they are always talking about the 2013 aspect of the game in comparison with the final product. CDPR said it several times, they decided to change the whole rendering process, i'm okay with it, its their choice. I was already pretty sceptical about the old build. It looked way to beautiful in comparison of what we were used to see. But then, what happened to the E3 2014 graphics, or just a few weeks after it, the 35 minutes gameplay demo? We can cleary see that the game was pretty similar with what we have now, but at the same time very different. It had so many more details, the atmosphere was better (colors, water) and they were more details in general. It looked like the walls had tesselation (which we dont have in the final product on PC), the draw distance was better, etc.
What happened to that game, what we could saw just a few months ago ?
EDIT : The 35 min footage is the reason I was upset about the finals graphics of the game, like many other gamers that have a good PC to run a game smoothly. 35 minutes is a long footage, I thought : "Well looks like the final product isnt gonna be very different from what we've seen in this long demo", and then, in January 2015, they were these trailers released with a game what had totally changed. But dont get me wrong, I've already played a lot of hours, and I love this game, it would have been a perfect game if it looked like it did in the long footage.
Please apologize my bad english, I hope I was clear enough .
Last edited: