Well said.I think we are all starting to sound like broken records at this point. The core of the issue for me is twofold :
- The engine in the VGX trailer clearly showed a volumetric quality to its lighting. It added depth and atmosphere. The skin also didn't look as flat as the recent screenshots, it seems that some form of screen-space subsurface scattering has been removed. My hope is that those features are locked behind the Ultra settings as they no doubt will prove very memory and computation-expensive.
- Every single time that the words "platform parity" have been uttered, it has been synonymous with lazy PC port and political statements in favour of the consoles. Because piracy or whatever. You guys know first-hand how bullshit this is. You created gog. You are giving 16 DLCs away for free. You provided support for TW2 for more than a year after its release. You released TW2 without DRM in the face of your own publisher. You did and still get how to do things right. You have shown guts and vision before kickstarter even came along to prove everyone wrong.
So hearing these words come out of a CDProjekt lead is, to say the least, very scary if true. You guys used to be the poster child for PC development, showing for the first time in a while all the untapped power of the platform. I understand the point you make regarding manpower and engineering complexity. But providing higher resolution assets, various object draw distances and giving us the choice to melt our rigs in the fashion we desire doesn't sound too difficult. This is what we want, not ubersampling or nvidia bullshit. I would understand if you pulled previous rendering techniques for stability or performance reason. No problem, this is how it goes. Things get prototyped, look good and end up in trailers. Game development happens, things break and can't be fixed with a behemoth of a game lurking over your shoulder. But you didn't tell us that, instead we got these statements that make it feel like they have been pulled away to make the consoles look good.
This doesn't sound like you guys at all, but I understand where the concerns comes from. All in all, I wish you the best and can't wait for may.
You know they could avoid all the anxiety and speculation if, with each trailer, there was full disclosure on the configuration used, the options that are toggled on/off, etc. I can't fathom why they don't.
All in all I hope I can make the game look like the earlier trailers, even if it only runs at 10 fps on my current machine. It's if they take certain graphical options out entirely (which presents a blatant 'why?' but other devs have done it in the past) that I'll be unhappy. Heck, have a 'future PC' tickbox that unlocks a new menu, so people don't misconfigure.
If they've locked anything, I hope it's merely the trailer content from hereon. They've downgraded what you see in the trailers so that from here on out nobody can feel mislead.
It's not all negative, what I've seen in this latest footage. The major issue I had with the latest footage was a lack of tessellation on stone and brick, foliage pop-in, missing shadows on foliage, the water looked kind of mediocre (heck, I think bioshock's water looked nicer), and the blood on that slain beast looked like red paint. Other things, like the glistening water on Geralt during bathing looked amazing. The faces look excellent (but again, we were shown better flesh-tones in earlier trailers).
Last edited:
