Hi everyone
I was always a lurker to this forum and have always tried to keep on track with the most recent news of developement of the series since the first games. I never was an active member of the community, but seeing this discussion lately and the bad will (or accusations of such) I couldn't stand aside.
Let me begin with my opinion of the trailer. There were 3 things that I felt were off or bad. This were:
1) Frost effect of the wild hunt armour, which makes the textures blurry or make it seem like its not properly loaded. The smoke effect is great though, imo. So are the textures on the "un-frozen" wild hunt armours, which look as good as in the SOD trailer.
2) Lighting in the Eredin scene seems off, but then again the perspective was weird and we didn't saw the whole scene or all of the potenital light sources.
3) Alignment of the chainmail texture on Geralt seemed off, but it's nothing that can't be fixed.
Overall, I find the video as good quality-wise as the 35 minute gameplay. It had its flaws and it was obviously worse than the SOD trailer, which had more cherry-picked scenes, but I don't see any tragedy here nor treason, and especially nothing that couldn't be rectified.
The thing that frustrates me though, is the way some of the community members reacted. Let me remind you all that we've got the 35 minute gameplay in three (3 - !!!!!) different language versions (English, Polish, Russian - AFAIR) recorded on different occasions. If you haven't had any problems with those, then I doubt that you should have many problems with this trailer after uncompression. Unless, ofcourse, you haven't put much effort in researching about the game (except the SOD trailer) or suffer from sight loss and hearing loss.
I'll give CDProjekt the benefit of the doubt, since they've always addressed all the problems in their games, sooner or later. In such way we've finally got the enhanced edition for the first game, with better localisation, and a much better second game than we could've imagined from the pre-release materials, when basically the only ones giving a fuck about the game where the fans of the first installment.
We haven't even seen the final product yet, yet some people started titling CDProject as the new EA/Ubisoft. IMO the only business mistake made by them so far is, sadly, pleasing a too broad audience. The effects of it can be seen right now. Some complaints here dangerously border hipsterism and graphic-whorism, and I'm starting to doubt if some of those complainers were even fans of the series in the first place, rather than some recent bandwagon addition to the community.
Also, as a side note, some of you base your accusations on the NeoGAF posts, yet no one was reluctant to cite them and share what they said in detail in the first place. Let me remind you that:
1) NeoGAF is known to build site recognition and popularity by spreading "breaking news", sometimes undocumented or even made up.
2) "Inside" poster wrote only something like 1 or 2 posts in that thread, avoiding giving any detail or evidence on the matter, or any explanations and answers to other posters.
3) The first thing he stated is that the developement process is based on some unethical exploitation of workers. We never got any evidence of them doing so, and it only sounds like a bullshit explanation, thought up only to "legitimize" his reasons for spreading confidential "information".
4) The second statement was about building "unrealistic" expectations by the marketing department. First of all, it's the job of the marketing dept to show and advertise the good sides of their product. Any producer and developer does that, from the smallest indie developers up to the big conglomerates. It's pure common sense and has nothing to do with being unethical. Imagine only if developers started advertising bugs and shortcomings during their production cycle. Also, If they would really want to keep those expectations THAT high, then they would never have published the gameplay videos or the latest trailer. Instead, we would probably only see, each time, only the finest cherry-picked scenes and vague materials.
ps. Sorry for my english. I tried my best to keep it free from errors.