It's clear to me they had to use any "hack" possible in the game code to make this whole thing work properly and avoid bigger issues, but still they are pretty far from a fully coherent and organic image quality. As I said, the character models are those which took the biggest hit, in one of their streams they talked about reworking the skin materials, unfortunately the end result is most of the times unsatisfying. As you pointed out, it's not only about the missing hair shadows, it's the whole thing that simply looks off. And those black patches appear also in other places, like curtains and palm trees. On the latter they just don't disappear even by getting close to them. I hope they will fix all of this. At the same time I was hoping PL was finally going to put an end to most of the visual and not visual problems the game had.
Yeah, so far RR and what
seems to have been done to accommodate it's use has done more harm than good. That peculiar blackness of objects and a few characters has been there from the start. I'm pretty sure on objects is geometry that's hidden and not culled.
On trees and bushes it's probably a result of contact shaders - things like when a tree sways in the wind or your charcter nudges a bush
Contact shaders are used to fake physics interaction because the real thing is prohibitively expensive when any number of them could be on screen at once. Since it's not real geometry moving you get that bad shading as the actually geometry is completely stationary. Similarly damage states for cars have problems as pieces are removed the older visual state isn't culled fast enough. On concrete barriers it isn't culled at all - and may even be worse if they were because then the whole thing would turn black for a moment since it's so slow. What the deal with NPCs has been is something I'm not entirely sure about. I guess it's part of the NPCs body that's masked but it's still "there" in the buffer. There's a handful of NPCs that have always been like that and every single one, from what I've seen following 2.0, got worse. It's really, really bad now on 6th street gangers.
All the above isn't even taking into account the blatant visual embellishment through out the campaign. The actual content of the expansion is great so far, love the gigs, story has been entertaining, and the cars are bitchin'. But the difference between what was said/shown and what's here can be stark at times.
Below: Kind of looks like 1.63. Other than some things that may not be ideal in the open world, it's damn near perfect. Amazingly done.
Below: What it really looks like. Maxed out, everything at 11, even with Ray Deconstruction turned off.
There are moment where it almost looks like the first image, but those are fewer and far between than in 1.63; where it looked like that all the time barring an error or just low quality background NPC of course.
All that said; I'm confident they'll get a handle on it. If anyone can make it work it's the CDPR tech guys. NRD reLAX had issues when they launched PT - it caused the irridescent artifacts on textures and blood, and they sorted them out. I'm hoping I don't find more game breaking bugs that put me off before then.
