As a long-time fan of the Witcher games and someone who has followed the development of the Witcher 3 since the beginning, I have to admit that i'm deeply concerned over what has happened to the game over the past 6 months. I've heard countless excuses but none of them address the simple fact that PC games have Graphics levels that the user sets according to their hardware. That being the case, there should be absolutely no reason why the assets and graphical effects seen in the 35 minute video would be removed from the final product. Why on earth would your development team spend hundreds if not thousands of hours creating a beautiful world that convinced countless fans of the series to spend not just money on pre-ordering the game... but hundreds of dollars to upgrade their PC's.... only to pull a bait-and-switch at the last minute.
I spent the last year or so praising CDPR for being a developer who was the ONLY developer left that I fully trusted. You guys were the polar opposite to Ubisoft or Bioware who absolutely ruined the concluding chapter in the Mass Effect series. I loved how you guys kept showing us new content from The Witcher 3 because it made you look like you would deliver, and not do what many developers do like showing off one short, highly polished segment of the game in order to lock-in all those presales... only to release an 8 hour long POS like The Order 1886 or a buggy mess like Assassins Creed: Unity.
But in the end, it seems CDPR is just like the others. You've completely turned your back on the PC gamers who you owe the existence of your company to. And for what? To satisfy some Parity clause in the licensing contracts you signed with Microsoft and Sony in order for you to sell The Witcher 3 for their consoles? There are only 30 million PS4/Xbone's sold to consumers, and only a fraction of those will purchase this game.... but you cater to them while ignoring the FAR larger market which is PC gaming. There are far more than 30 million PC's out there with graphics cards able to run TW3, and last I checked... PC gaming for the past two years has been the global market revenue leader, absolutely crushing the console market and they actually include hardware sales in their numbers while the PC numbers don't.
I really hope that you guys saved those high quality assets because It would be in your companies best interest to begin work on TW3: Enhanced Edition w/DirectX 12. You saw the sh*t storm Bioware got hit with after they lied and burned their fans a couple years ago. I don't want that to happen to CDPR, but i can sense a storm is brewing.
Not more efficient, but its obviously much better to optimize cause there is only one ps4 and not 1000s of pc versions
Nonsense. There are only a few variables that require specific optimization and these are primarily focused on whether your PC uses Intel or AMD processors and nVidia or AMD graphics. All Intel and AMD processors while being different in design, all conform to x86 standards regardless of it being a dual-core or octo-core processor. Code optimizations are based on standardized Instruction sets that are not specific to either brand such as AVX, SSE4.1, etc. As long as the software is coded to function on these instruction sets, it will work with each CPU regardless of frequency, L2/L3 cache, etc.
The same goes for the standards used in graphics cards. Both AMD and nVidia cards while different in design all use the Direct3d API in this game and because of this the game doesn't have to be configured for each individual graphics card because it allows scaling according to GPU ability. Any features which are AMD or nVidia specific are implemented with the help of the graphics chip maker, as are all the driver optimizations needed to utilize the features. Perhaps you didn't get the memo, but Xbone also uses Direct3d API with an AMD CPU, so much of the work is already done since both use fully scale-able software behind them.
This idea that CDPR has to custom optimize every possible combination of CPU, GPU, chipset, etc is about as far from reality as imaginable. Much of that is already done through existing driver software. If what you claim was actually true, why is it that when brand new graphics cards are released, they almost always work with older games whose developers could have never imagined said future technology at the time.