Witcher 3 Gameplay from GDC and PAX

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Oh , thank you Kinley-found it. Hope tomorrow we`ll see something new or get some other materials-pack of arts and screenshots.
 
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GIFs from gameplay ;)

 
Damn, the lighting looks absolutely amazing. Very atmospheric.

The animations have really improved a lot, espceially the combat animations. It all seems much more fluid and natural.

And I just LOVE that armor. Probably my favorite armor that they've shown so far.
 
Makes me sad to see how the community is reacting to all this. CDPR show so much good faith and can't obvioulsy say everything for obvious commercial reasons. A week ago we have seen a gorgeous video that made almost everyone happy. 7 days later a new videeo comes out. It is less beautiful but probably to console standard (because the event was around the Xbox One version(and if it pc so what? we know that the game is even more better looking than it already is... and it is cry for downgrade again ... So sad...

So here is my opinion on the video in itself. It's amazing. The wyvern looks great. The npcs too. I m just asking myself questions about alchmy and I am eager to know more. Love the Torch and I hope it will stay useful unlike Dark Souls 2 :) We have seen longer combo too.and they were nice :) Can't wait for tomorrow commentary
 
The Good:

-Love the UI. Clean, sleek, simple coloring. I just hope it feels good to navigate on PC.

-THUNDERBOLT - YES. WOAH. AMAZING. THAT is what potions should do. Soon as he activates Thunderbolt you could practically feel the effect - and that's just watching the video, imagine when actually playing the game and activating it yourself.

-Skyboxes, lighting, artstyle etc - it's all sublime. Yes I think much of the game doesn't look quite as good as say VGX, but it's on-par with every other piece of footage (And vastly surpasses the Debut Trailer) and we've still yet to see Ultra.

-Nice to see there's still more conversation options than the mostly 2 we've been seeing in other demos.

-Voice Acting & Lip Syncing is still absolutely superb - Lip Syncing is without a doubt the best of any game with this kind of scale and scope - incredible props to the RED's there.

-Lighting in the cave was fantastic and it's fucking AMAZING to see torches make a return - you seriously cannot understand how much I love torches in games. If I wasn't in combat and it was dark, you can bet your ass I had that thing out in TW1.

The Bad:

-Wyvern fight looked pretty damn boring. I know Geralt was over-leveled, but just mechanically the fight looked pretty uninteresting. Swoop/Dive, Charge, Bite and Poison Spit seemed to be the only mechanics it had, and it spent ages up in the air just begging you to fling Crossbow Bolts at it. I think I'm going to have to play my first playthrough on Hard to ensure an enjoyable combat experience.

-No Oil or Potion Drinking animations. Sad, Sad, Sad.

-Witcher Senses still looks railroaded and rubbish. I wish they hadn't expanded on it like they have, and just kept it as a simple medallion mechanic like TW2. Although that said, there was those other yellow footprints which could have been examined, so perhaps there was a different path and another way of solving the quest. Guess we'll have to wait and see come release, but so far I'm kind of really sold negatively on the Senses.

-Dirty, Ugly Exclamation marks both in 3D and on the Mini-Maps - Ugh. The Witcher 2 just had simply little blue/green dots on the mini-map, and most of the time a quest was signalled by an NPC doing something - like "Oh a Witcher, I wonder if he'll help us". I really hate the exclamation marks, makes it feel like an MMO.


I don't think there's anything I put into the 'Bad' category (In this gameplay or the others) that is going to overall absolutely ruin the experience. However at this point I'm definitely getting my expectations into line and expecting the usual "Witcher Negatives" as I like to call them. Each game always tries to do tons of new stuff on top of the previous one, and whilst many aspects end up as a success, there's still many which fall down as flaws - and it means there is no "perfect Witcher game", but at least they're still all good. So I'm expecting TW3 to be good, absolutely, but I've thrown away my (probably foolish) initial desires of this "super game" which blended the great elements of 1 & 2 to absolute perfection for an incredible finale.
 
About the lighting, I distinctly remember an interview with Damien where he said in-door lighting suffers in The Witcher 3 because they spent so much of the engine's powers on out-door lighting. He said in-door lighting in The Witcher 2 will probably look better than in The Witcher 3.

This doesn't make sense. Maybe he meant that they optimized the lighting algos for global illumination outdoors, and since in TW3 there is no separate indoor/outdoor, indoors it looks a bit bland. Ambient occlusion should help, but... If this statement is true, i would be a bit disappointed - not only because indoors is as important as outdoors, but because maybe it implicates that TW3 plays out mostly outdoors...
 
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I'm just asking myself questions about alchemy and I am eager to know more.
That's a good point. We still don't know many details about how the alchemy system will work in its final form. All we know is that you activate potions mid-battle.

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...and the grass is the worst part of it :)
I don't what you're complaining about. Over here the grass is pretty dang close to ideal (when it's not covered in snow.) Where do you live --in the middle of Antartica?
 
4. Downgrade

It seems some folks are feeling uneasy. Not only don’t they want to discuss the topic, which they have every right not to discuss, they also seek to have the topic go undiscussed, which is a bit more questionable and far more telling. Until moderators explicitly forbid debate of the case for a hypothetical downgrade, I’ll be here alright, each and every time I deem fit, patiently discussing it, no uproar, just calmly pushing for a rational consideration of points, a rational consideration of both sides of the dispute. I am not impressed by epitaphs such as «downgrade crowd» nor am I bothered by how it makes me look to this or that high profile member. At all. These epitaphs don’t amount to a point. A GIF of a cat is not a point either. You don’t want to discuss the case for a downgrade? Well, that’s perfectly fine. Don’t. Discuss whichever you feel like discussing, here or elsewhere. But extend to others the very same basic courtesy and allow them to at least have their points heard.

With that out of the way, let’s tackle the topic.

I’ll say the latest footage looks very good. It is perfectly in line with GDC’s and mostly on par with the 35 min demo. Pop in seems to be less extensive, which is music to my ears. Still, notable problems:

- Grass. Much has been said. I’ll just reiterate two facts: José Teixeira said in an interview they had at the time recently revamped the foliage. Another dev stated that some of it is indeed procedurally generated. These might help explain the notable divergence with both VGX and SoD trailers. The fact grass in real life is not 2D has no bearing in the discussion.
- Texture. There are some funky low res textures at work. The case compounds when some funky geometry steps in, such as in the shot with mounted Geralt overlooking NML.
- Lighting in the dungeon seems quite problematic. Little in way of ambient occlusion. Very flat. Not that the 35 min demo was ideal in that regard, but it just goes to show that as far as I can tell, issues persist.

- The Takeaway? May seem like a paradox, but not being mutually exclusive, to me both statements still hold water: the game looks very good, and the case for a downgrade just congealed a few more molecules.

Ehm...so what is the downgraded stuff now? As you said there are some graphical issues but all you described has nothing to do with so called downgrade. I thought it means that something was good and it got worse and that does not matches your critique here.

Also when will any gamer understand that tech demos/trailers are done usually on highest settings possible on super high end hw and as the game develops it changes and it gets optimised so other than NASA computers can run it. You would rather cry that it is little worse instead of beign happy that you can run the actual game. This is why I consider downgrade ppl as pretty dumb bunch(no personal offense).

Yes there was that Ubisoft fiasco here but it is quite known that Ubi does not care about pc at all. But this is CDPR we are talking about.
 
@jjensson I'm not exaggerating or paraphrasing what he said in any way. He literally said the in-door lighting in The Witcher 3 won't look as good as the in-door lighting in The Witcher 2. But, personally, now that I've seen how amazing the outdoor lighting is I am really impressed.
 
Ultimately, I think the problem with all the downgrade accusations is that people are comparing a series of short 4 second vignettes that CDPR went through nearly 60 iterations to perfect vs long form footage which is invariably going to expose the good, bad, and ugly side of the game. Its just flat out not a fair or proper comparison since we really cannot critique the VGX/SoD scenes in the same way.

Unless MS is in the habit of putting their logo on PC game play, it is in fact xbox one. They uploaded it recently on youtube. Check the feedback thread.

They (Sony too) are very much in the habit of doing that.
 
Do keep in mind that the VGX/SoD trailers were shown and thus intended to indicate how the game will end up looking or so one would assume.
If they gave an incorrect image of the game then it is a case of an overpromising trailer with cherry picked scenes rather than a downgrade.
 
@jjensson I'm not exaggerating or paraphrasing what he said in any way. He literally said the in-door lighting in The Witcher 3 won't look as good as the in-door lighting in The Witcher 2. But, personally, now that I've seen how amazing the outdoor lighting is I am really impressed.

Hmm, IDK, just rewatched the bathing scene from the older uncompressed footage, and i think it doesn't look worse than TW2. But of course, if you are on console and don't have AO, then his statement would make more sense.

What i want to say is, i'm not worried, it looks fine.
 
Do keep in mind that the VGX/SoD trailers were shown and thus intended to indicate how the game will end up looking or so one would assume.
If they gave an incorrect image of the game then it is a case of an overpromising trailer with cherry picked scenes rather than a downgrade.

Well, then it becomes perspective. Its kinda hard to blame them for cherry picking when the entire point of those "hype trailers" is to cherry pick. if their intent was to be totally deceptive and overpormise then they would never release these long form trailers that actually give us a proper view of what the game is.
 
this is quite impressive mental gymnastics you have done here
Y'know, quips like this aren't really helpful to having a calm. positive, discussion about whether the game is downgraded.

Why don't you write an essay-like post telling people exactly why you think the game is downgraded instead (use screenshots from trailers) and then other people can post an essay-like post why they think it is not (if they disagree.)
 
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