This vid is so hilarious I can't stop laughing for a moment even after the vid ended. ;D
The level of sarcasm presented there is so spot on from the opposite point of view xD
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This vid is so hilarious I can't stop laughing for a moment even after the vid ended. ;D
The level of sarcasm presented there is so spot on from the opposite point of view xD
CDPR next time don't show trailer with graphics that you're not sure you can deliver, show the current progress, don't show something you know you can't deliver. And do a better job at optimization, there's no reason for this reqirements, graphics are nice but nothing special, even on ultra.
I think that at the time, before it was truly open world, they thought they could deliver what they showed.
Its always been designed as an open world game.
The difference is the world as a whole used to be a bit smaller (although I seem to remember them saying it was 35 times bigger than witcher 2 very early on..and have kept to that comparison..hm.)
At the time they released the early trailers it was not truly open world, sure they were developing it to be open world but until you get the whole world filled out you cannot know what level of detail you are able to produce both from a workload and a optimization standpoint. you also cannot predict 100% what you are able to produce with a vertical slice, which is what they showed before they completely changed their rendering engine.
Edit: to clarify I am not disagreeing with you guys I just am trying to help understand the development stage the game was in at that point. I could be wrong, I don't work for CDP so maybe the world was completely open and filled in at that point, but that was not my understanding of it.
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As talented as they are, CDPR is still a relatively 'young' company with much to learn. I don't think they were trying to 'cheat' people with the very first trailer, since every gameplay video from then on was actually the 'downgraded' version. The trailer just happened to be done very early on and yeah, it was partially there to hype up the game, but the project was a big risk for them so you can hardly blame them for trying to get some money in.
Ultimately, what matters is that they delivered one of the best RPGs ever made, and that easily overshadows the visual downgrade. Larger companies with more money have cheated us out of this many times in the past and are still getting away with it.
Even with the downgrade, however, the game is still one the best looking RPGs out there. Take a look at the Fallout 4 trailer and revel in the disappointment. From the footage we saw, FO4 can't hold a candle to W3. I'm not even sure it can match it from a gameplay and story perspective.
Ultimately, what matters is that they delivered one of the best RPGs ever made, and that easily overshadows the visual downgrade. Larger companies with more money have cheated us out of this many times in the past and are still getting away with it.
Even with the downgrade, however, the game is still one the best looking RPGs out there. Take a look at the Fallout 4 trailer and revel in the disappointment. From the footage we saw, FO4 can't hold a candle to W3. I'm not even sure it can match it from a gameplay and story perspective.
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I don't understand what you mean. Open World is a relative term. Even a small map can be considered open world if the player has the freedom to explore its entirety. Witcher 3 was developed from the beginning with open world regions.
Even Witcher 2 is somewhat open world. It is just separated into small explorable regions. But you cannot revisit them, and are largely constrained to missions in them, so they aren't quite recognized as open world locations.
sorry for my poor explanation. the open world was not as expansive at the time they showed the first few trailers and was more of a vertical slice. at least that was my understanding of it. A vertical slice, even an open world one, does not compare to a completed open world. Both in the workload involved and the performance of the game.
Ah no need to apologize friend.
Funnily enough, we both believe the exact same thing, just said it differently and confused each other!!
If I remember correctly they mentioned that the first trailer was a vertical slice in an interview, and the second trailer was before they changed the rendering engine. I can try to find the article with the interview but it might take me a bit.
Graphic change from 2013 trailer is understandable, it's a trailer afterall, probably not even in-engine can beat that. But graphic change from 2014 35 minutes demo is a bit questionable, even the storyline was changed, Dijkstra was the one issuing contract on the Griffin and he was also the one handing the information about Johnny the godling in that video. Even with Youtube video compression, that particular video look differently 'better' in term of texture choice and lighting and all that.
I have the answer to my own question in favor to CDPR, and I also have the answer from the opposing side's point of view, but what really happened ? Why went into such length downgrading a lot of things from an already working and already made world ? Even if it was only partially done, that 35 minutes demo covers quite a lot of already well done area, and judging by the look of the world map, it's already a fully functional world, not just a small demo.
"If you're looking at the development process," Iwinski begins, "we do a certain build for a tradeshow and you pack it, it works, it looks amazing. And you are extremely far away from completing the game. Then you put it in the open-world, regardless of the platform, and it's like 'oh shit, it doesn't really work'. We've already showed it, now we have to make it work. And then we try to make it work on a huge scale. This is the nature of games development."
and
"Maybe it was our bad decision to change the rendering system," he mulls, "because the rendering system after VGX was changed." There were two possible rendering systems but one won out because it looked nicer across the whole world, in daytime and at night. The other would have required lots of dynamic lighting "and with such a huge world simply didn't work".
and finally this
Marcin Iwinski picks it up: "Maybe we shouldn't have shown that [trailer], I don't know, but we didn't know that it wasn't going to work, so it's not a lie or a bad will - that's why we didn't comment actively. We don't agree there is a downgrade but it's our opinion, and gamers' feeling can be different. If they made their purchasing decision based on the 2013 materials, I'm deeply sorry for that, and we are discussing how we can make it up to them because that's not fair.
from this article
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...he-witcher-3-graphics-downgrade-issue-head-on
there are a few other articles where they talk about the status of the game at the point that each trailer was made but I found this article first.
Cheers,
Gadfly Jim
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for some reason it keeps posting my reply as an edit to the last post I made so we will see if this works:
The last game I worked on we used a 8 month old build of the game for Pax, simply because it was the most stable build at the time. in my experience things like graphics and quests/story are worked on right up until release. maybe this explains why it changed when it was seemingly late in development. Though that is all speculation really
That explains VGX but what about the 2014 E3 trailer? In that one you can see two builds of the game, one of them is similar to ours but still better. But anyway what I meant to ask was like why a vertical slice would run better than an open world. That part doesn't make sense to me, it's like saying an open world game runs worse than a linear one basically but that's not right.
In my experience when you work on a vertical slice you optimize everything from the models and textures to the AI to work for that vertical slice. this does not mean that the vertical slice runs smoother/better than the final project, but that the assets that are developed for the vertical slice may need to change in order to work in the final game without killing your performance. vertical slices are often used to showcase the game to publishers or investors so it is important to have the game running smooth but like I said that doesn't mean that all the assets will work in the final build.
like I said before, all I can do is offer speculation based off of what I have heard/read, and my own experience.
like I said before, all I can do is offer speculation based off of what I have heard/read, and my own experience.
Yes it is, actually. Any large, complex structure with many moving parts is much more challenging than a smaller, simpler version. The more features and choices you add, the more problems you get.
I really don't get it but thank you for trying to explain it. To me it seems like a vertical slice is just a demo but that should run the same as the full game.
Most of the really demanding games I've played are linear, performance in video games seems more attributed to who is making it rather than world layout. For instance if I pool Metro, Ryse, Lords of the Fallen, Last Light, GTA V, Crysis 3, Sleeping Dogs HD, Assassin's Creed Black Flag, The Witcher 3, and Ground Zeroes together you will see the frame rate is about the same but the open world games are running better than the linear ones even though they all have good graphics. Then there are games that are optimized well like Ground Zeroes which is open world, looks just as good, but runs much better.
What exactly do you mean by features, choices, and problems? Are you talking about bugs or performance still?
Bugs and performance limitations both. It's true that you have a median line in those game you mentioned, but that's because they have swapped scale complexity for engine complexity.
You only have so much headroom available to you - you can dedicate resources to one thing, (intense, amazingly realised graphics) at the expense of some others (stability, open-world scale, highly complex pathing AI, whatever)
This is natural in any finite model - without infinite resources, you have to make compromises.
Firms like Rockstar can expand the horizon a lot, because they have so much money...but anyone who played GTA IV on PC -knows- money isn't always going to fix things.
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