thoses excuses.... :sweat: ( about the part you quoted, didnt wasted my time to read all their bullshit talk )
So
1- That's another bullshit talking to do damage control about the utter graphic downgrade / terrific optimization
2- They developped their game in a very wrong way...
Actually that is standard for game development. look at what Ubisoft is showing for assassin's creed syndicate, which is what they are calling pre-alpha. by your logic it should look really crappy now but that is not how you impress publishers and investors so you have to jump out of the gate running. games at E3 have always looked better than the final project, sure you can find a handful of token games that looked better at release but in general they have always looked better on stage for as long as I can remember. a lot of character artist and modelers I know go by the rule of make models as hi poly as you can and then cut polygons when the environment artist starts bitching because the engine begins to chug. some of those people work for Bungie and Blizzard.
its CLEARLY NOT like that, that you think / build / optimize your map... ( even if sure i only worked on big map without streaming world or so.. but.. still.. that look SO wrong what they said... )
you cannot know how to bring the whole level/world to a finished level of detail/polish until you fill out a small chunk of the world. this is usually called a vertical slice. you cannot simply plop in a huge world the size of the witcher 3 and go, alright just finish that. it doesn't work. Modding is nothing like developing a game from the ground up. sure someone can grab skyrim and say, "what the hell, I can completely change the look of the whole world in one year and I am just one person." but they forget that the game world is constantly changing and iterating during development, all the areas have already been optimized for you, and the base structure needed to change models lighting and textures are already set up.
Optimization: this is a big one, if mods had to take a blank world that has not been optimized, split up, and set up for proper streaming most mods would be a buggy frame rate dropping horrible mess. even more so than some mods now. the amount of time and effort put into the bug fixing and optimization stage of development is crazy. and yes The Witcher 3 is a really really well optimized game. here is one example:
"We have not been able to pass 2 GB of graphics memory. Meaning the game doesn't use huge succulent textures, but rather renders quality shaders in-game, you can tell the programmers put a lot of work into this. Once you go to Ultra HD we'll close in at 2GB, but that's an incredibly small number for the game in terms of graphics memory."
http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/the-witcher-3-graphics-performance-review,9.html
compare that to gta which can easily pass 4 GB of graphics memory. (note: If you want to argue that GTA:V looks better thats fine but at that point I think its subjective, I think TW3 looks better but that's just me.)
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/gta_v_pc_graphics_performance_review,9.html
there are some more technical performance optimization things that I have noticed but for now I will leave that be. all in all modding is a completely different beast to making a game from scratch. Mods(games?) like black mesa and skywind are the closest you can get to developing a game and even then you have the level structure, world, art style, asset list, story/quests and much more already figured out for you.
