It still doesn't make sense, to put a lot of time and effort into making the graphics more detailed, if only a very small part of the players can use that additional setting and most of those players would buy the game anyway.
And no, a 980 can't run the game on 1440p with everything on max and still maintain 60 FPS all the time.
What really doesn't make sense is why they would spend a lot of time developing those graphics you're talking about and then remove them. They already spent the money you find it strange to invest in and they did it to please consumers. Then they removed it.
Also the logic you're following is strange because I bet a majority of the people who played TW2 in 2011 played it at close to max settings despite not being able to run it that well, it was unoptimized at the time but this game is worse-off. And when they upgraded they played it even with Ubersampling at 60fps. You can even get Ubersampling at 120fps now, 4 years ago people would argue that would be impossible. The strawmen about people who have weak PCs is barely valid now seeing as millions of people have cards stronger than a 780, so why would it be valid in one year or two years?
Developers make good graphics because they like to express their passion, it's good advertising, it pushes the industry forward with innovation, and we the consumers like it. There's no reason not to invest in graphics and time has proven it's a worthwhile venture. Another thing to point out is that CDPR graphical overhauls for both previous games for free and nobody even asked them to, so I wonder why you are defending a downgrade they've done now. Makes no sense.
the work was done with those assets "on a small portion of the world for demo purposes" which, when scaled up, could not be sustained at a suitable level of performance!
hence they were dropped.
so yes; the assets were there; on a different render engine! as CDPR have stated they had a choice of 2 renderers and in the end chose the one that would allow for the huge world to run as best as possible at the cost of some of the bells and whistles!
That's only in regards to the 2013 build of the game, CDPR has not clarified why they messed up the 35 minute gameplay visuals -- that was a playable build of the game slated to launch later that year.
Some of my posts were deleted though.
