I want to clarify a few things about this shots folks.
Thing is, i saw one of the earlier Witcher 3 builds in 2013 behind the closed doors at Igromir Expo in Moscow. And it clearly looked even then, with 2 crashes during the demo/ In fact it looked a hell lot better. The early material wasn't any setup or, as you would say, fake. They've just simply overpromised.
Let me explain. The demo we saw was stable 30FPS with some dips, decent drawing distance (lot better than on this pics) and with much prettier lighting model. The picture on early stages were more crisp and colorful. And i'm not even talking about textures (characters/ground) that is downgraded in current state so heavily that Witcher 2 looks on par or even better. Shadow density has been clearly downgraded. This goes for shadows drawing dictance too.
Chainmail on Geralt's armor downgraded on fresh pics to a single low-res texture is awful. And from what i see they've muted the colours in the later builds, that is a shame. Build we saw was a lot more like Inquisition in terms of colour handling.
So what happened? I think optimisations happened. Our expo build was rigged to a powerful PC with 2-way SLI with top of the line GeForces. Sadly Witcher 1 and 2 was very poorly optimised upon release and this time i think CDPR just decided to take some shortcuts. Instead of expensive work with code optimisations they've simply lowered the settings.
And yes, even by console standarts after Inquisition, Second Son or Unity this pics looks flat.
