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Witcher 3 downgrade arguments in here and nowhere else

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Also, who the hell thought this rain screen effect was a good idea? It's atrocious.....

17283483483_14cbf0a3d8_k.jpg


Skin is also extremely bad and looks like gen 7

Drowner scales are pretty nice though :)

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according to the devs witcher uses a fully pbr pipeline but it certainly doesnt seem like it. ivevseen close up shots where certsin materials on geralts armor/clothes appear to utilize it but ive not seen any thing in the environments that look physically accurate. Skin is also extremely bad and looks like gen 7

I agree. Maybe this is due to the late integration of PBR in the game workflow and pipeline while the other games mentioned did have it from start and they managed to accomodate it to their respective engines unlike The Witcher 3 where it seems that it was injected later which didin't have good aftermaths, also most of the other games use Allegorithmic Substance tools for PBR materials creation and use betetr lighting solutions and integrations which make PBR instances more prominent.
 

UnrealEck

Member
That just looks like LOD, colour and contrast tweaks and sharpening added to me. Am I missing something? Or were you just joking?
It looks good though, don't get me wrong about it.

It was a joke. That's about the most delusional reddit thread I've read in a long while.

Unlocked the graphics? Lol. The config edits just crank things up. That's not going to have a monumental affect on how the game looks.
 

Larogue

Member
Depending on what you are looking for graphically. I can see someone who likes sceneries like dense forests, huge plains, etc. with crazy draw distance prefer this game's visuals over other games. For things like cities and interiors, it really isn't all that graphically impressive.

I just took some screenshots in Novigrad (downsampled from 5160x2160 and maxed out in-game), and it really doesn't stack up well against AC:U's Paris.

Ne8xPid.jpg

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80HaSo6.jpg

UpVreiw.jpg

DucSZiV.jpg

qFb3pBO.jpg

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Can't stop appreciating the beauty of AC:U graphics, no matter how many time it has been posted before.
 
I
so yeah I think deceiving was part of the plan. it was their intention to mislead people into believing in that bullshit vertical slice.
All this can ever be is pure speculation. We can't know whether they ever truly intended to target the 2013 slice. Given that it was two years ago, I don't feel comfortable speculating on the integrity of that claim. All we can know is that there was indeed a downgrade. Anything else doesn't really matter.
 

mr stroke

Member
Depending on what you are looking for graphically. I can see someone who likes sceneries like dense forests, huge plains, etc. with crazy draw distance prefer this game's visuals over other games. For things like cities and interiors, it really isn't all that graphically impressive.

I just took some screenshots in Novigrad (downsampled from 5160x2160 and maxed out in-game), and it really doesn't stack up well against AC:U's Paris.

Ne8xPid.jpg

bbnT7S5.jpg

0NKQFwB.jpg

mJAFgHK.jpg

LxknLkP.jpg

ZejRpnb.jpg

80HaSo6.jpg

UpVreiw.jpg

DucSZiV.jpg

qFb3pBO.jpg

x73WzSF.jpg

8f47DSN.jpg

lmLLKRB.jpg

J0qGQTq.jpg

+1
AC blows Witcher 3 out of the water. While the forest looks fantastic, towns and buildings make the Witcher 3 look average at best. Even Dragon Age looks better .
 

-tetsuo-

Unlimited Capacity
So many people bitching about a version of a game that doesn't exist. My mind is blown.

Edit: Also, I'm dying to know how many of you care about your actual grass in your front or backyard as much as you do the grass in The Witcher.

Well real grass looks pretty real, so I doubt they think about it very much.
 
Edit: Also, I'm dying to know how many of you care about your actual grass in your front or backyard as much as you do the grass in The Witcher.

Wow. How perceptive you are. Things I don't care about in real life:

How real clouds looks
How real grass looks
How real water looks
... the list goes on.

There's no point in critiquing real life. But we can critique a game's graphics.

The grass in The Witcher 3 is probably the weakest aspect of the game's visuals. When I'm riding around on my horse, the grass is so jarring that it's hard to appreciate how good everything else looks. It's badness stands out to the point of being distracting.

I hope against hope that this is something that modders can fix with Redkit...
 

Raysod

Banned
Since the developers in their recent interview on eurogamer publicly admitted the downgrade in the PC version of the game I don’t think that there is any argument on the matter…

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...he-witcher-3-graphics-downgrade-issue-head-on

The issues I have are on company ethics, because since 2013 CDPR showed as fake footage from Witcher 3…

I strongly believe that CDPR gets a free pass at the moment from games media and journalists…

And I cannot believe that they still use the fake footage in their official youtube channel and on their official Witcher website (that at this moment is under maintenance) and people are still getting miss leaded on the final quality of the game…

I had enough of almost all next gen games show us fake footage and the final product is a downgraded version of the trailers and i expect something similar from Batman Arkham Knight to be honest...

I still believe that the game is great though, I bought it on PC, but on my hardware - i7, Titan 6gb (Kepler), 16Gb ram, Windows 8.1 - I experience loads of technical issues, freezes, stuttering and crashes…

I hope that the next patches will fix those tecnhical problems and at the moment I stopped playing the game (after ten hours), because I really want to experience it at its best form…

Maybe an enhanced Witcher 3 edition in a few months on PC would be the ideal way to play this beautiful game…
 

longdi

Banned
Wow ACU looks much like the TW3 2013 trailer than the actual TW3 game, and it proves that the 2013 trailer can be replicated reasonably well on a high-end PC...with a competent engine.

Shame on you CDPR higher ups. You had the chance to come out squeaky clean from this saga but you chose the wrong morality choice. :/
 

Pagusas

Elden Member
Wow ACU looks much like TW3 2013 trailer than the actual TW3 game! It proves that 2013 trailer could be done with a high-end PC...

Shame on you CDPR higher ups. You had the chance to come out squeaky clean from this saga but you chose the wrong morality choice. :/

Not only that it proves it can be done on a cross platform game... if one has thousands of employees like UBI.
 

Salaadin

Member
The lies and spin are depressing. Hopefully this is a learning experience for them. They do a lot of good things but stuff like this just sticks out like a sore thumb. I don't like it.

Regarding Assassins Creed, what exactly is the point behind posting these shots? Not all devs have the size, money, and manpower that Ubi has. Besides, wasn't that game marred with technical issues making it practically unplayable for many?
 

Papacheeks

Banned
Since the developers in their recent interview on eurogamer publicly admitted the downgrade in the PC version of the game I don’t think that there is any argument on the matter…

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...he-witcher-3-graphics-downgrade-issue-head-on

The issues I have are on company ethics, because since 2013 CDPR showed as fake footage from Witcher 3…

I strongly believe that CDPR gets a free pass at the moment from games media and journalists…

And I cannot believe that they still use the fake footage in their official youtube channel and on their official Witcher website (that at this moment is under maintenance) and people are still getting miss leaded on the final quality of the game…

I had enough of almost all next gen games show us fake footage and the final product is a downgraded version of the trailers and i expect something similar from Batman Arkham Knight to be honest...

I still believe that the game is great though, I bought it on PC, but on my hardware - i7, Titan 6gb (Kepler), 16Gb ram, Windows 8.1 - I experience loads of technical issues, freezes, stuttering and crashes…

I hope that the next patches will fix those tecnhical problems and at the moment I stopped playing the game (after ten hours), because I really want to experience it at its best form…

Maybe an enhanced Witcher 3 edition in a few months on PC would be the ideal way to play this beautiful game…

Dude.....

They admitted it was realtime not pre-rendered, but had not been tested on Consoles yet, they overshot, and thought the current build of the engine would scale to consoels, they were wrong. And admitted it in the interview and eve explained why it had to change and that they expected people to notice.

Which is more than I can say for Refelctions, Montreal, and other developers.
 
Well real grass looks pretty real, so I doubt they think about it very much.

Wow. How perceptive you are. Things I don't care about in real life:

How real clouds looks
How real grass looks
How real water looks
... the list goes on.

There's no point in critiquing real life. But we can critique a game's graphics.

The grass in The Witcher 3 is probably the weakest aspect of the game's visuals. When I'm riding around on my horse, the grass is so jarring that it's hard to appreciate how good everything else looks. It's badness stands out to the point of being distracting.

I hope against hope that this is something that modders can fix with Redkit...

My point is that it's video game grass, and therefore not a big deal. And personally, I don't think the game has a weak aspect when it comes to visuals. It's a beautifully made game.
 

DOWN

Banned
My point is that it's video game grass, and therefore not a big deal. And personally, I don't think the game has a weak aspect when it comes to visuals. It's a beautifully made game.

That's a lame, delusional, deflective conclusion. Of course it has weaknesses and it absolutely looks worse graphically than a number of games. It's completely fair to point those out. The lighting is worse than Unity, for example. That's a compromise of a lower budget and dynamic lighting. It's fair to acknowledge that compromise.
 
That's a lame, delusional, deflective conclusion. Of course it has weaknesses and it absolutely looks worse graphically than a number of games. It's completely fair to point those out. The lighting is worse than Unity, for example. That's a compromise of a lower budget and dynamic lighting. It's fair to acknowledge that compromise.

I think it's a better looking game than Assassin's Creed. Now what?

Edit: I knew entering this thread was a bad idea. Commenting in it was worse. I can already tell this is going to be an infinitely long potential circle jerk of negativity and minuscule comparisons to similar games... at least to me that's what it seems like. I'll leave all of you people to it. Sorry to waste anyone's time. I'm out.
 
AC Unity looks better in screen shots than in motion. Pop and distant detail is sub-average. I think in motion the Witcher can look more beautiful and I think the world itself is more convincing. I mean the texturing and some of the lighting in AC Unity is excellent. The foliage and trees are nothing special though.

Also the indoor scenes look a good deal more impressive in Unity. Obviously it is of much smaller scale, but in terms of city visuals, the Order easily beats Unity. Of course, the scale is much less impressive.
 
Is it sad that this thread is making me want to pick up AC: Unity, not the Witcher 3 like I had been planning?

I was thinking the exact same thing... lol.

I think it's an unfair comparison though, AC: Unity was developed with deep pockets by over 600 people, on top of this, TW3 is a much better game by all accounts.
 

Zakalwe

Banned
The Witcher 3 looks fantastic.

CDPR handled it fine, they were more than resonable in their explanation about the process.

This is getting ridiculous now.
 
Is it sad that this thread is making me want to pick up AC: Unity, not the Witcher 3 like I had been planning?

I own both games. I think AC: Unity is probably the best looking game to date, all things considered. It has shit LOD though. Like.... REALLY bad.

Speaking of grass.... check out this massive grass rendering distance.


But mmmmm.... dat subsurface scattering...


That said.... I've played Unity for maybe 5 hours. Didn't like it. Pretty game, but.... it's an Assassin's Creed that's regressed in terms of gameplay since Black Flag.

I've already put in ~15 hours into The Witcher 3 and I've basically just scratched the surface. Can't wait to play more.
 

SapientWolf

Trucker Sexologist
Wow ACU looks much like the TW3 2013 trailer than the actual TW3 game, and it proves that the 2013 trailer can be replicated reasonably well on a high-end PC...with a competent engine.

Shame on you CDPR higher ups. You had the chance to come out squeaky clean from this saga but you chose the wrong morality choice. :/
Staying the course with ACU might actually have been a bad business decision. It looked and ran like hot garbage on the consoles. But PC gamers finally got what they were promised from Ubi.
 

Enosh

Member
You look just as out of your mind as before. No, W3 does not look better than this:


6PL5sXH.jpg

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I love the look of unity, especially when inside palaces, churches etc it looks just like some baroque painting

of course the engine is kinda wonky and think they overdid a bit so it ran like shit on consoles, the next AC game looks kinda worse plus has a more, eh dare I say it "cartoony" look to it
 
Unity uses a baked GI system, while Witcher 3's lighting is fully dynamic. The radiosity of Unity lighting makes the game looks a lot better especially in sunlit interiors.
Unity's system precludes dynamic ToD and weather effects, and is very storage and VRAM inefficient (i.e. twice as much as W3 despite a much smaller map size).
Probably as a result of this it has an awful draw distance. In short, I can't see how it would be possible to use baked GI in TW3.

Dynamic GI would 'solve' those issues but is prohibitively computational expensive, but until then I feel that both achieve amazing graphics in their own way.
 
Unity uses a baked GI system, while Witcher 3's lighting is fully dynamic. The radiosity of Unity lighting makes the game looks a lot better especially in sunlit interiors.
Unity's system precludes dynamic ToD and weather effects, and is very storage and VRAM inefficient (i.e. twice as much as W3 despite a much smaller map size).
Probably as a result of this it has an awful draw distance. In short, I can't see how it would be possible to use baked GI in TW3.

Dynamic GI would 'solve' those issues but is prohibitively computational expensive, but until then I feel that both achieve amazing graphics in their own way.

Is W3 fully dynamic? They just came out and admitted they couldn't get a fully dynamic lighting system to work and had to scrap the renderer for something simpler?

...Adam Badowski says, "but there are complex technical reasons behind it. "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".

W3 has very flat lighting to be a fully dynamic lighting system imo. I could be wrong. Someone enlighten me?
 

viveks86

Member
Is W3 fully dynamic? They just came out and admitted they couldn't get a fully dynamic lighting system to work and had to scrap the renderer for something simpler?

They never had fully dynamic GI to scrap it

In some ways Global Illumination is the biggest challenge currently facing graphics programmers. It’s quite hard to find a solution that gives feature parity across all our target platforms and we decided that for now we would rather spend our time on other features for providing better-looking lighting and shading. We will definitely return to this topic at some point and I’m sure that we will find a solution that will fit our games, but right now we have other ideas on how to improve the visuals.
http://www.dsogaming.com/interviews/cd-projekt-red-talks-the-witcher-3-tech-tessellation-physx-dx11-2-windows-8-global-illumination/

W3 has very flat lighting to be a fully dynamic lighting system imo. I could be wrong. Someone enlighten me?

W3 does have a dynamic lighting system, without which realtime ToD is not possible. What they swapped out was the rendering system, because it didn't play well with the amount of dynamic lighting they could afford. Whether it's flat or not is a different matter.
 
Is W3 fully dynamic? They just came out and admitted they couldn't get a fully dynamic lighting system to work and had to scrap the renderer for something simpler?
They said the different renderer would have required lots of dynamic lights, not that the current one doesn't have it (but less in number)
W3 has very flat lighting to be a fully dynamic lighting system imo. I could be wrong. Someone enlighten me?
W3 doesn't have GI or at some kind radiosity (diffuse inter-reflections), so it has to use ambient bias lighting or objects in the shade would look completely black.
The other way would be to use a lot more lights for the shadows, but they couldn't get that to work. So that's the reason the lighting in the Witcher 3 looks flat.

rs_indirectblu2b.jpg
 
Uh.. I thought W3 uses (like most other games) pre-baked light probes for it's indirect lighting. I wouldn't call it flat because I'm sure most people are talking about the vegetation not being shaded properly to show depth and curvature.

It uses some lights to cast dynamic shadows while some others don't. But this is pretty much every game in existence.
 

54-46!

Member
I'm actually thinking about waiting to play this game until the Enhanced edition comes out, maybe they'll update the visuals or something.
 

Chaos17

Member
You look just as out of your mind as before. No, W3 does not look better than this:


6PL5sXH.jpg

18rmfGn.jpg

AC is not as big as Witcher 3.
Emulating a bigger open world game ain't that easy.
If you want to be fair, compare it to GTA 5 instead and don't forget alll the patches it had to be stable and playable.
 
AC is not as big as Witcher 3.
Emulating a bigger open world game ain't that easy.
If you want to be fair, compare it to GTA 5 instead and don't forget alll the patches it had to be stable and playable.

All of this is completely irrelevant when the discussion is about which one looks better.

Yes a burger is not as healthy as broccoli, but that has nothing to do with how much better it tastes.
 

pa22word

Member
you think the pc version should of had its own renderer and assets along with the added cost's and time that comes with it?

Yes?

They made their budget back and enough to both fund a port of the game to consoles, and at least partially fund the sequel with the second game.

Why should PC users accept a downgraded experience for a series they are the entire reason for the popularity of?
 
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