The action role-playing game is finally out

May 21, 2015 14:26 GMT  ·  By

A lot of people have been talking about the downgraded visuals in CD Projekt RED's The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and the company has finally decided to tackle the subject matter head-on.

The main problem is that, as always, the gaming community is polarized on the subject, with PC users blaming the limited hardware of last-gen consoles, while console enthusiasts... well, they're just enjoying the game and flaunting it.

Now, to be fair, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a definite blockbuster, an action role-playing game that is likely to set a new standard for open-world games. It does have several issues to work out, as the threads on Reddit can attest, but when it comes to the actual gameplay, it's rock solid.

The graphics are definitely worse than the ones shown back in 2013 at VGX, and the developers have finally renounced their "no downgrade" routine and admitted that the final version of the game features visuals that are worse than what the studio initially showcased.

But as it turns out, there are some pretty good reasons why that happened, and they go beyond the fact that console hardware is objectively inferior to the constant advances of the PC market.

In a recent interview with Eurogamer, the developers revealed why they chose to make some of the changes that are now perceived as visual downgrades, and provided a pretty down-to-earth explanation for the whole thing.

A massive game is more difficult to put together than a tiny demo

CD Projekt RED co-founder Marcin Iwinski started the apologetic conversation by stating that nobody at the studio was happy about how things ended up, but there was ultimately no way to avoid it.

He acknowledged the fact that the build created for the initial reveal looked amazing, but pointed out that, as the development process progressed and the world got bigger and bigger, some of the features had to be cut back in order to ensure that the game actually worked.

A lot of PC elitists suggested that the game was held back by the fact that it also had to run on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and that the studio worked for parity across all platforms instead of making it look great for them.

Iwinski countered this claim by pointing out that, without the two current-generation consoles as a target platform, the market for the game would have been significantly smaller, which in turn would have led to the game having a much smaller scale.

While a PC-only edition of the game would have indeed looked better, the studio could not have afforded to make it into such a huge project without also selling it on consoles. Delivering The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on the Xbox One and PS4 allowed the team to go much higher in terms of budget, which also meant that they could work on creating a gigantic open world, without having to worry about sales.

The first footage was a vertical slice

During the interview, Iwinski was specifically asked about the graphics in the VGX video, which you can conveniently find below, next to one of the early gameplay trailers.

He revealed that the footage, while captured in-game on a PC, came from a vertical slice build, a demo specifically engineered to run as well as possible, and to have as high fidelity as possible. It was a closed-off section that didn't have all the rich interactions of an open world to contend with, which helped push the visuals.

Games development is pretty hard work, and specifically when you're trying to create a set of universal tools for an open-world game. When you're dealing with a very linear product, it's easier to cordon certain sections off, to engineer the experience so that the player is shown only the best bits.

But when the player is in control of the experience, each and every system has to work flawlessly. When you're putting together a trailer, you can play with camera angles and toy around in post-production, but a live experience has to work seamlessly, without any visible performance impact, no matter what you're doing.

Many people are able to enjoy the game for what it is, a great action role-playing experience with a deeply human facet, presenting both the good and the bad in the world. Others feel that they have been cheated, and that the experience should have been much more engrossing, especially as far as the visuals are concerned.

CD Projekt RED never intended to mislead anyone

The changes made to the game during the development process had complex technical issues behind them. After having released the initial trailer, the developers had to remove some of the features and change a lot of things in order for the project to work, including changing the rendering system, as the previous one simply did not work with such a huge world.

Many of the choices boiled down to trade-offs between juggling what the team wanted to do and how well it would actually work in the real world. The complex particle system responsible for the fire and smoke in the initial trailer had to be killed, but the game improved by a lot since 2013, especially when it comes to frame rate and size.

The team does not feel as if the graphics were downgraded in any way, they simply did not know whether everything was going to work or not. It was not a question of lying to the audience or bad will, only the complex nature of video game development.

Iwinski also added that he was truly sorry for the people who played the game and were not fine with it, and pledged to make it up to them. He also urged those who were not 100 percent convinced whether or not to buy the game to wait and see how things would evolve with upcoming updates.