Gaming
CD Projekt Red Addresses Witcher 3 Graphical Downgrade
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has released to critical acclaim across the board. It’s hard to throw a rock without hitting a rave review for CD Projekt Red’s RPG, including a 10 out of 10 from Gamespot, becoming only the 9th game in history the site has given a perfect score. Despite the game’s success, however, The Witcher 3 has also been subject to complaints about a downgrade in graphical quality.
The complaints revolve around a PC gameplay trailer that aired two years ago at VGX. A comparison of that trailer to the finished game shows a marked difference in graphical quality, with the VGX trailer appearing to be much more detailed. The assumption here was that the graphics had to be downgraded so the game would run on the Xbox One and Playstation 4, but some people were still disappointed that the higher quality graphics couldn’t be preserved for the PC version. As time wore on, questions over this continued to arise, with people starting to accuse CD Projekt Red of deliberately misleading their fans.
In an interview with Eurogamer, CD Projekt Red’s co-founder Marcin Iwinski confirmed that there was indeed a change in the game’s graphical quality. The reason for the change basically boils down to the fact that, two years ago, the game was still fairly early in development. It’s a fact of game development that changes like this are made several times, so a gameplay trailer that early on was never likely to be representative of the final game. “We do a certain build for a tradeshow and you pack it, it works, it looks amazing,” Iwinski said. “And you are extremely far away from completing the game. Then you put it in the open-world, regardless of the platform, and it’s like ‘oh shit, it doesn’t really work’. We’ve already showed it, now we have to make it work. And then we try to make it work on a huge scale. This is the nature of games development.”
Console limitations were also a factor, however. “Developing only for the PC: yes, probably we could get more [in terms of graphics] as there would be nothing else – they would be so focused, like if we would develop only on Xbox One or PlayStation 4. But then we cannot afford such a game,” Iwinski said. But developing the game only for PC was not an option. “If the consoles are not involved there is no Witcher 3 as it is… We just cannot afford it, because consoles allow us to go higher in terms of the possible or achievable sales; have a higher budget for the game, and invest it all into developing this huge, gigantic world.”
So there it is. CD Projekt Red didn’t want to downgrade The Witcher 3‘s graphics, but it wasn’t feasible to develop at that level for consoles. And don’t be mad at consoles. Like it or not, they make up a huge portion of the gaming market and without them, CD Projekt Red wouldn’t have had the funds to create The Witcher 3 at all. It’s also worth remembering that there’s a huge patch coming to the PC version in a week or so, which will apparently include 600 changes, so that should improve the graphics quite a bit. There’s also a patch coming that will allow PC users to change the .ini files, so savvy users can further tweak their settings.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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