Witcher 3 - “We Are Aiming for CG-Quality In-Game Graphics”

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Gamingbolt has a very small, but brief interview about Witcher 3.
We spoke only Quest Designer Paweł Sasko about how much better they look, especially in relation to the current crop of next-gen titles. He stated that, “It all comes down to the fact that CD Projekt RED loves challenges. With tunnel-like, linear levels created by a talented team, it’s relatively easy to deliver eye-candy graphics, because it’s always clear where player is looking.

“But when the game has the size of The Witcher 3 it becomes an incomparably bigger challenge and this is what makes our artists totally excited. Screenshots that we’ve shown are from an old build of the engine that ran using a dated renderer. Much of it is already rewritten and judging from the effects, we are aiming for CG quality of in-game graphics.”

“But this is not only an achievement of our programmers,” he says. “Our art team is one of the best staffed departments in the company, mostly because the guys and gals have been with CD Projekt RED since the beginning of The Witcher 1. We also know that in many cases with canny art direction it’s possible to do more than using monstrous textures and having them loaded and displayed flawlessly. We are aiming for the title of prettiest RPG of all time.”
So while The Witcher 3 will bring forth tesselation, improved multi-threaded and all the whiz-bang features of DirectX 11, CD Projekt RED wants it to stand out as an artistic achievement as well.
More information.
 
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Prettiest RPG - that is also going on consoles?
Ain't that a mission impossible?
 
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Prettiest RPG - that is also going on consoles?
Ain't that a mission impossible?

Console players will believe until they get the game and install it...
 
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As much as I believe these guys are very talented, I'm starting to worry this project might be too ambitious to ever really work with all these strong features intact.

I guess we'll see.

I just don't want another Gothic 3 - which is very much the kind of progression it's starting to sound like.
 
Prettiest RPG - that is also going on consoles?
Ain't that a mission impossible?

It's a next gen launch title. I don't think the console version will be *that* much different from the PC version.

I thought Witcher 2 was the prettiest RPG I had ever seen, so I can believe the same for W3.
 
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I thought Witcher 2 was the prettiest RPG I had ever seen, so I can believe the same for W3.

TW2 was also very linear though. If what they are planning with "open world sandbox" has any truth to it, I find it very hard to believe that they will manage to incorporate both sandbox gameplay and cg-quality graphics into one product and still manage to run it satisfactorily on consoles and even [most] PCs. They'll have to scale back in one of those proclamations.
 
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CG means Computer Graphics.
space_invader.jpg
 
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TW2 was also very linear though. If what they are planning with "open world sandbox" has any truth to it, I find it very hard to believe that they will manage to incorporate both sandbox gameplay and cg-quality graphics into one product and still manage to run it satisfactorily on consoles and even [most] PCs. They'll have to scale back in one of those proclamations.

Well, it's gonna be 3 years since Witcher 2. That's 3 years of advancement on PC. Which means what on average? 2-3 times more powerful computers?

If you're playing on an old computer, you just have to settle for lower settings. The game is supposed to run with max settings only on a high-end, 2014 computer.

On consoles, they are jumping roughly 8 years forward next year. That's 8 years of technological advancement, the next gen consoles for PS and X-box are going to in a whole another ballpark than the current consoles.
 
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TW2 was also very linear though.

TW2 was only linear in that it wasn't a sandbox. Otherwise, it was far from linear. I can't think of another title where an in-game decision altered the rest of the game to the extent that it did in TW2.
 
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While TW2 had a diverging path for chapter 2, it was still very corridor'esque in gameplay. It certainly wasn't as bad as your typical FPS, but it's a far cry from what they're striving for in their self-proclaimed Skyrim'esque sandbox open-world of TW3.

I just think that, if they plan to go ahead with a sandbox world, they will have to make some visual compromises to have multiple areas loaded into memory. For example, although The Witcher 2 had lovely graphics, I absolutely couldn't stand the dithering on shadows. It is technical compromises such as this that I expect from a studio looking to push the envelope with currently available technology (and next-gen consoles *are* currently available technology).
 
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For example, although The Witcher 2 had lovely graphics, I absolutely couldn't stand the dithering on shadows.
By the way, was that ever solved, patches, modded or otherwise side-stepped?
 
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After how their attitude has been for years now, I can trust them. Given enough time, they can pull it off hopefully.
 
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Confusion between the quality of graphics and the quality of the artwork.
Part of the job of an artist working on computers has always been to beat the limitations of graphics quality to deliver artwork quality.

Seems this is going the path of movies: in the past, directors had limited means to bring their vision to the screen. They had plenty of ideas and limitations did not prevent them from delivering seminal master pieces. Today, thanks to CGI, they have nearly no limitations to bring their vision to the screen but they no longer have visions to bring to the screen.

Maybe the video games industry world will head the same way. High quality graphics but no more artwork to bring to life.
 
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Maybe they are aiming at a very limited verison on the old console generation, and make a lot of use of new console generation?

But huge open world, and so high quality graphics, will it even be possible?
 
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Maybe they are aiming at a very limited verison on the old console generation, and make a lot of use of new console generation?

But huge open world, and so high quality graphics, will it even be possible?

I find it very unlikely that the game would come out on older consoles.
 
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As much as I believe these guys are very talented, I'm starting to worry this project might be too ambitious to ever really work with all these strong features intact.

I guess we'll see.

My thoughts precisely DArt. They are creating such a hype that it might be very difficult to live up to it...
 
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