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curl-6 on 18 May 2015
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HoloDust said:

2013 was a tough time for CD Projekt RED simply because we were trying to create an entire bulk of the game on the older DirectX 9 renderer that we had in place for The Witcher 2. Most of the assets were created during the time we were creating our DX11 solution render pipeline to bring the next-generation experience to everyone. A lot of the footage including the debut gameplay trailer was done when the consoles were not even out and we only had an idea of the specifications of the system. This landed itself into problem territory when we realized the next-generation systems could not simply meet our graphical output to the desirable level of quality that we needed. There were several options: build three different builds or consolidate to the nearest denominator, which is what we did. We took the specifications of the lowest performing throughput system which I don’t care to mention here at all to avoid that discussion, and worked our way up from there. As almost a 250 man team, we sequentially had to take out/turn down a lot of features not just from our NVIDIA GameWorks pipeline but our normal game solution scripts as well – these include the following:

  • Level of horizon detail (essentially the draw distance had to be completely tuned down to tax the consoles less)

  • Volume based translucency

  • Ambient occlusion and foliage density / tree count

  • Flexible water simulation / tessellation  we resorted to a (script texture effect similar to most games than physical based simulation)

  • Ground/building tessellation

  • Forward lit soft particles (this is the fire, smoke, fog that you would encounter while going through thick terrain into open space)

  • Real-time reflections in the water are completely off and replaced with a cheaper render solution estimator (this is a primary reason blood splatter was also removed from water)

We just did not have the manpower, budget or the console power to produce the vision we intended before the consoles were released to create a more visually stunning game of higher fidelity like 2013 assets. The PCs themselves had more than enough power to achieve this vision, almost certainly. But working on the game across 3 platforms did not make it feasible to keep features included that could potentially break the game as we kept building around it. All the 2013 trailers were actually in-game footage (not prerendered or vertical slices) but essentially just not an entirely finished world running on a high-end PC at the time.

 

http://whatifgaming.com/developer-insider-the-witcher-3-was-downgraded-from-2013-list-of-all-features-taken-out-why

Yeah, I don't think they were alone in that, it seems many devs expected PS4/Xbone to be stronger.

Well, that's it then I guess. Consoles held back PC confirmed.