The Witcher 3 is a very good-looking game, but it doesn’t quite hold up to the jaw-dropping standards of its initial promotional trailer, first shown off at the VGX game awards show in 2013. While it doesn’t seem to have angered players as much as the Watch Dogs controversy, a section of the fanbase has been fairly vocal about what’s becoming a frustratingly common issue in the games industry - glossy, breathtaking promo trailers that wildly over-promise the visual capabilities of a game’s engine.
It’s not an entirely new problem of course, I remember losing my tiny mind at initial Half-life 2 footage shown off at E3 years ago, but as the industry marketing machine gets ever more elaborate and prevalent, it’s certainly becoming more noticeable. CD Projekt discussed the issue recently, in an interview with Eurogamer.
”If you’re looking at the development process,” CDP’s Marcin Iwinski explains, ”we do a certain build for a tradeshow and you pack it, it works, it looks amazing. 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.”
That 2013 footage (which you can see above) was genuinely captured on a PC, the developer maintains, but over time some visual compromises had to be made in order to ensure a reasonable performance. In terms of pure performance, the team maintains that there have actually been significant improvements since 2013, in frame rate and the sheer scale of the open world. Despite being proud of the final product, the team admits that they may have made mistakes during their promotional campaign.
”Maybe we shouldn’t have shown that (trailer,” says Iwinski. ”I don’t know, but we didn’t know that it wasn’t going to work, so it’s not a lie or a bad will - that’s why we didn’t comment actively. We don’t agree there is a downgrade but it’s our opinion, and gamers’ feeling can be different. If they made their purchasing decision based on the 2013 materials, I’m deeply sorry for that, and we are discussing how we can make it up to them because that’s not fair.”
Future patches and updates may add additional options on the PC version for squeezing the most out of the game, the team says, though they’re not promising anything specific.
”I hope it shows our intentions,” says Iwinski, ”because we are not hiding anything. Considering our values, hiding is the last thing we ever want to do. And for those who are still not 100 per cent decided, I definitely encourage them to wait and see what we will be releasing in patches, updates and whatnot.”
Fair play to CDP for approaching this issue head on. I’m the first to get annoyed at over-promising promo trailers, but I still think, from what I’ve played so far, that The Witcher 3 is a truly gorgeous game. And, more importantly, a genuinely good one. Admittedly there’s a significant drop in visual quality from that VGX trailer, but considering the silky smooth 60FPS I’m getting on a relatively decent but unremarkable PC, I’m happy with the compromise. I think the difference between this and something like AC: Unity, is that it wasn’t just the graphics that were broken in Ubisoft’s game. What do you guys think?
