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Witcher 3 Patch is Coming with About 600 Changes

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  • Witcher 3 Patch is Coming with About 600 Changes

    A new patch for The Witcher 3 should be coming soon from CD Projekt RED. As part of an interview with Eurogamer, studio head Adam Badowski, co-founder Marcin Iwinski, and communications manager Michal Platkow-Gilewski revealed that a massive patch is coming soon.
    Before I get into the nitty-gritty, know that a big patch with 600 changes - including improvements to graphics and graphical settings - was sent to certification today (Wednesday 20th May), and will take between five and seven days to clear. There will be patch notes covering it all.

    This was part of their interview with Eurogamer that also discussed the whole "downgrade" issue that some fans are still up in arms about.
    Why did the graphics change?

    "If you're looking at the development process," Iwinski begins, "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."

    It was captured PC footage, not pre-rendered, Badowski confirms, but a lot had to change. "I cannot argue - if people see changes, we cannot argue," Adam Badowski says, "but there are complex technical reasons behind it.

    "Maybe it was our bad decision to change the rendering system," he mulls, "because the rendering system after VGX was changed." There were two possible rendering systems but one won out because it looked nicer across the whole world, in daytime and at night. The other would have required lots of dynamic lighting "and with such a huge world simply didn't work".

    It's a similar story for environments, and their texture sizes and incidental objects. It was a trade-off between keeping that aspect of them or their unique, handmade design. And the team chose the latter. The data-streaming system couldn't handle everything while Geralt galloped around.

    The billowing smoke and roaring fire from the trailer? "It's a global system and it will kill PC because transparencies - without DirectX 12 it does't work good in every game." So he killed it for the greater good, and he focused on making sure the 5000 doors in Novigrad worked instead.

    "People are saying that 2013 was better but actually there's plenty of things that improved since 2013," Michal Platkow-Gilewski points out. "Size of the world, frames-per-second..."

    "Yes!" realises Adam Badowski. "The game's performance: people say the game is well optimised. This is the first time for this company!" It's the first smile I've seen from him all interview.

    So sure, while people may see only "downgraded" visuals, they fail to realize that without changes or "downgrades" the game would probably run like complete garbage or have other issues. It's not always a cut and dry case as to why things had to change between preview and release, but people sure do love to complain.

  • #2
    Out of curiosity, were the Aliens: Colonial Marines graphical issues due to incompetence, or due to technical issues that didn't happen in the E3 build? I'm not intending this to be a devil's advocate comment, but I am wondering if this is a similar issue (the technical issues part, I am NOT calling CD Projekt Red incompetent).

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    • #3
      Originally posted by K-16 View Post
      Out of curiosity, were the Aliens: Colonial Marines graphical issues due to incompetence, or due to technical issues that didn't happen in the E3 build? I'm not intending this to be a devil's advocate comment, but I am wondering if this is a similar issue (the technical issues part, I am NOT calling CD Projekt Red incompetent).
      If I were to guess, I'd say ACM was largely due to incompetence and/or the gross nature of how that game was farmed around to various studios. ACM is a linear game with loads in between each level or section. There shouldn't be very many technical limitations when you're working with such small areas like ACM's levels. It's a whole new ballgame once you get to completely open world games like Witcher 3.

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      • #4
        Fair enough. Makes sense.

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