Have a look at this short comparison clip. Significant difference, no? CD Projekt Red finally admitted to what everyone likely knew was the truth already, and that was the obvious fact that The Witcher 3 was visually downgraded rather significantly since the E3 2013 reveal. Here’s what the studio co-founder Marcin Iwinski had to say:
If you’re looking at the development process, 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. Maybe we shouldn’t have shown that, 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.
What we were blessed with a couple years ago promised us an absolutely stunning looker of an open world game, and knowing how good the last Witcher title looked, it wasn’t really far fetched to buy into the hype. Unfortunately, not every developer is quite honest with itself or the people watching them, as they’ll often put their best and shiniest foot forward while hiding the rest until it’s time to do a full reveal.
“Bullshots”, along with early alpha or beta footage, have fairly consistently proven to be something you should be hesitant to put your faith in, unless you like ushering disappointment upon your life. Let’s all exercise a little more caution in the future, yes? Question what you see, and lower your expectations. The video game industry is a business, so remember that publishers and developers are out to impress you. Be discerning and wade through the bullshit to the real juicy meat at the center that you’re actually going to be gnawing on come release day.
Thanks to Crave’s Game Revolution for the confirmation.
