Tweet
Ranking among the cream of the crop of PC developers working today, CD Projekt RED has shown a no-compromise approach to every project it's set its mind to. Case in point: the sublime Xbox 360 edition of The Witcher 2 didn't simply cut back the original PC code, but instead had code rewritten from scratch to push the console aesthetic in a new, arguably improved direction. But with The Witcher 3 being developed on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, can we once again expect an off-shoot of the PC experience, or something closer to parity? And indeed, how is the team looking to get the most out of PC development?At the centre of the studio's first next-gen title is, of course, a brand new technological underpinning: the home-built REDengine 3. Also set for use in its upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 project, major bullet-points for the engine include support for 64-bit precision high dynamic range, fully tessellated environments, and a streaming algorithm to permit a completely open-world game design. The Witcher 3's game world counts in at over 25 times the size of its predecessor's, and this freedom to roam in any direction is a series first. Now it's possible to scale mountains via an added jump move, swim underwater, travel by boat and also horse-ride from one end of the map to the other. Expectedly, such advances rule out the game's development on PS3 and 360.
The limits of last-gen consoles won't be missed, however. Despite the forward-thinking revisions in lighting, materials and shaders for The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition, sacrifices were inevitably made to suit the 360's hardware. This ranged from reductions in texture map quality, reined in draw distances, and half-resolution effects - plus a native frame-buffer of 1280x672. Even so, for a developer this au fait with PC development (going as far as including an ubersampling option that still manages to stress today's top-end rigs), the end result stands as an incredible accomplishment given the 360's limits.
Read more…
More...