The Witcher 3 GOTY Edition

[Perkel]

for real this is my biggest pet peeve with modern games. shitty shadow cascading. I was playing elden ring and that game has some of of the worst, low res blobby most distracting shadows ive ever seen.

Shadows are INCREDIBLY expensive because their cost rises in logarithm instead of linear fashion. With each new light you have to recalculate whole scene another time and take into account existing shadows. So by 6 light source casting shadows you are looking at power of 6. Only real way to deal with that problem is either bake them aka no dynamic shadows/lights or raytracing which skips whole issue as nothing is recalculated with each new light source and shadows are just lack of light rays thought it creates its own power hungry set of issues.

You can have 1000s of dynamic lights without shadows but you can only have like 6-7 lights with shadows IN MODERN GAMES. So usually you have your sun casting shadows, few nearest lights casting shadows and character torch/light casting shadow and that's it. And even those have very aggressive limits.

So only raytracing can help here and by that i mean path tracing rather than hybrid we use today.

 

[Old Hans]

So only raytracing can help here and by that i mean path tracing rather than hybrid we use today.

this is the tech im really excited about, lights and shadows that dont require a bunch of developer tricks, like in that video a couple posts above, at the 5-minute mark. thats what im talking about. now all I need is a computer that isn't NINE YEARS OLD. then I can re-immerse myself back into the Witcher 3 where I will spend hours admiring my ray traced horse saddles

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

They altered the "bad ending" a little bit.

 

[Old Hans]

They altered the "bad ending" a little bit.

I noticed in that thumbnail, the annoying blue line on his pauldron is still there.

 

[Dhaze]

for real this is my biggest pet peeve with modern games. shitty shadow cascading. I was playing elden ring and that game has some of of the worst, low res blobby most distracting shadows ive ever seen.

FromSoft really struggle with shadows; and they have possibly the worst implementation of SSAO I've ever seen. It was bad in DS2, bad in DS3, then became outright awful in Sekiro and remained like so in Elden Ring. In some places you can have a sort of faint white-ish aura or glow that englobes your character. Overall I don't care much about graphics, yet even I find that disctracting.

 

[ferratilis]

I noticed in that thumbnail, the annoying blue line on his pauldron is still there.

Don't worry, it's not in the game anymore. I was also triggered by that blue line before.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I just learned that HBAO+ has mysteriously disappeared from the DX11 version of the Next Gen Witcher 3. In other words, buy raytracing-enabled cards, you scrooges!

Downloading the "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition (Part X of 10)" from the left column of GOG "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition" library entry downloads the same files as downloading "Witcher 3 Classic 1.32 PartX" from the right column of the same library entry, under "Extras". The latter was supposed to be the non-next gen version

Until CDPR fix the urls, the only way to install the non-next gen is to install from the old library entry "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt". You know it, the one that existed before CDPR created the Witcher 3 GOTY edition as a separate library entry, with all DLCs bundled in the same install files.

Gotta love it when indie studios of 5 people are better at managing their releases than a publicly traded million-dollar AAA company.

This has been fixed, after I wrote to support about it, and likely I wasn't the only one.

 

[ferratilis]

Sorry for graphical faggotry, but I took a glance at that DF video, and found something interesting. They use this location to show the difference between non-RT and RT:

Spoiler

He keeps yapping on about how the non-RT version looks bad.

And then I took a screenshot of my own, I can only play non-RT, this is how it looks:

Spoiler

Despite the difference in weather, there's a ton of detail missing in their shot, along with shadows and AO. I can only guess they deliberately lowered the settings to upsell RT. It wouldn't be surprising from them tbh.

 

[Old Hans]

Sorry for graphical faggotry, but I took a glance at that DF video, and found something interesting. They use this location to show the difference between non-RT and RT:

Spoiler

He keeps yapping on about how the non-RT version looks bad.

And then I took a screenshot of my own, I can only play non-RT, this is how it looks:

Spoiler

Despite the difference in weather, there's a ton of detail missing in their shot, along with shadows and AO. I can only guess they deliberately lowered the settings to upsell RT. It wouldn't be surprising from them tbh.

of course when the sun is out in Vanilla looks nice. once you remove the sun everything looks flat. I remember some of the interiors like the barber shop were just totally devoid of lighting and shadows. it looked terrible

 

[Perkel]

Sorry for graphical faggotry, but I took a glance at that DF video, and found something interesting. They use this location to show the difference between non-RT and RT:

Spoiler

He keeps yapping on about how the non-RT version looks bad.

And then I took a screenshot of my own, I can only play non-RT, this is how it looks:

Spoiler

Despite the difference in weather, there's a ton of detail missing in their shot, along with shadows and AO. I can only guess they deliberately lowered the settings to upsell RT. It wouldn't be surprising from them tbh.

Do the same thing at night.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I only play in the daytime, Geralt is occupied at the Passiflora after dark.

 

[don_tomaso]

Sorry for graphical faggotry, but I took a glance at that DF video, and found something interesting. They use this location to show the difference between non-RT and RT:

Spoiler

He keeps yapping on about how the non-RT version looks bad.

And then I took a screenshot of my own, I can only play non-RT, this is how it looks:

Spoiler

Despite the difference in weather, there's a ton of detail missing in their shot, along with shadows and AO. I can only guess they deliberately lowered the settings to upsell RT. It wouldn't be surprising from them tbh.

of course when the sun is out in Vanilla looks nice. once you remove the sun everything looks flat. I remember some of the interiors like the barber shop were just totally devoid of lighting and shadows. it looked terrible

You are doing quite a retarded comparison there. The whole point was to show of how it looks when there are no direct sunlight in the environment. Non-GI games usually look extremely ugly then, which they are showing very well imo. Come back with a screenshot matched with their time of day and complain instead. I'm sure the "missing" AO is just because of the increased image contrast resulting from the sun in your pic, you don't noticed the AO as well.

 

[ferratilis]

Do the same thing at night.

Spoiler

 

[Justicar]

 

[Perkel]

someone made RTX config that works 20-40% faster without noticeable difference to picture quality

 

[Justicar]

 

[Sykar]

If only the combat mechanics and loot system would match the graphical quality...

 

[Semiurge]

Justicar were those taken with the new photo mode? I noticed that there's some depth-of-field blur around the edges.

 

[Perkel]

If only the combat mechanics and loot system would match the graphical quality...

If only they would pick W3EE instead of FCR3 to include by default...

btw. W3EE dev :

 

[Perkel]

Started watching whole "secrets of TW3" on yt. Damn it. Quests have so many different interactions that me finishing game like 4 times hardly saw half of those.

The real stunner are those weird ones that you think no one would think of but somehow they did. In that Lambert/Gerlat quest in Kaer Mohren where you go with boat across lake you can actually ignore finding boat and just swim across. When you arrive to cave there will be actually a cutscene where Lambert says that Geralt is fucking weird swimming across whole lake.

missing in action:



lords of undvik:

 

[Starwars]

There's a lot of cool, small stuff in the Witcher 3, lots of nice reactivity. There's a bunch of that type of stuff in Cyberpunk too (though not as much afaik).

It's fun for novelty but I still feel like it doesn't add as much as it should. The game is so vast and the details are usually so small (cool as they can be) that I find it all gets a bit lost in the grand scheme of things. And while walking around White Orchard, for example, is a treat for the eye, in most of the houses there's just filler loot. It doesn't really encourage exploring it in depth, so finding that the Nilfgaardian soldier moves in with the Temerian family is a nice touch but... still a very very small *reward* for wading through a lot of generic houses. It's like... I'm sure there's cool stuff you can find in Novigrad in some house or another, but who's gonna go through all that shit? It all looks fantastic but the game never managed to pull me in in a way that I really wanted to go around and explore every nook and cranny.

I'm not usually one to complain about small, hidden reactivity, I love that stuff, but in Witcher 3 I really wished they had focused the overall experience a bit more and opened quests up in more interesting ways.

And while you can do a lot of the quests in weird order or whatever, and get a reaction for it, they just try to railroad you so much that you have to go out of the way to do in a weird order. It's a shame since there is an effort in the game to have that reactivity, but nothing about the game encourages you to go about the quests in a more creative way. You get level indicactors, quest compasses, it just tries too hard to guide you.

 

[Gerrard]

Too bad they didn't apply that attention to detail to not having the same scripted conversation play from the same NPCs every time you pass them.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Too bad they didn't apply that attention to detail to not having the same scripted conversation play from the same NPCs every time you pass them.

They've grown on me actually, I find them fun. It's also cool to check out the variations in different localizations for things like songs, and some dialogues. They sometimes have little in common, or are worth experiencing in a different language.

 

[Decado]

I started this up again after the new upgrade/update for my PS5. Well worth another playthrough. This is one of those games I bounced off of pretty hard the first time around, but I'm glad I stuck with it . . . even though I wouln't really consider this a hardcore RPG.

 

[good fucking shit happen]