The Witcher III: Wild Hunt - GameGPU Preview
| BASIC INFORMATION ON THE GAME |
Release date : February 24, 2015
Genre : Action RPG, Open world
Developer : CD Projekt RED
Publisher : CD Projekt (Poland), 1C-SoftKlab (CIS), WB Interactive Ent. (USA), Spike Chunsoft (Japan)
Seven years ago, the Poles from CD Project RED showed the world their vision of what a good PC RPG should look like. A series of games about a witcher named Geralt is based on the books of the writer Andrzej Sapkowski. And the developers have repeatedly said that the author takes part in the project when they directly need advice on the plot or a fresh look from the outside. From the very first part of the Witcher series, it immediately became clear that this fantasy RPG would win the hearts of fans of games of this genre and those who were waiting for the continuation of the story of the hero from Rivia.
Of course, one can endlessly describe how huge and beautiful the world created by the Poles is. But in this article, by bringing together all the news and rumors about The Witcher, we will try to reveal what you will see when you launch Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on your PC on February 24th.
| GRAPHIC COMPONENT |
| GAME WORLD |
And so in order - first of all the surrounding world, which, according to the developers, will be of colossal proportions. In March, at a presentation titled "Optimizing View and Streaming in Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with Umbra 3" jointly organized by CD Projekt RED and Umbra Software, extremely interesting digital information about the sizes of some game locations flashed on the slides . So, for example, the area of Novigrad promises to be about 72 square kilometers (8.5x8.5 kilometers), and the area of Skellige - 64 square kilometers (8x8 kilometers). In total, it turns out that two game locations in Geralt's new adventures will be three and a half times larger than the entire game map in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Curiously, at the beginning, the CD Projekt RED team promised that the game world of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt would be only 20-40% larger than the game world of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. So, at the moment it is not entirely clear what the figures presented at the presentation were indicative and not yet scaled to the game world, or whether Geralt will have to complete his journey in a much larger world than originally thought. One thing is for sure - the new "Witcher" will be damn huge.
The huge size of the game world hints, as well as the introduction of new ground vehicles and ships. For movement, it will be possible to get a horse for yourself, and for sea adventures, armed with oars, it will be possible to plow the sea surface. By the way, additional quests will be connected with horse racing. In what form they will be implemented is still unknown.
You won’t be bored at sea either - a merchant ship can sail nearby, and sometimes a whale’s tail flickers on the horizon.
| SETTING |
Since we are talking about TES V: Skyrim, it is worth mentioning that the first two Witchers offered only a relatively open world, which was divided into large, but still limited locations, in which the player could move around with some restrictions. This time, CD Projekt RED will not only offer us completely open areas that are dozens of times larger than the levels from the previous parts, but will also breathe life into them. The developers see the main drawback of The Elder Scrolls series in the soullessness and “cardboardness” of its vast expanses. The Witcher 3 is close to ideal in this regard: every square meter of space will live, interact with the player and respond to his behavior.
According to community managers, The Witcher 3 will not auto-scale monsters, which means that players may encounter enemies that can kill the hero if he gets too far without proper preparation.
The passage of the main storyline will take about 50 hours of play. Side quests will take about the same amount. During this time, the hero will be able to pump up to a maximum level of 60.
In addition, in The Witcher 3, players will not be forced to complete quests within a certain time. The developers want the players to go through them at a pace that is convenient for them. However, there may be plot twists that will make you move faster. It will also be interesting that for the first time in the series, so-called randomly generated events will appear.
So, at one press show, the developers demonstrated a system of randomly generated events in action. Geralt stumbled upon a village, in the vicinity of which a crowd of inhabitants had gathered, discussing strange phenomena and metamorphoses that prevent the villagers from living a quiet life. After that, Geralt, after talking and finding out the essence of the problem, went to investigate. The whole mission looked great and varied, but the question about randomen counters arises like this: will they all be completed according to the same scheme, or will the authors diversify them as much as possible so that they do not become boring after two or three tasks.
| Gambling process |
In addition to creating a large and living world, the main tasks of the Poles included improving the plot non-linearity and expanding the branching of dialogues. The Witcher 3 will constantly put the player in front of a difficult choice. There is no place for good knights here - Geralt does not try to pose as a generous hero. Often we will be forced to choose not between a bad or a good scenario, but between two evils. And of course, each of our decisions will entail certain consequences, which may not appear immediately. These or other events will also affect the "loss" of one of several dozen possible endings.
Very little is known about the plot of the game. Wild Hunt will tell a completely new story, almost unrelated to the previous parts. Even if you have not joined the adventures of Geralt before, you can enjoy the adventure without misunderstanding. The hero left "big politics" and is now engaged in things closer to his vocation. The plot is based on the confrontation between Geralt and the Wild Hunt - a group of ghostly riders with a pack of dogs that destroy all life. All the main characters of the Sapkowski universe, including Triss, will help us.
| COMBAT SYSTEM |
The Witcher 3 combat system builds on the foundation laid in The Witcher 2, but the team has put in a lot of work improving it and fixing past bugs. One of the results is an updated dodge system that allows players to dodge, roll, and perform other pirouettes. It has not undergone particularly major changes and is a more improved system of sword fighting with the use of magic. The main innovation in the gameplay is special attacks. The developers demonstrated one of them when Geralt met in a duel with a monster in the presentation: he fired fire from his hand, burning the monster like a flamethrower.
By the way, monsters now need to be hunted: the player must calculate the victim before engaging in battle with it. Geralt asks the inhabitants, collecting bits of information about the monster, adjusts a unique arsenal for a certain enemy, and special vision, an analogue of the detective mode from the Batman: Arkham City game series, will help him in his search. In summary, in order to go hunting, you need to properly prepare. CD Project RED showed how the whole process of hunting happens in the episode where Geralt was tracking the goblin. Our gray-haired protagonist, using his special vision, followed in the footsteps of this monster and at the same time, like Batman, commented on every clue.
CD Projekt RED also improved the game's inventory. Unlike The Witcher 2, the inventory in the new game is presented in the form of a grid system - details will be later.
And, finally, it became known that in The Witcher 3 there will be no branching stories similar to those in the second chapter of The Witcher 2. The second part of The Witcher is considered one of the best in the entire series, largely due to the fact that players had the opportunity to choose which how to go through the situation, sometimes from completely different points of view. And while Witcher 3 will have a choice of consequences, as well as ways to complete quests and a dialogue system, you should not expect such stories as in the last game.
| Supported OS and graphics API |
The game announced support for Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC. CD Projekt RED is proud that their game is not only for PC, but also for nextgen consoles. The Witcher III: Wild Hunt will be compatible with all major systems of the Microsoft Windows family of 32-bit or 64-bit systems, and Linux is also on the list of supported systems. The priority and main graphics API for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be DirectX 11. The game will work through the Steam digital distribution service. Steam is already accepting pre-orders for the game.
Currently, the Xbox One version of The Witcher 3 is set to 900p, but according to the project's executive producer, they are working on raising it to 1080p: "900p is the minimum requirement for console versions. We would like to reach 1080p on Xbox One. That's our goal. Whether we can do it or not, I don't know, but we have to get the best out of the equipment."
"Microsoft and Sony say 900p is great and there's not much visual difference between 1080p and 900p, but it's a hot topic right now. So 1080p is our goal."
Meanwhile, the PS4 version runs at 1080p: "It's just a slightly more powerful machine, that's known, but I think in the long run everything will run at 1080p on both consoles. The devs just need a little more time as the architecture Xbox One was more difficult than PS4."
"Actually, it's easier for us to work on Xbox One because we're PC developers. We create everything on PC for DirectX 11, and Xbox is also based on DirectX."
As for other changes, the Xbox One and PS4 consoles will use a less advanced SSAO system, and the body of water will not boast advanced tessellation quality, in addition, there are other “tiny victims” of visual design that have minimally affected the graphical side of the game, but gave a huge jump in project performance.
Jose Teixeira noted that the level of optimization of the console versions is even higher than what the developers expected. The creators have not yet decided whether the console The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will have a dynamic or fixed frame rate. In some locations, CD Projekt RED has already achieved a stable 30fps and this figure will soon be achieved for all gaming areas.
| Game engine |
The developers say that RedEngine 3 creates large-scale open worlds, improves the quality of graphics and, finally, there will be no loading screens in the game. They claim that RedEngine 3 is geared towards next generation platforms and will eventually break down the boundaries between game graphics and CGI cutscenes. The fundamental difference between RedEngine 3 and its predecessor is that REDengine 3 is designed to support open world games. The developers spent a lot of time calculating the functioning of the information transfer system and many other technical tricks that allowed CD Project Red to achieve the desired result, both in terms of storytelling and open world.
RedEngine 3 also rewrote the rendering to run on DirectX 11, which adds a lot of interesting features that will improve The Witcher III: Wild Hunt visually. CD Project Red is actively working on performance optimization, using a special tool that scans all files for excessive resource consumption, the presence of parasitic elements and other problems. The main goal is to achieve a stable frame rate and, if possible, improve performance on all platforms. Small changes can lead to an increase in the frequency of 5-6 frames per second. The team expects to be able to squeeze out up to 12 additional frames per second by the final.
Visual effects artist José Teixeira says that thanks to the optimization, even an average PC with a GTX 660-level graphics card will be able to produce a good picture. At the same time, consoles still have to sacrifice something, but this will not negatively affect the graphics of the game, but it will allow to stabilize the FPS. Regarding the effects in the game, Jose adds that the sign of Igni includes thousands of individual particles that bounce off the surface of the earth and even set grass on fire. In terms of detail, the effect can be compared to the particle system in Unreal Engine 4.
According to the same Jose, the city of Novigrad was mostly made by hand - buildings, scenery and many other things were placed individually, at slightly different angles, to achieve realism.
Global Illumination is the biggest problem graphics programmers face. It's hard enough to find a solution that looks decent on all platforms, so the CD Projekt Red programmers decided to focus on things that provide the best visual result in terms of lighting and shadows. Light itself plays a very important role in the game - it is based on a dynamic system, so there will be no "baked" light textures. Signs in The Witcher 3 are not only sources of light, but also have additional properties, such as arson. At the moment, the team continues to work on improving materials, in particular on wet surfaces.
Weather in The Witcher 3 will be fully dynamic thanks to a system based on the likelihood of certain conditions occurring, such as rain or specific cloud cover. Rain in this case has several types of intensity. The change of weather happens smoothly, so there will be no feeling that during the rain you suddenly turned the switch and it immediately became sunny. In this case, the clouds will also cast shadows on the ground. And when it snows, it can accumulate on surfaces.
In addition, the game will have a system for influencing the weather on Geralt's condition - he will have to look for shelter and warmth so as not to freeze in bad weather. Otherwise, he may take damage or move more slowly than usual.
Also an important feature will be the new vegetation system. It is displayed much faster and is more diverse. Perhaps all this was due to one developer who is an expert in the field of plants and knows exactly what type of plants should be placed in a particular area.
| Gameplay video |
Below we publish directly the video of the gameplay itself from the official website:
Judging by the videos of the gameplay, the game looks simply stunning, although it is not without some flaws, which mainly relate to facial expressions, as a result of which the characters behave not quite naturally. In general, if the graphics, environment and atmosphere of what is happening remains at the same level, then any flaw in the developers can be forgiven.
| Estimated system requirements |
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SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR GAMEGPU "Witcher III: Wild Hunt"
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Based on the above material, we draw some conclusions. From the fact that the game is based on the RedEngine 3 engine (well, and the given materials on the game), we can conclude that it will be quite resource-consuming. Despite the optimization, in order to see a beautiful picture, you will have to upgrade. Apparently, for a comfortable game, at least four computing threads will be required. Also, the game will need about 4 or 6 gigabytes of RAM in the system for the smoothness of the process.
Well, if you think about the graphics subsystem that will be needed for The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, then in our opinion, video cards starting from the level of NVidia GeForce GTX 680 or AMD Radeon HD 7970 will be able to provide sufficient performance. Optimal performance, taking into account all activated maximum settings you can expect from NVidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti or AMD Radeon R9 290X.
Assess the perspective of graphics 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Rating 88% [13 Votes] |
Assess the prospects of optimization 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Rating 84% [11 Votes] |