So how is a 970 ranging from 30-60fps when the game looks damn near identical to the ps4's 2011 hardware? I have a 970 and I'm tempted to buy this but might hold back...

That isn't true? It's just that pc games don't have a photo mode option to apply ridiculous AA and downsampling. A ps4 has a graphics card from 2011. A GTX 980 destroys it. And actually with enough hardware PC games can downsample a 4k or greater image into a 1080p and make gameplay look as sharp as what you're seeing in those ps4 photomode screenshots.

Has anyone confirmed if building tessellation is cut from the game? I know there are alot of videos that show this but what about the final game?

Saw some people in denial about the downgrade.

Straight from the Dev's themselves. Fucking mind boggling. The Witcher was a PC centered franchise from the start and sold 10x more on PC than it did on 360 last gen. This is pointless for them to hold the game back for shitty 2011 hardware for the sake of the consoles being able to run it. Also this means the consoles can't match a 2013 PC build lol.

2013 was a tough time for CD Projekt RED simply because we were trying to create an entire bulk of the game on the older DirectX 9 renderer that we had in place for The Witcher 2. Most of the assets were created during the time we were creating our DX11 solution render pipeline to bring the next-generation experience to everyone. A lot of the footage including the debut gameplay trailer was done when the consoles were not even out and we only had an idea of the specifications of the system. This landed itself into problem territory when we realized the next-generation systems could not simply meet our graphical output to the desirable level of quality that we needed. There were several options: build three different builds OR CONSOLIDATE TO THE NEAREST DENOMINATOR, WHICH IS WHAT WE DID. We took the specifications of the lowest performing throughput system which I don’t care to mention here at all to avoid that discussion, and worked our way up from there. As almost a 250 man team, we sequentially had to take out/turn down a lot of features not just from our NVIDIA GameWorks pipeline but our normal game solution scripts as well – these include the following:

• Level of horizon detail (essentially the draw distance had to be completely tuned down to tax the consoles less)

• Volume based translucency

• Ambient occlusion and foliage density / tree count

• Flexible water simulation / tessellation we resorted to a (script texture effect similar to most games than physical based simulation)

• Ground/building tessellation

• Forward lit soft particles (this is the fire, smoke, fog that you would encounter while going through thick terrain into open space)

• Real-time reflections in the water are completely off and replaced with a cheaper render solution estimator (this is a primary reason blood splatter was also removed from water)

We just did not have the manpower, budget or the console power to produce the vision we intended before the consoles were released to create a more visually stunning game of higher fidelity like 2013 assets. The PCs themselves had more than enough power to achieve this vision, almost certainly. But working on the game across 3 platforms did not make it feasible to keep features included that could potentially break the game as we kept building around it. All the 2013 trailers were actually in-game footage (not prerendered or vertical slices) but essentially just not an entirely finished world running on a high-end PC at the time.

Source 2 being announced is a pretty big deal I'd say. No shit we'd expect to get HL3 on a new engine. The old engine is so dated its not even funny. What's bad is the most dated part of HL2 and episodes isn't the graphics its the gameplay.

I'd say Valve isn't holy grail of PC devs anymore. For fucks sake they've had their biggest following waiting 11 years for a sequel without even a proper announcement....Half Life is arguably the biggest pc series ever what with all its spawned. Second to WoW I'd say.

You say that. But people said the same thing about Crytek with Crysis 2 and 3 and look how that turned out.

@jun_aka_pekto: Yes they were lol. They were developed as PC games, taking advantage of the high end hardware available of the time. And then later (a decent bit later) released on consoles developed by a completely different company that ported it and found a way to get it running on much weaker hardware. Just because the game didn't remain exclusive for its entire life doesn't mean it didn't release as a true PC game.

I wouldn't mind it being downgraded and being ported to consoles after the fact like HL2 with the original xbox but I think we all want it developed as a true PC game.

Idk if this has been confirmed ever (nothing seems confirmed with hl3) but it's something I've wondered seeing as its been since 2008 since a true high budget pc exclusive fps was released.

I may be a pessimist but I fully expect the game to be multiplat which would suck. It would be held back by console hardware thats already what 4 or 5 years old?