Haha, I do think it is extremely funny how gta5 got bashed while witcher3 was praised like it would be the holy grail of PC gaming. Also now we hear how the story line sucks, from people who never played the game.
Gta 5 is all about the experience. All great games are. That is something all gamers know. Others, they may struggle understanding it. They are more like, "what is so special about that, I don't get it".......its nothing new.
As far as witcher 3 graphics,
as much as I see people complain abut the graphics downgrading, I also see people praising how it is very playable with a 280 or 770 at the highest settings (minus hairworks). So clearly there seems to be this lack of understanding when it comes to graphics and how this all works. The 2013 witcher pics would require much more than a a 280 or 770. When a Titan X is struggling to be playable at 1080, people would be claiming un-optimized and terrible the performance is. As I write this, I can already imagine people denying this but stop and think for a minute. There is no doubt about it, there would be floods of people complaining about performance, hating on how poor the game plays, ranting and raving about stutters and the lack of smoothness, poor optimization, how nvidia broke the game to force people to buy Titan x SLI, etc etc etc. There would be flooding on forums everywhere, nonstop hate and bashing. People who can disagree are fooling themselves.
We are at a point in graphics where small gains take a lot of resources. The visual effect is minor but the performance hits are large. Like ultra grass on gta 5 vs high. Clearly there is a difference, but the performance tanks just by adding that tiny bit of fidelity.
Look at the grief ubisoft got for unity and such. Sure, everyone will say lazy developer or gameworks. These games brought graphics cards to a crawl and people said it was just because UBI was being lazy. Well, people just don't understand the huge massive undertaking it is to create a modern game and better graphics. People will say the game didn't look that good to have such a demand in GPU performance. They sit on their chairs at home and pretend like experts. Sure, ubisoft could have polished more but the truth is those games ended up needing some really every hardware.
No matter what anyone will tell you, those games took a lot of hardware to create that level of graphics.
Every game engine is different and some are more efficient at certain things than others. Some can produce specific effects better than others and with less horse power needed. But all the tricks and shortcuts that gave us great graphics in these canned and staged scenes in the past, they aren't so useful in a real open world environment. The more games are expanded, the more the more the engines have to do and there is n way around the fact that you can't do all things well at all times without way more horsepower than currently available. The path forward in gaming will be slow because improvements in graphics from this point are hard fought. Increasingly more complex just for the tiny improvements that people will just take for granted anyway.
If there are people who want to argue about it, I just say watch and see as we inch forward when we used to leap. Blame developers or the industry all you like, it doesn't change the fact that the future of realism won't come easy.
All that is besides the point.
No one is gonna release a game that needs Titan SLI to play maxed out. The uproar every time we get a demanding game is so great and the bushings so hard, no developer wants that. The problem with PC gaming is that most people want the cake and to eat it to. People want the games to run fine maxed out with 290s and they want graphics to look substantially better. Developers just want to make games people like and to sell them. If they see a team release a game that get boycotted because it is too demanding, they will take note.
People see the graphics and screenshots from 2013 witcher3 and they see them now. They see the performance for the game now and say it is acceptable. they don't realize how huge a difference it would be if the game wasnt downgraded. Those amassing graphics would have a massive effect on performance. And those who don't realize this, they may never get it. If there is an uproar when demanding games are released, then developers will take note.
No matter what anyone may say here, it is all a out compromise when making a game. You can only do so much and that is all you can do. Teams work around the clock, non stop racking up millions of man hours. Unimaginable time it into the tiniest bits which pile into stacks as the game comes together. Stuff may get added but most importantly is the stuff that just gets cut out. Just like that, poof. For whatever reasons: its not working or is costing too much, taking too much time, it just isn't fitting in well, time, budget, a change in direction, what eve it may be, countless reasons. Stuff gets shifted around, added, and cut throughout production . When it comes to performance, its all the same. Games get trimmed to fit, they make decisions on what needs to go or what needs to be improved. And if it is not improving, not working like they want, it may just get cut out. It may be to improve performance or it may be due to quality. See, one effect may look wonderful in one setting but not work so well somewhere else. In an open world, it is not so simple. But ultimately, we have have teams and goals. Performance is a factor.
If X effect causes stutter and will take a lot of time to sort out, it might easily get cut. We know how much PC gamers didn't like stutter. There is also the possibility that the overall performance hit of an effect just seemed too high and was cut just to fit the game in a specific performance bracket. And this is unfortunate. But as long as the PC community keeps throwing fits when a game launches that is very demanding, then developers will continue to not push the envelope. It is pretty simple.
See, even the original crysis, the game everyone praises now, it launched to a very unwelcoming PC market. Hardly anyone bought it. It took years to gain popularity. It was not an instant hit at all, not even close. Today, no huge developer would ever want to launch a game that took off as slow as crysis. These corporations are traded companies and every huge and expensive game they release is expected to sale. It is an absolute must. An extremely slow start would be an utter disaster. How many companies have been walking a tight wire and how many got stretched so thin they had to sell out. We see all this praise for crysis but crytek couldn't afford to pay their employees just not that long ago. So many people act like they know so much and say this is how it should be done or that. They have no clue about how to make a huge game and what it is like being a game developer. So so many developers struggle and go under. So many get bought out, it is anything but easy.
Games take massive resources these days. So many studios are one flop away from closing its doors.
The point is, they have to make a game that sells and people will buy. No one bought the original crysis and it struggled for years with low sales. History has shown that demanding games are not well received, developers take notes. Of course it is easy to trash on a game and say it doesn't look that good for the computer power it needs. Developers also don't want to throw huge piles of time and money on effects that will only limit the number of potential sales as people may start to claim their games are too demanding.