No.
You should compare what castles in the game look like, to what castles in the real world look like. Or how castles looked in the past. The first castle looks much better, much more realistic, in the first screenshot. How anyone can think the opposite is beyond me.
Yeah, I don't understand how that could be a thought. Rounded, natural stones is worlds better than straight angles. Not just aesthetically, when talking about castles, but level of graphic prowess. Straight angles are just...not interesting. Getting a nice textured, rounded, non-symmetrical stone with depth. That's bomb.
The second image looks so horribly bad compared to that first. the colors are flat, no real shading...but the entire image looks that way. It's as if we are looking at very different system settings on top of everything else.
We can not judge the game until it is out. Because we don't know if we're looking at the PC-version or console version, a new or old build, and we don't know what settings. If The Witcher has perfect technology, you should be able to turn on my stuff, maybe including more polygons and more tessalation. So the above screenshots runs @60Hz on supercomputers, and the lower screenshot runs @60Hz on crappy laptops. But we don't know yet.
exactly. This discussion is rather useless right now, tbh. Granted, you kind of want to know these things now, if you find this an issue in life worth taking a stand over--I get that, I guess--but it's really not worth bothering yourself over until you get a release and can muck around with settings as you want.
In the grand scheme of things, people should just stop pre-ordering altogether, wait for honest reviews, and decide if a game is either wordy of the hype, or simply worthy of being at a legit state of completion on release.
As it stands, I never pre-order games. I play ~90% of my games aboiut 1 year after release. I'm a cheap ass, and I have shit that I like to play to death anyway, so I don't really care how old a game is. That being said, these are the two games that I have pre-ordered:
--Guild Wars 2, full deluxe edition, with all the marbles, because I was such a fan of GW1. Loved GW2, still like it but barely play anymore, but I certainly got my money out of that. Not the type of game I expected it to be, but it was great at launch with very minimal issues for a AAA MMO. I'd say it was the smoothest launch for any MMO of its status, ever. I don't regret that one.
--The Witcher 3. ...just 2 days ago I went ahead and bought it. I never could get into the Witcher games, as much as I tried. 3 attempts with the first one, Now on my 2nd attempt with the 2nd, and I am finally loving it. I'm almost midway through the 3rd cahpter...major coup for me with this series. I've always liked them, just never thought they were the games for me. But I really love CDPR and what they do, even though I'm not a huge fan of these games. I feel like I obtained their Witcher games criminally--like $2.50 for Witcher some 5? years ago, and $5 for Witcher 2, barely 1 year after release.
I guess I want to pay them back somehow (pretty much what I did paying full price for Borderlands TPS and Season Pass this year: easily the weakest of the 3 games; but I barely paid for BL1 &2, which I diumped tons of highly entertaining hours into)
Shit. Now I want it. Now. I like that the inventory/menu system is back to a grid design. ...at least in some places.