Was The Witcher 3 Downgraded? 2013/2014 Demos vs Final Game
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So what actually happened during the game's development in the last couple of years? What's clear is that early on in development, The Witcher 3 underwent a massive overhaul to its core rendering technology in order to deliver on the developer's vision for a dynamic open world. The first mistake was showcasing its vision for the game before it was actually functioning - the studio simply didn't know if what it was showing was even possible, as the latest iteration of the firm's REDEngine was still deep in development. Prefacing the 2013 trailer by saying that it was in-game material was clearly a misstep when the reality was that The Witcher 3 as we would come to experience it wasn't in a playable state at the time.
Having first presented its vision of a massive "multi-region open world" experience, it's clear that the version of the game now in our hands bears little resemblance to this original prototype. However, The Witcher 3 was demonstrated on Xbox One during the Microsoft conference at E3 2014, and behind closed doors on PC. CDPR eventually went on to release this demonstration publicly, allowing fans to get an extended preview of actual code in motion. What's curious is that even armed with 35 minutes of direct feed footage, the whole downgrade debate had little traction at that point, and from this point on we feel that CD Projekt Red itself was very open about the state of the game.
There were changes made from this demo that impacted the final game in both positive and negative ways, but the differences are relatively minor. Geometry changed in a select few instances, the approach to lighting and colour correction differs a bit, and the foliage LODs changed to combat aliasing at the expense of clarity. Yet, some improvements were made including a greater draw distance, additional foliage, and what seems to be a stronger wind simulation.
While the 2014 showings of the game were much more representative of final code, it's the 2013 footage that causes problems - not least its deployment in more recent marketing over a year after the early code was shelved.
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