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The Witcher 3: Differences between PS4 and Xbox One

• Egon Kilin
• May 13th, 2014

Eurogamer recently had an interesting talk regarding The Witcher 3 with CD Projekt Red co-founder, Marcin Iwinski. The discussion mostly revolved around the differences in performance between the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game. The game was delayed to February 2015 in order to give more time for development and optimization for each of the platforms.

Although The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt might end up running better on one console than the other, ultimately this will be “more of a PR differentiation” and should’t be meaningful to players. The article also mentions that we might end up seeing a higher resolution on the PS4, however there’s still plenty of time left to optimize the Xbox One version as well. The overall performance of the game will be affected by the PS4 and Xbox One’s control schemes, but it is still uncertain if this will have a big impact on the overall result.

“We are still working on squeezing the juice out of the consoles and Microsoft are supporting us in this respect,” Iwinski explained. “The final effect, whether it’s 720p, 1080p – we had the debate in the studio about it and actually asked our tech guys to explain how it works, and they sent me some complicated graphs that ‘if I have this size of the screen, and I sit one meter or two meters from it, then I might be able to see the difference.”

“We’re definitely working to max out each of the platforms in terms of what we can get, because that’s a crucial element of The Witcher. Will there be big differences? Really I don’t think so. It’s too early to say. If there will be, they will be tiny. It will be more like people talking ‘hey, I have this and you have that and this is better’.”

Consoles aside, Iwanski  talked a bit about the PC version of The Witcher 3 as well. Given the nature of the platform, the game will have the possibility of scaling beyond what the PS4 and Xbox One can handle, but this was to be expected. CDPR’s co-founder also said that they will not be dumbing down the PC version in order to have it run the same as the console versions.

Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is expected to be released on February 2015 for PS4, Xbox One and the PC. Although details on the game are still scarce, some new concept art did surface recently. The latest image depicts the canals of Novigrad, a new location that’s said to be a major port city found in the Northern Kingdom of Redania.