Load the Game

The Witcher 3 devs want 1080p for both PS4 and Xbox One

• Egon Kilin
• June 18th, 2014

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt demo provided us with a good look at the combat aspect of the game. During the video we saw Geralt of Rivia easily dispatching bandits and cutting them in half. He then came across a griffin and defeated it surprisingly easy, which raised some questions regarding the difficulty of the game. While they don’t hold a candle to Dark Souls, games from The Witcher series are known to be pretty challenging in their own right. Executive Producer John Mamais explained during a recent interview with Eurogamer that combat looked easy on purpose during the E3 2014 presentation of the game.

“What we showed at the Microsoft conference was the easy way to play,” Mamais said. “We only had five minutes to show, so we had to play on easy and make the fights go really fast. You saw lots of dismemberment. It’s not going to be so easy to cut somebody in half when the game comes out. We were showing off some features there. I was reading some feedback after the conference and people were saying, ‘oh, that looks so easy,’ but it ain’t gonna be that easy.”

The producer also revealed that The Witcher 3 demo was running on the Xbox One at 900p and 30 fps. CD Projekt Red is still working on improving this version and have it running at 1080p just like the PS4 does. Although the difference between 1080p and 900p is barely noticeable, the company still wants to make both versions look equally good in order to please everybody. Moreover, Mamais mentions that all optimisation done for the PS4 and Xbox One is done for the PC version of the Witcher 3 as well. “It’s a cross-platform engine, so any optimisation we do for one platform goes into the other platform and just speeds it up, basically.”

“We will hit 900p no problem. We’d like to get it up to 1080p on Xbox One. That’s our goal. Whether we can do it or not I don’t know. We’ve got to squeeze everything we can out of the hardware. Microsoft and Sony say 900p is the sweet spot, and there’s not a lot of difference visually between 900p and 1080p, but it’s a hot topic now. So that’s what my goal is.”

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be released on February 24th, 2015 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Stay tuned for all the latest news and updates.