![]() Thunderstorms can and do light up the environment in an impressive manner. The Lighting system is quite good and is fully dynamic with some level of global illumination built into the engine. These days many games seem to get how important these things are, but when this technology is so well implemented, it is a major boost to how a game looks. Metal, chain mail, gambersons, steel plates, stone, masonry of all kinds, wax… it all looks natural. It makes wood look and feel… well like wood. Some voodoo magic must have been done with this part of the engine, as it really is one of the best I have ever seen. It is the enhanced materials processing system. However there is one thing that somewhat saves even those lesser assets and elevates the rest of the game easily. For important scenes even in the main quest as well. Also some times I have seen an NPC use an item in a scene with that item looking… rather bland. They do not look terrible (due to another piece of tech I will talk about in a a minute, as well as the art style) but they are noticeably less detailed than their surroundings. Normally I would not take that as an issue at all, but the problem is that sometimes such objects are in plain sight. Still it is a bit of a shame that powerful machines can not make use of their high memory pools. We know why this is done – to help consoles as well as weaker PCs handle the rest of the game. For example, some supposedly less important background items or animals look a lot worse than their surrounding high definition environment. However there are certain… less impressive things in the game. ![]() Meanwhile, even third tier random peasants and guards look quite good both in cutscenes and out. Geralt and other main or important characters look amazing, easily some of the best in gaming. A lot of work was done to make sure the details most people would notice or look at would look amazing and it shows. Characters, terrain, most important to gameplay animals and many key items look exceptional. On Ultra settings, 16x anisotropic filtering as well as high resolution mipmaps and textures are in use. ![]() Witcher 3 is a game with generally excellent texture work. Whilst the general quality is good, those inferior parts exist. With that being said, often parts of the foliage may appear aliased or not as high quality as they could have otherwise been. The distance at which trees and bushes can be seen is vast and tends to give the game a sense of scale as well s aid immersion. It really does remind you of Crysis in a sense. The huge amount of leaves, grass, trees and bushes is staggering. The Foliage rendering system is also very complex. Novigrad City itself is one of the crowning achievements of The Witcher 3, technologically speaking. This is something few games have so far managed to do whilst keeping decent performance and it does feel awesome. All of this is done without loading screens or hitches. For example, the Cities in the game can have complex sewer system, a street level full of detail and AI simulation and still have many buildings with custom details and objects inside. Of particular note is just how complex the design can be. This adds to immersion and helps players understand their position within the world no matter where they are. One can see the towers of Novigrad, the game’s biggest city, the ancient fortresses or mountains of Skellige from kilometers away. Tweaking the ini files can push many of those aspects further (into the absurd, hardware destroying range) but honestly even without such tricks it looks and feels massive. Smooth LOD transitions avoid the dithering effects that might be seen in other open world titles. With an impressive geometry draw distance and an excellent foliage and tree draw distance, it manages to feel vast. One of the most impressive things within Red Engine 3 is its ability to render gigantic worlds.
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