I have a feeling we will progressively start seeing these <downgrades> due to performance issues with various systems. Or maybe something to do with performance of the game?
The ‘downgrade’ as a result of performance was at the back of my mind – I was going to mention it with the TW3 comment, but I figured it might be be a non-point, given today’s graphics cards. And the fact that there were no noticeable performance issues with Patch 7, at least for myself.
But yeah, you have to factor in the bigger picture – when they start adding in the rest of the game, it makes sense that there could be issues (I seem to recall reading an article on Cyberpunk downgrades being the result of the global codebase). Why remove the clouds, for example? I assume it costs more resources to ‘compute’ something like that – but man does it look nasty now.
Pity it’s too late to switch over to Unreal 5 and its ‘unlimited polygons’: I guess the product is not just at the mercy of Larian’s writerly limitations, but also the underlying tech stack.
At least CDprojeckt Red don’t piss around with this stuff, and just ditched their old engine and have moved to U5 for all future projects. Common sense does be a great old asset with this stuff…
