The Witcher 3 is looking to push both PCs and next-generation hardware to their limits. It’s been a mantra of developer CD Projekt RED since the beginning, as both of the company’s previous titles were greatly touted for their visual and technical prowess. Just being one of the best isn’t always enough for some artists, though. During a SIGGRAPH 2013 talk (via DSOG), CD Projekt RED’s Balazs Torok and Krzysztof Krzyscin detailed just a few of the big changes players can expect to see from the RED Engine 3.
It was after The Witcher 2 landed on the Xbox 360 that CD Projekt began to push technology forward with RED Engine 3. The engine will support dynamic cloth physics, a fresh mimics system, dynamically loaded appearances, a new animation system not based on Havok, a fur solution, triangle count support that is up to 40K, and 2K textures for the characters’ heads and bodies. Experimentation on DX11 tessellation on characters also occurred, but players likely won’t see it in the final game.
“We tried tessellation on the characters but it didn’t give us good results, there are two reasons for this,” the developer said. “The first reason is that our meshes are already very detailed, so the tessellation doesn’t give us as much as it gives to others, and the second is that it would be very hard to deal with the wholes that the tessellation would create. So at the end we decided not to use tessellation on the characters.”
You can expect The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which will be a less casual experience than Skyrim, on PC and next-gen consoles in early 2014.
