The Making of The Witcher 2

Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry is offering an editorial on the making of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and the subsequent porting on Xbox 360 with the Enhanced Edition, with plenty of tidbits coming from the developers at CD Projekt RED who worked on the title. The article focuses mostly on the title’s technical achievements rather than its design but still makes for an interesting read, especially if you’re interested in knowing how a relatively small Polish studio could manage to port the title on the Xbox 360 with such fidelity and compete with teams with a much higher budget. Here’s a snip:

“Xbox 360 has its own specific output colour/gamma curve, different from PCs, and TV sets have totally different colour rendering from monitors designed for gamers and office work. We had lots of issues like overexposure, ugly colour-banding in shadows, strange colours and wrong gamma.”

To overcome the issues, the programming team stepped in to assist the artists with some much needed modifications.

“We helped artists and implemented colour pre-scale that helps to fight banding, changed the tone-mapping process to work differently with a more intuitive set of parameters, and designed a special filmic-like colour curve that looked just fine on most TVs,” WroÅ„ski continues, pointing out that the decision helped immeasurably with the final presentation of the Xbox 360 game.

“I think it was worth giving lots of attention, as lots of gamers and reviewers say that they prefer the colours and lighting on the Xbox 360 version of our game.”

In our tech analysis of the console game we reckoned that the lighting was one of the stand-out successes of The Witcher 2 conversion, looking more natural and organic compared to what we thought was a relatively harsh approach in the PC game. There was also a sense that the lighting was more physically correct – sometimes we wondered just where the light sources were in the original version. It turns out that the changes brought about were technology-led rather than being some part of a planned revision by the art team and partly explains why those revisions were not rolled back into the PC game.

“This was a matter of technology. What we used on the PC wasn’t as good on the Xbox. So we devoted a year of work to redesign the lighting,” affirms lead level artist Lucjan WiÄ™cek.

“It is really important to give scenes a proper atmosphere, so we rethought many decisions, and although the first-phase changes were dictated by technology, the end result satisfied our artistic needs.”