Witcher fanatic here, read the books, have a Witcher keychain, love the lore, for me it's Game of Thrones of gaming. Not even trying to deny I'm a hardcore fan. I don't care about the downgrade, a dx11 equivalent of W2:EE would have been fine with me. However...
I also took a "no preorder" stance ~5 yrs ago and while I was at times yearning to make an exception for CDPR, I managed to resist. I never ever thought that I would say this but I'm glad I didn't break my rule. I can still fully appreciate healthy criticism directed at CDPR.
A semi transparent "work in progress" disclaimer in a youtube video does not give ANY developer an excuse to show off a game with image quality the end user cannot reproduce.
Watched the Syndicate gameplay video, NPC's still have the same issues as in Unity, it's genuine footage and I applaud Ubi for it.
CDPR still has time to address this, in theory. If you watch the 35 min video, the controls are used in a fashion that best "hides" fps drops but whatever PC they used had constant issues to render steady 30fps. Even if that's the case, it's better to give the end user the option that crushes their PC's than to take away the choice completely.
Screenshots stopped being reliable a long time ago but CDPR have released quite a few videos, in other words, lots of "evidence" to be used against them. This is not a situation they would walk in deliberately but they are in it nonetheless.
AAA game development is an insanely expensive high risk business. Studio closures are frequent in the news, securing external funding to cover the astronomical development costs of a AAA game is very difficult. That's an explanation rather than excuse why studios/publishers resort to lowly stuff like that.
As for the expansion pack, if it's an old school expansion pack which it seems to be, I'm fine with it. Before people say it's the same thing as DLC, try Company of Heroes then it's expansion first, compare that to today's DLC.
Bottom line, I don't think this situation is something CDPR wanted, maybe they redeem themselves come launch day.
I game at 1440p on a 970/4790K clocking to 1.5GHz/4.8, most games run ultra and some allow 60fps with 2X MSAA. It looks like I won't have to make too many compromises to stay @60fps.
My 970 aiming for ultra @1440p is ~50% faster than my 7950, which was roughly 25% faster than PS's equivalent GPU. PS4 could squeeze out some good looks at 1080p/30fps.
