vorob: I know that it will sound silly and misery, but i always saw Witcher as a handcrafted game with no chance for copy-pasting things. Recently i entered Novigrad and saw house internals copy-pasted from time to time.
Scene 1:
https://pp.vk.me/c629530/v629530184/8342/LjOwxB3AkyI.jpg https://pp.vk.me/c629530/v629530184/834c/j-HE2HWPVB4.jpg Scene 2:
https://pp.vk.me/c629530/v629530184/8360/wjkIeYTW8-M.jpg https://pp.vk.me/c629530/v629530184/8356/wokKuAqqU1Q.jpg Scene 3:
https://pp.vk.me/c629530/v629530184/832e/BQRY31Vb2ms.jpg https://pp.vk.me/c629530/v629530184/8338/QaKGmjZKbvQ.jpg How can i explain that to myself? From game-world perspective? Cause with such copy-pasting my illusion of real game world is broken :(
Yes, numerous buildings and their internals are cookie-cutter in The Witcher 3, pretty much like every video game ever made in history.
It's ultimately a tradeoff any game developer has to make. The more unique objects there are in the world, the more object models and unique textures and other data there are, the more system and video RAM it consumes, the larger the footprint it makes on the CPU cache, etc. Games like this are designed to push the limits of what the system and GPU can do ultimately, so they have to make a list of all of the various cool features and functionality they can put into a game and decide what the most important ones are because CPUs and GPUs have finite resources.
So if you make every single building in a game like this absolutely unique as well as every single NPC, their model, their voice and dialogue, then you have to store all of that extra data in RAM and video memory, have larger audio buffers etc. and ultimately other features wont make it into the game. Then it's a question of which features are the most important to the overall game play and story? Ultimately a balance has to be met and tonnes of limitations put on things because while the real world has infinite possibilities and RAM and CPU speed aren't concerns in the real world for it to work, in the game world CPU and RAM and GPU and VRAM are sadly finite and infinite possibilities can't all co-exist.
Having said that, this game does have a lot of unique things compared to a lot of games, and they salt the duplicated cookie-cutter stuff with a variety of random filler to a degree to give a bit of illusion to hide it.
If and when the day comes where our computers are powerful enough to handle amazing epic games of this size and scope *and* have hundreds or thousands of 100% unique buildings, NPC models, voice actors, etc. then that will truly be an epic game to see. I've got 32GB of RAM so I'm partly prepared, but I doubt it'll be any time soon that we see that sort of thing happening on this scale. :)
