There's more than a little previewing going on in the latest DF Direct Weekly, as myself, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia share our thoughts and expectations from The Witcher 3's upcoming 'next gen' patch, while initial impressions of the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet release paint a less than positive picture of the new release.
We'll be looking at Pokémon in much more depth later in the week, but the bottom line is that Game Freak delivering two Pokémon titles within the year is perhaps not the best idea: the bugs are memeworthy, the performance is not great generally (circa 22fps to 30fps) while 'in the moment' stutter is obnoxious. There are clear learnings here - but ultimately, Nintendo itself has set the template for successful first-party software: give the developers the time they need to deliver compelling, extremely polished games.
The Witcher 3? We spend some time talking of our hopes for the game but right now, we can offer little more: a stream later in the week should offer up more answers, but as of filming, all we've had to go on is a single image from the remaster, perhaps suggesting the inclusion of ray-traced shadows - a feature also included in the console versions of Cyberpunk 2077. We can't help but hope that the PC version also gets equivalence with Cyberpunk 2077 - we know that DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 are supported, but we'd also hope to see the full suite of RED Engine RT features.