Seeing The Witcher 2‘s intro get upscaled to hell and back was certainly something. But The Witcher 2 was already a good looking game, so the upgrades weren’t quite as impressive as, say, what happens when the original Witcher gets the 8K treatment.
The character models for The Witcher 1 don’t have as much texturing or grit as the future games, obviously, so the overall look here is a bit flatter — or maybe Nintendo-like — than what you’d expect from Geralt today.
But holy fucking hell is it a substantial improvement from the original intro. Compare this:
… to this:
Backgrounds are sharper. Really sharp, in some places actually. The character models have a lot of neat detail, and even the hair has a kind of neat stylised look to it. Probably not the intention of the original art design, but when you’re just pushing a bunch of still images through an AI upscaler and re-rendering it as a video, it’s pretty hard to complain about the outcome.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/09/introducing-the-witcher-2-in-8k/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/09/witcher-2-upscaled-1-410×231.jpg” title=”Introducing The Witcher 2 In 8K” excerpt=”The Witcher 2’s intro sequence is still one of the best intros for a video game ever made. It’s still gorgeous in 720p today, but have you seen it in 8K? Oh my.”]
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