I wouldn't say they downgraded it, rather that they took the game in a different artistic direction. On the one hand, the 2013 gameplay trailer comparisons clearly show there are different assets, LOD is now less detailed, many effects are missing, the Image Quality was overall just a lot sharper. However, when you crank the grass density and foliage distance, and you actually see the game in motion, with its colorful landscapes and weather effects and everything swaying in the wind, it's immediately apparent that the team had a creative vision that diverged from the realistic, monochromatic footage that was initially shown. And they nailed it. I was just discussing this with a friend and we agreed that while Crysis 3 probably has the most sophisticated visual output, I would still say that artistically, The Witcher 3 is the most impressive game on PC right now. It really looks like a painting in motion.

The cynics want you to believe that CDPR had to hold their vision back once the underwhelming next-gen console specs were revealed but along that line of reasoning, the current state of PC gaming must have held them back as well. As the benchmarks show, anyone not using the latest series of AMD and Nvidia cards is having a really rough time trying to run this game. It's a demanding monster as is and I cringe to think about the backlash if they had delivered something as hyper realistic as the first trailers. If anything, I imagine DX11 just didn't deliver the GPU utilization they were looking for.

We might get back to some of the original features as time goes on with patching and mods. Just today they released an enhanced sharpening setting which was one of the main aesthetics of the early builds. And they have hinted that some of that stuff will be more possible with DX12. They've already surpassed my expectations of how this would look and run on my R9 290 and I'm excited for AMD's driver update next week to get my second card going in crossfire. For anyone wanting to see CDPR's breakdown on the issue, I recommend reading this:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...-issue-head-on