I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that it would make an interesting game. Making something more like the real world is often exactly what you don't want to do in a game.
A No-Rub solution was not an option? I can just take em out, store them in No-Rub solution overnight and repeat that for a month before they start to deteriorate.
As I said; I don't know specifically about The Witcher. I used the name as an example. There will always be additional factors beside hardware power, but in general; more powerful hardware is easier to get good results with.
The PS4 has more powerful hardware than the XBox One. If they are running the same game (The Witcher 3), logic tells us that it will be easier to get fluid framerates with the more powerful console. And that is what you care about, no?
Now I don't know about The Witcher per-se but there have been a good number of multi-platform releases where performance and fluidity were compromised on XBox One.
And it doesn't just seem to be Sony, the numbers say it's Sony (especially in Europe). General consensus is that Microsoft severely botched the launch of the One and has been left to play catch-up since.
A bit like how our own middle classes are not doing so great anymore compared to years prior and how our own population is calling for more representation. Which is why, as speculated by many, Trump got elected and Britain voted in favor of Brexit.
We better make sure we are still relevant by the time the Chinese have some internal chaos.
But at the same time it seems to casually reduce Notch's effort to "used perlin noise". He didn't need perlin noise per-se; there are countless of other terrain generation techniques. But perlin noise, in part, made minecraft what it is today, that's true.
We'll still have created A.I. which successfully made us obsolete so there's that. It's progress, just different. Why prefer a human future over an A.I. future? Isn't the point of A.I. to make something that can rival us? We'll die anyway, I'd be kind of proud to die to the next great step in our timeline personally, rather than die of old age.
For a project a while back I once wrote something similar in OpenCL. Back then, I wasn't calm enough to realize there is probably research in this area I could use, so I wrote it all in isolation :(. It was much slower but had the aim of being able to reduce an arbitrary (but preferrably closed) highly detailed polygonal mesh to a limited set of convex polyhedra[1]. This would happen automatically (no user interaction or setup required) and reliably. The resulting convex polyhedra sets were being used to perform occlusion culling before rendering. Fond memories :)
40kmph is actually very fast compared to the average cyclist. Fast enough that I would consider it reckless if done in heavy (cycling) traffic.
But you highlight the issue nicely; bikes are not self-powered, it depends on the human. Even with e-bikes this is true, most of them will only support the rider and have been made not to power the bike all by itself. So how to regulate that? Perhaps a good old speed limit is all that is really needed.
Where is here for you? In The Netherlands, an e-bike costs you about 1300 EUR. Not cheap for a bike but not overly expensive either, there are more expensive non-e-bikes that are regularly bought.
Pedestrians need to learn to expect bikes on those lanes. I don't know what they look like but they should stand out as bicycle lanes to anyone on the road. Also, cyclists should be careful just like regular drivers and adjust their speed to their environment. If you were raised in The Netherlands you would know very well to check for both cars and bicycles when crossing anything.
Vulkan is not available on PS4 and XboxOne which are the main targets for game development like it or not. This almost immediately rules out implementing a Vulkan graphics back-end because when you support XboxOne you are already using a version of Direct3D-12 so why bother with Vulkan if you can modify your existing XboxOne Direct3D-12 implementation for PC with a lot less effort. On top of that, support from both Microsoft and GPU vendors will be better for Direct3D-12 than it will be for Vulkan. Linux sales are so small it's not worth implementing another graphics back-end for.
That's how it is and will be as long as Microsoft shares their Direct3D implementation between their platforms (Xbox and PC).
There will always be exceptions but they are exceedingly rare and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Vulkan has a future but I expect it to be more of a mobile focused one.