Fans of The Witcher 3 are disappointed with the remaster, which turned out to be packed with bugs
You don't look a gift horse in the mouth, as everyone knows. The trouble starts when the horse isn't visible at all, and the rider glides over the ground with legs spread wide, occasionally sinking into the textures.
Scenes like these have accompanied the launch of the remaster of The Witcher 3. The free update arrived ten years after the game's release and a few years after the 2022 next-gen version. It added path tracing, ray-traced hair, frame generation, and mod support on PS5. A bouquet of good old bugs came along with the new features. One player on a base PS5 collected this list in just over two hours:
Geralt turns invisible after fast travel, leaving only his armor and hair
meditation rewinds time, and the animation has to be force-canceled
voices are barely audible while the music blasts, and the volume sliders hardly help
swords unequip themselves mid-fight, and their level requirements sometimes go up
auto-applying oils doesn't work, the minimap goes blank, and Geralt's eyes glow like headlights for no reason
The remaster behaves very differently depending on the platform. Some owners of the base PS5 and Xbox Series S report no problems at all, while most complaints come from PC with AMD graphics cards, Xbox Series X, and PS5 Pro. On an RTX 5080 with DLSS and frame generation, the game reportedly runs great. Old saves and forgotten mod folders get some of the blame, since a popular enhanced graphics mod is now essentially built into the game. A whole folklore of folk remedies has also sprung up: meditation fixes the audio, and oils start working again if the option is switched off and on.
Why remaster a remaster in the first place is a separate question. One explanation points to the upcoming expansion, since the new tech required bringing the base game up to current standards. On Steam, players can switch between the classic, next-gen, and remastered versions through the betas tab, but the classic version, as it turns out, simply won't launch.
Against this backdrop, CD Projekt Red inevitably got compared to the 2020 launch of Cyberpunk 2077, and to the upcoming The Witcher 4, which the studio is building on Unreal Engine 5. Many now see the move away from the in-house REDengine as a forced one. One gamer put it bluntly:
The code for TW3 must be held together by duct tape. They seemingly can't fix one issue without breaking 50 other things in the process.
While some remaster knights meditate for decent audio, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 from Warhorse Studios shows that a stable launch is still possible this generation. The Witcher is used to hunting monsters, but now the monsters are hunting him, and they live right in the code.
