The Witcher 3 players joke about Vesemir riding an invisible horse around White Orchard after the remaster release

Big updates to older games work like a lottery. New textures and lighting almost always come bundled with surprises, and some of them look like genuine witcher magic. Case in point: Geralt's gray-haired mentor calmly riding down a country road on thin air.

That exact scene played out in the prologue of The Witcher 3 after the latest free update, widely called a remaster. Vesemir escorts Geralt through White Orchard, only the horse beneath him has literally vanished. It gets better: the old witcher sank halfway into the road and rode all the way to the tavern like that.

It wasn't a one-off. Many players describe the same bug at the exact same spot. For some, Vesemir slowly sank into the ground until he disappeared, while for others he dropped through entirely, then resurfaced and hovered over the road.

One player said the horse kept following Geralt even after the griffin hunt, long after its owner had left. Others dug up a YouTube video of the same glitch in older versions, which suggests the remaster revived an ancient problem rather than creating a new one.

The invisible horse is far from the only issue. Players report sudden jumps in dialogue volume, frame drops, and strange lighting effects in Gwent, along with generally weak performance and AMD driver problems.

One person saw a flock of birds behaving like a biblical locust swarm over Egypt. Most of the bugs are harmless and more funny than annoying, but each one stings for the reputation of CD Projekt RED. The studio has yet to fully shake off the botched 2020 launch of Cyberpunk 2077, and a joke about "Ciberwitcherpunk" was inevitable.

Some players believe the update doubles as an engine test run ahead of the upcoming Songs of the Past expansion. Skeptics joke that the studio is saving on testing by handing it over to players and social media. The most resourceful commenters refused to call it a bug at all. One put it plainly:

That isn't an invisible horse, Vesemir can just do that.

Vesemir horse may be invisible now, but his posture in the saddle is still flawless.