The Witcher 3 remaster made dungeons brighter and monsters funnier
Darkness in games works as well as any soundtrack, because the scariest things are the ones you can't see. But flood a dungeon with even light and render every brick, and the monster around the corner turns into someone in a school play costume.
That's exactly the scenario a meme plays with, and it spread across Reddit after the updated version of The Witcher 3 launched.
On the left is the original, where Geralt creeps through the gloom with a sword and lantern while a monster stares at him from the dark. On the right is the same corridor without a single shadow, and the creature looks downright ridiculous.
One commenter put it this way:
CDPR literally recreated this meme in the remaster.
The complaint is a familiar one from many re-releases, where sharper textures and new global lighting eat away at the original art style. With The Witcher 3, though, part of the cause is a deliberate decision.
The developers shifted the color grading from saturated and high-contrast to something more realistic. In rainy Novigrad it works great, and the world looks as dreary and unwelcoming as intended. Velen and Skellige suit the new palette too, but in Crookback Bog and sunny Toussaint the result is far more debatable.
The remaster's biggest problem is inconsistency. Open spaces look magnificent, while interiors are a whole other level of chaos: some players complain about an overexposed image, others about darkness so thick you can't see a thing.
On a PC with an RTX 5070, the game runs at 50–60 fps at 1440p with ray tracing. On Xbox Series S, performance mode aims for 60 fps but, according to players, drops to roughly 540p and turns the image into mush. There's also no way to roll back to the previous version there, unlike on Steam or PS5.
Some of the problems can be fixed through settings. The broken bloom effect is best turned off, and the gamma slider only becomes available with HDR disabled. For some players, switching off tone mapping on the TV itself did the trick.
The catch is that bloom can't be turned off on consoles, and owners of calibrated HDR displays point out that lowering in-game brightness defeats the whole purpose of HDR. And if nearly everyone has to tweak the default settings, the developers clearly missed the mark.
