The Witcher 3 fans are upset that the remaster literally destroyed the cozy charm of golden Toussaint

The chase for photorealism does strange things to games. Raw detail ages in a couple of years, while good art design lasts for decades. Sometimes a path tracing update manages to swap the latter for the former, and a fairy-tale duchy suddenly looks like an alien landscape from No Man's Sky.

That is exactly how Toussaint looks in the remaster of The Witcher 3. One player posted a comparison of shots from the 2016 Blood and Wine expansion on Reddit: the warm golden filter is gone, the sky has faded, and foliage in sunny weather glows a toxic neon green. According to the same player, Skellige looks noticeably better with path tracing, but Toussaint has literally lost its natural lighting and warm color grading.

The secret of the original lay in that color grading, and one commenter described it perfectly:

The original had that sort of browning that really old oil paintings have.. it added to the feeling that you are walking through a land that should only exist in illustrations or the ideas of old. It had an almost dreamlike quality when contrasted with the vibrant storybook colours and motifs.

Players compared the old Toussaint to a "perpetual golden hour" and recalled that the region has been called a living oil painting since release.

The neon greenery looks more like a bug than a design choice, though. One player familiar with rendering suggested that the foliage transmission effect, which lets light pass through thin surfaces, is broken. In their view, the engine ignores the actual color of the leaves, so even orange and brown canopies glow the same green. A similar flaw showed up in the 2022 next-gen update, and hopes that path tracing would fix it didn't pan out.

Not everyone sees the same picture. PC players with maximum settings at 1440p say everything looks fine on their end, while most complaints come from console players. The difference matters: Steam lets players choose the original, next-gen, or remastered version, while on consoles the new version simply replaced the old one. A free RenoDX HDR mod is suggested for PC, but the problem apparently lies in the ambient light color and the grading of the entire region, which a single filter can't cure.

Light now passes faithfully through every leaf in Toussaint, but golden hour never made it through with it.