The Witcher 3 is hands down my favourite game of all time. I am in love with this game. Playing it feels like being at home, I could've never imagined this would be the game of all games I'm giving a negative review to, due to the abhorrent, stillborn facelift this game received.


I don't know where to start, stutters? bad performance? lazy graphical updates? broken shaders? crashes? memory leaks? the countless glitches? some features removed and added only to the DX12 wrapper version? This used to be simultaneously one of the best looking games in existence and one of the best performing ones on PC, now it feels like a run of the mill modern PC port chock full of stuttering, complete with the signature bad performance in cities that the old gen version was very surprisingly free of. On my relatively high end PC (3080, R5 3600x, 16gb of DDR4 3200mhz) I get ~45 FPS on the DX12 version with DLSS balanced (this game is in such a hilariously bad state that lowering DLSS internal resolution made the game iteratively run worse for me), with a target resolution of 4K. Lowering to 1440p seems to yield somewhat stable 60-70 frames per second.


There's glitches galore, some were fixed over several patches. I started the game last month and was surprised to see that Geralt was still locking out of movement for a solid second everytime he stops, though this was fixed now. There are broken shaders as well - especially for water puddles, when viewed from certain angles they will look like smooth concrete or something like that. There are also numerous bugs that haven't been fixed from the old version (corpses being launched into outer space after enemies finish their death animation, among others).


CDPR claimed in the past that Witcher 3 was completely hand-crafted, and I'm inclined to believe it even though the veracity of their often bombastic claims has become questionable in recent years. The game was so detailed and unique everywhere, to my eternal adoration, free of lazy corners. Every small area had identity. You could be riding through a dense wood in the corner of a map along a small trail, and then a thin felled tree will block the road, forcing you to take a detour through the dense underbrush, small touches like this add a lot of character to a game's world, and require not only expense from the developers - but it also cannot come from developers who do not have their heart into it. This has been completely thrown out the window in the next-gen upgrade; the previously hand-placed foliage has been completely replaced with texture map based procedurally generate foliage, and they didn't bother to even at least move in and fine-tune the new look, so now you have things like bushes floating above small hills, grass growing out of a small camp fire, trails nearly completely covered by grass, that transition of smaller roadside foliage to taller grass blades in fields/forests is gone, among other things.


I won't write about the development status of this "upgrade", even though it had a lot of bad omens up to its release for those who were following it, and its release launch was announced like a couple weeks before launch, clearly CDPR, who promised a 2022 launch for the next-gen "upgrade" which right now feels like a gigantic, unstable fort of planks glued and duct-taped together, have not learned one whit of humility from their last infamous launch, and are doomed to repeat that mistake in the future.

The Witcher 3 is hands down my favourite game of all time. I am in love with this game. Playing it feels like being at home, I could've never imagined this would be the game of all games I'm giving a negative review to, due to the abhorrent, stillborn facelift this game received. [h1]Performance[/h1] I don't know where to start, stutters? bad performance? lazy graphical updates? broken shaders? crashes? memory leaks? the countless glitches? some features removed and added only to the DX12 wrapper version? This used to be simultaneously one of the best looking games in existence and one of the best performing ones on PC, now it feels like a run of the mill modern PC port chock full of stuttering, complete with the signature bad performance in cities that the old gen version was very surprisingly [i]free[/i] of. On my relatively high end PC (3080, R5 3600x, 16gb of DDR4 3200mhz) I get ~45 FPS on the DX12 version with DLSS balanced (this game is in such a hilariously bad state that lowering DLSS internal resolution made the game iteratively run worse for me), with a target resolution of 4K. Lowering to 1440p seems to yield somewhat stable 60-70 frames per second. [h1]Glitches[/h1] There's glitches galore, some were fixed over several patches. I started the game last month and was surprised to see that Geralt was still locking out of movement for a solid second everytime he stops, though this was fixed now. There are broken shaders as well - especially for water puddles, when viewed from certain angles they will look like smooth concrete or something like that. There are also numerous bugs that haven't been fixed from the old version (corpses being launched into outer space after enemies finish their death animation, among others). [h1]Lazy graphical facelift[/h1] CDPR claimed in the past that Witcher 3 was completely hand-crafted, and I'm inclined to believe it even though the veracity of their often bombastic claims has become questionable in recent years. The game was so detailed and unique everywhere, to my eternal adoration, free of lazy corners. Every small area had identity. You could be riding through a dense wood in the corner of a map along a small trail, and then a thin felled tree will block the road, forcing you to take a detour through the dense underbrush, small touches like this add a lot of character to a game's world, and require not only expense from the developers - but it also cannot come from developers who do not have their heart into it. This has been [i]completely[/i] thrown out the window in the next-gen upgrade; the previously hand-placed foliage has been completely replaced with texture map based procedurally generate foliage, and they didn't bother to even at least move in and fine-tune the new look, so now you have things like bushes floating above small hills, grass growing out of a small camp fire, trails nearly completely covered by grass, that transition of smaller roadside foliage to taller grass blades in fields/forests is gone, among other things. I won't write about the development status of this "upgrade", even though it had a lot of bad omens up to its release for those who were following it, and its release launch was announced like a couple weeks before launch, clearly CDPR, who promised a 2022 launch for the next-gen "upgrade" which right now feels like a gigantic, unstable fort of planks glued and duct-taped together, have not learned one whit of humility from their last infamous launch, and are doomed to repeat that mistake in the future.