The Witcher 3 upgrade

[floppybootstomp]

I haven’t played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for a while so when I received this email from Projekt Red (The games’ developers) I thought I’d give it a go and installed the 35Gb upgrade.

“The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, one of the most awarded games in history, is now enhanced for the next generation! Take advantage of a free update available to all players who own a copy of the game, or purchase the Complete Edition for 50% off! Return to the Continent as Geralt of Rivia, face off against dangerous monsters, make choices in a morally ambiguous world, and find your adopted daughter Ciri before the ghostly forces of the Wild Hunt.

Enhanced for the next generation!

This edition of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is enriched with various visual and technical upgrades, including graphic improvements, faster loading times, fully integrated emods created by the community, real-time ray tracing, and much more — including new items inspired by The Witcher series on Netflix! It fully takes advantage of what the next generation has to offer. Be sure to check out the brand-new Photo Mode and capture the beauty of the Continent for yourself!”

And now the game is impossible to play.

When I open the game my mouse cursor has a mind of it’s own, the screen is dark, it stutters and within ten minutes it had crashed twice. And that was just within the opening menu.

I installed latest video drivers and that didn’t make any difference so I searched the net and this confirmed the upgrade is definitely faulty/unfinished. Projekt Red have acknowledged the upgrade has problems and say they are working on multiple fixes. We shall see.

So this is a heads up that if, like me, you were tempted by the upgrade, just hold on a whiles.

 

[Ian]

Damn. CDPR have had a really bad time with bugs recently.

What spec system are you running now @floppybootstomp? Real shame to hear that the free upgrade is so buggy, as the screenshots I saw looked really promising.

 

[floppybootstomp]

CDPR had their reputation tarnished with the release of Cyberpunk 2077 and it just seems to get worse unfortunately. As an aside, I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077 on the X-Box 1-S and it's running fine on that.

From what I've read it doesn't seem to matter how high end a system the Witcher upgrade is run on, it's still buggy/unplayable. I tried again to load The Witcher 3 and this time got as far as the game continuing where I'd left off but it was quite hopeless - severe stuttering, shadows, clipped audio and after about 5 minutes it crashed..

This is my current spec on gaming machine, I hope to upgrade mid-January when I should get paid for a large install I completed recently:

MSI Z390 Gaming Edge Motherboard
i5 9600K 3.7Ghz Coffee Lake
16Gb Corsair DDR4 (2 x 8Gb)
Nvidia MSI GTX1060 6Gb
Crucial 465Gb SSD M.2 NVMe - Win 10
Seagate 4Gb SATA mechanical for games storage
Pioneer BDR-209M Optical drive
Asus Xonar DGX sound card using UNI custom drivers
Corsair 650W modular PSU

 

[Ian]

I've still not played Cyberpunk 2077 after the mess that initially happened, although I had meant to buy it after the bugs were squashed. Maybe now is the time!

Lets hope they pull their finger out with the Witcher 3. The studio has gone from a sterling reputation to quite a poor one in just a few years.

 

[Abarbarian]

The Witcher 3 and all the DLC along with tons of graphic and game mods plays just fine on my Arch linux Skylake rig