Witcher 3 Getting a Free Upgrade
 

I'll let the news speaks for itself. So here you go.:)

The Witcher 3 getting a free upgrade for PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC -The Verge

Nice! I still have my GTX980….which works well enough for non-4K gaming (mostly). I doubt I'll upgrade until the fetaures in these cards become cheaper…

Kudos to CDPR. I'm not a great fan of any of their games, but they seem to be a good publisher.

I can only imagine the kind of system we'll need to run TW3 on max settings with ray tracing. :)

No need to imagine anything, IIRC WGD already has such a beast. :)

I think it's a bit misleading the way the Verge phrased it. It won't be using ray-traced graphics as such - it'll have RTX features, which use a bit of fuzzy raytracing to achieve various effects. I'm hoping they're going to use it for global illumination. I loved the world design of W3, but I always thought the lighting was a bit lacking, and often looked unnatural. That could be a major upgrade for me.

https://www.dsogaming.com/news/the-w…se-in-h2-2021/

Nice. And it seems CDPR is not handling it. Saber Interactive. Interesting. At least they can't be accused of not focusing on CP2077.

Smart move as it frees them resources and it doesn't need a lot of work by a third party. It's basically upgraded graphics and sound with the newer version of Red Engine.

Kinda sad that we need to specify that such update is "free".

One good news, one bad.

https://twitter.com/CDPROJEKTRED_IR/…23570287353859

They had difficulties with one, so let's do two in parallel. Unless they significally increase the time they spend per project, I can't see this going well.

Ouch, the comments on that tweet…

Hmm I'm not sure how I feel about that to be honest. I don't know much about Saber Interactive, but I looked them up, and their project history isn't exactly impressive.

Kids shouldn't be allowed to use Twitter. :)

I'm hoping for the combination of them having worked on the Switch port of Witcher 3, and the next-gen updates to Witcher 3 not being very extensive, to allow them the chance that it'll be decent. Except for the ray-tracing I'm now sure how much I'm expecting in the next-gen update. At least for PC.

I'm with you on not being sure what to expect, but it does say "a range of visual and technical improvements", so I'm hoping that means most of the textures and effects as well.

I'm curious how this will affect mods if at all. Hopefully they won't all have to be updated.

I'm not too worried about the work being done by a third party. Even if a company doesn't demonstrate much of an exciting record, they might well have a decent crew of technical folks who could do this sort of upgrade work competently.

I've yet to really play a game where RT mattered all that much, honestly.

I think Exodus came close, but - sadly - I found the gameplay underwhelming and dreary.

Control looks great as well, but I already completed that one before I upgraded my rig.

Cyberpunk does look pretty good, but my god it's costly in terms of performance.

It's not until the most recent patch that I can get it to run smoothly with RT - and that's only because of DLSS.

Not that I'm going to play it yet, though.

Maybe once they add a few more rudimentary immersion features.

I've been impressed by how the modding scene has already mostly fixed my primary gameplay complaints. Well, so it seems - as it's hard to know without testing them myself.

Anyway, I'll be sure to check out Witcher 3 after this upgrade - but I don't think it will change much, honestly.

As long they don't do it themselves it's a good news. TW3 looks more and more like an awesome industrial "incident" in the middle of a very lackluster production.

Some kind of 'oops' moment but don't worry we are back to the normal with our next production which will be some kind of FMV game with plenty of Z movie actors, a huge marketing department and a full team of writers to create fresh excuses about how sorry we are to have screwed it again.

@Kos

I'm kinda with you on that one.

I never bought into their whole "for-the-consumer" marketing spiel - but I certainly never expected them to be so overtly deceitful and apparently toxic as a place of work.

Then again, a part of the blame should fall on the critics and the most vocal fans of Witcher 3.

That game was never even remotely 10/10 if you actually care about the gameplay part of games.

Well, tastes differ and all that - but people will be extremely hard pressed to claim great things about the progression, itemization, balance, combat and so forth.

Great story and extremely competent production, yes.

But if we reward developers for making hollow open worlds with half-assed systems and balance with essentially the perfect score and endless applause - we can hardly expect them to improve much for their next game.

With all that said, I honestly expected Cyberpunk to be a very good game.

I can't tell you the shit I went through to get the parts I needed for my new rig - and the fact that I reserved my vacation time exclusively for that game didn't exactly help.

But it was certainly a lesson learned. One that I should have learned with games like MoO3 and Outpost.

Guess not :)

Indeed, with the small caveat than I really loved TW3 because of the quests and the writing and ended up forgetting about the gameplay to just love the experience.

I built a new rig in the middle of a component crisis with the most costly GPU to be found for CP2077 (was the only one available) as well than a Samsung G9 Odyssey to compliment it so yes I can understand what you went through.

I personally like the gameplay of Witcher 3. I also liked the combat mechanics, and the various options to make a character build. Where it did fail was the balancing of it all. They put in many options, but none are required. Even on the highest difficulty, once you get to a certain point it gets very easy and all of the option are just empty flavor.

And I also agree that the open world feels kind of like a very pretty empty world. I think this is because they also can't seem to make it explorable. The reward for exploration is never in finding some unique items. And the world is not designed very tightly, to be made to be explored. It's very open and in being that open, it ends up being flat.

I really am curios what FromSoft will do with Elden Ring. Their world/level design is fantastic, and just made for exploration. But I think that is also because it's not open world. So I'm curious how they will match the two paradigms. Will their open world end up being like a hub world, with various close-hubs which are very high on the exploration meter. Or will they actually make an open world that feels both organic, and still constrained enough to offer exploration.

That's fair enough. I found the skill system to be very rigid and limiting, personally.

Combat "felt" good, definitely - with cool animations and so forth. But the actual fights were way, way too much dodging all over the place and doing one single thing to win almost all of them.

I think I defeated 95% of every single fight using Igni and nothing else. I played on Death March - and apart from the inevitable initial few hours of struggle, it was a complete pushover.

That said, I always prefer stealthy characters in single-character RPGs - so I'm naturally biased against games that don't allow for that.

I think my primary problem with the character system in W3 is that, apart from the tiny handful of spells, you have next to no active abilities.

I'm a huge fan of active abilities in RPGs - as I consider them the best "toys" you can get in terms of power progression.

But the problems with W3 mechanics, for me, go much farther than just the character system.

Yeah, the PoI encounters were simply underdeveloped and utterly boring once you've done a couple of them.

The itemization ensured that anything that wasn't a Witcher Gear "recipe" was 99% trash gear that you had no reason to care about.

Beyond that, they even opted to reward you with absolutely minimal XP for defeating enemies - so you couldn't even use that as a proper excuse to go exploring new places.

Dreadfully bad design.

CP2077 is much worse, though.

I don't mean to go on and on about it, though.

Suffice it to say that I don't think it deserved quite as much praise as it got - and I don't think fans did themselves any favors by overstating how amazing it was over and over.

I'll check it out :)

But we've been through my opinion of asian game design already.

Essentially, these games are too much work for too little reward for my westernized privileged tastes :)

Even my sister played The Witcher 3, so it must be not bad …

kaer moren area looks :drools:

I love the Witcher universe. I own all 7-8 books and they are definitely a must for anyone who like reading Fantasy. That said, I'm sad I have never managed to really enjoy any Witcher game(I tried 1 and 3). It's mostly because of the gameplay. Too twitchy, too consol-ish.

It's just not my cup of tea but I understand very well, that some people like it. It's one of these games I wish it had a "story" difficulty mode to not botter much with the fight but enjoy the story and dialogs.

All of the Witcher games have an easy mode now. In fact, it's even called "Just the Story" in TW3. TW1 on the other hand was pretty easy to begin with.

What did you feel was consolish about them? There's nothing consolish about the first game that I can think of. I can understand someone feeling that way about certain aspects of TW3 though.. like how they went Ubisoft style for the world map.

Battles. How it needed to be timed and you had to do "combo". I have a vague memory of getting frustrated doing some combats in a marsh. It's been quite a long time so my memory of it is pretty fuzzy.

Yeah the first Witcher games combat was a bit wonky. You had to choose either your steel or sliver sword styles and swing in a certain rhythm to attack. Glad they ditched it.

They're action-oriented for sure, but I don't see how that makes them consolish. TW1 doesn't even have native support for controllers.

The combat in TW1 takes a little getting used to, but it becomes second nature fairly quickly. I actually quite like it, but I can understand why a lot of people wouldn't. I think it's still worth playing for the story and characters though. Not to mention some great music as well.

That's the sort of gameplay I assimilate, perhaps wrongly, to those console games I used to play in my youth. Perhaps it wasn't the right word, but anyhow, I didn't like it!

https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroo…he-game/z83b21
quite the surprise if it comes today on pc
edit false alarm, probably it will come with tv season 2

Is that the new version with ray tracing, etc, though or just the game getting released on PS5 and Xbox Series X?

From what I've read, the core of the upgrade is a version of the HDproject meshes and textures (available now on Nexus). Not sure about ray tracing but it's possible. I believe the intent is to bring the vanilla game up to the latest modded state.

https://www.dsogaming.com/news/the-w…se-in-q2-2022/

So it seems it's been delayed to Q2 2022.

Played it.

I wonder if they can provide a water shader that doesn't look like gloopy gel.

*Sheepish developer deletes goopy_blue*

I think it's still one of the best looking RPGs out there even 6 years later. My only complaint is the animation of the foliage when the wind is blowing. It moves like it's in a hurricane.

For me, the delay is irrelevant since I don't have a ray tracing capable GPU anyways and probably won't for quite awhile.

The only upgrade I would like, should I ever revisit the game, is to remove that plaintive Velen theme song. God did that wear out its welcome for me.

Hey, another game I haven't finished. I had a session relatively recently, and yeah it still looks beautiful to my eyes.