The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Hotfix Is Live To Slay These Next-Gen Issues On PC
For a nearly 8-year-old game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has proven surprisingly resilient to the test of time. It also recently received a fresh set of legs courtesy of developer CD Projekt Red's next-gen update with overhauled graphics (including an Ultra+ setting exclusive to PC), integrated mods, and more. Various bugs have plagued its release, however, which CD Projekt Red has been scrambling to fix. Working towards that goal, the developer has made available a hotfix on PC.
This is response to the litany of complaints the developer has received, which it acknowledged shortly after the next-gen update went live.
"We are aware of the issues PC players have been reporting since last night's release of the update. We are actively investigating all of the reports and will be providing an update on particular issues as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience!," CD Projekt Red stated on Twitter last week.
Following up on that, CD Projekt Red has issued a hotfix on Steam and GOG that checks in at around 3GB for the former and 1.9GB for the latter. Neither one changes the game version, but according to CD Projekt Red, the hotfix "should improve the overall stability and performance" of the game, as well as "fix GOG and Steam overlays."
Concurrently, the developer announced the release of the next-gen update on Origin with the latest bug fixes already in place (version 4.0).
Responses to the hotfix have been mixed. One user on CD Projekt Red's forums notes that the it eliminated "some of the weird stuttering," but that the game is "still kinda choppy" when running with Geralt. Likewise, another user noted the game is "more stable" and with "slightly better FPS" after applying the hotfix, but says their GPU usage is still unusually high.
Additionally, the folks at Digital Foundry tested the game with the next-gen update and then retested with the hotfix and are "sorry to say that whatever improvements CDPR has made do not address any of our major criticisms." Some of those issues include shader compilation stuttering and heavy taxing of the CPU affecting performance.
All in all, it sounds like the hotfix is a step in the right direction, though perhaps not the cure-all that many hoped it would be. Fortunately, CD Projekt Red isn't finished optimizing the game with the latest hotfix for PC, or on console either—the developer says it is "working on further improving the experience on all platforms."
