Last week, I travelled to CD Projekt Red to play the long-awaited next-gen update for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which will be released 14th December – AKA next week. I spent a few hours with the update, playing with the new graphical options, the quality of life improvements, and the quest tied to unlocking gear from the The Witcher Netflix show. And I talked to acting narrative director Philip Webber about it, too.
I’ve written more flowerily about what it’s like to go back to the game with all these bells and whistles on, but here, in what I think is a more easily digestible form, is everything I learned about it.
There are some hidden surprises in the next-gen update that won’t be detailed in the patch notes, including some new animations for Geralt and, more importantly, his horse Roach. “So we hid lots of new secrets and lots of new little details that we want people to find,” said Weber. Geralt now snatches herbs from plants, for example.
More importantly: “Roach can walk backwards now. Or actually, if Roach is standing there’s even now a hidden button that you can kick. Or I think Roach now lifts her head if you’re in the water. We tried to put in lots of these small things for people to just find, that we won’t even put into the patch notes.” I didn’t get a chance to test these after I spoke to Weber.
This will likely be the last update The Witcher 3 will get and all of it will be free. “Pretty sure there will be patches, probably, to fix things, but I think in terms of content, I would say it’s probably the plan,” said Weber. “But then again, this is what we said for [second Witcher 3 expansion] Blood and Wine [in 2016] as well.
He added: “I can’t talk about it but we are working also on the new saga right now,” referring to the project codenamed Polaris that will begin a new trilogy of games. He’s the acting narrative director on that game. “So I do think for Witcher [3] Wild Hunt, this is, let’s say, our big final present/celebration of that game that we want to give. And that’s also why we wanted to make it free. This is, let’s say, our thank you to the fans. Also, we all have lived through the last two years,” which I took to be a reference to the Cyberpunk 2077 launch troubles. “It was very affecting people in the studio. So it felt also good for us to make sure that we do this well and we make it for free, as this nice package for people.”
The next-gen update is made up of a curated selection of community mods for The Witcher 3, plus updates (and bug fixes) CDPR has made and the new DLC.
Mods made by the community include World Map Fixes by Terg500; Nitpicker’s Patch – Various Visual Fixes by chuckcash; The Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project by HalkHogan; FCR3 – Immersion and Gameplay Tweaks by Andrzej Kwiatkowski; and HDMR – HD Monsters Reworked Mod by Denroth.