Posted on: September 22, 2025

v-serp
Bestätigter BesitzerSpiele: Rezensionen: 5
Next gen update
The original to me was probably 4*. It did a lot of things well but it also signaled the end of the gaming era most of us grew up enjoying and that had been progressing all that time. It was like FFX making Final Fantasy casual and mainstream with endless cutscenes and a decline in storytelling they never recovered from, but now it's for the entire industry altogether. TW3 was extremely successful and influential, the style of game to be marketed to non-gamers of the time, and so everyone else followed suit. The Next Gen update loses another star because it has major issues. The launcher itself is a poor decision, you can skip it however by choosing to just launch the game itself (edit your desktop shortcut if you desire and point it to the game exe, also make sure to set the directory to start in to it). You can't load your previous Witcher saves, and you can't even simulate it because it will crash (previously you could at least pick choices, now they just make it for you). The bigger issue is hairworks crashes the game at points, and even with hairworks off there can be crashes, especially in Toussaint. Random performance drops can also happen. There are texture and lighting issues that pop up here and there. If you try the DX11 version it just looks really ugly, I don't recall the original looking that bad, so I don't know what they did. When the DX12 version is running with settings maxed out, it does look pretty good although it's still a 10 year old game. Chances are because the performance is poor you'll need DLSS framegen, but the devs are also too lazy to use DLSS4 and the Transformer model. You can put in the newest DLSS files manually but you still can't get the transformer model. Frame gen also I'm not sure if it's MFG, I think it's probably just the DLSS3 version. And even with reflex you get that disgusting input lag. More on that below. Combat was made even more annoying. They did some balance changes and targeting that really doesn't help. Adding auto-apply oils in base and having finishers trigger automatically were good decisions. But the game's combat is still very weak, and gets more frustrating with new enemies in the DLCs as well. There is virtually zero replay value because everything is so gated, you're forced to go in order, there aren't multiple ways of doing things, and the cutscenes are only tolerable first time through and are more grating after that. The English VA is generally poor. For some reason there are also just way too many children in the game, and they all sound and act like toddlers, yet we are forced to interact with them constantly and watch them skip around and act "cute" when the world is grisly and dangerous and they're abandoned in a swamp somewhere. It's just absolutely insane if you're trying to immerse yourself, and have any experience with reality at that. The best part of the game is probably exploring Velen and to a lesser extent Toussaint, finding POI, doing witcher contracts, clearing out bandits, etc. It's not super great but it can be a decent enough gameloop. Unfortunately Skellige is filled with Smuggler's caches, which aren't satisfying. DLC stories are better than the main game, and are rather self contained. Gwent is also a very fun sidegame, especially in the Blood and Wine DLC that adds another faction. But that's still not enough to carry the game. And again because of the design of the game, you must progress in order, which severely limits exploration. The game has a level system as well as the story gating, so unless you choose to start a premade character for the DLCs, you won't have access to them right away. You can start Hearts of Stone about 10 levels below its suggested level if you already know how to play the game and are great at it, but that pretty much means clearing out around at least half of the main story or more. Completing HoS will be enough to start and complete B&W, and then you can finish the main game if you still want to, but it's very limited in freedom.
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