I'd like it if the corpses didnt dissapear quite so quickly. Preferably it could be handled in the following manner: Corpses dissapear after 5 minutes of gameplay or the oldest dissapear in a rolling tally, the number/time as a setting in options/advanced, with a "low spec" setting duplicating current behavior.

Why is it that every time this issue comes up someone speaks up about how corpses murder performance.

There are just as many games that don't aggressively clean up corpses as those that do. Some clean them up based on a population cap which is an excellent compromise between visuals and performance concerns, especially in games that may feature endless enemy respawns in some sections.

Games that can be tweaked to keep corpses universally suffer little performance impact when corpses are increased. Go into your crysis cfg's sometime and set corpse-fade time to 999 seconds. If the game could draw all those enemies while running combat AI and collision for them at decent FPS's it can CERTAINLY draw their lifeless corpses without falling to its knees. That's what LOD's are for. It's not like the things are at full detail when the player is several meters away.

I can think of a few titles where corpses stay FOREVER, with no performance impact. Bethesda's gamebryo based games come to mind, as does Dragon Age when corpse-fade is tweaked via .ini. STALKER is right there, so is Mass Effect where corpses can be tweaked to never fade and maintain full collision, with no performance impact!

How bout Half life 2 where corpse fade is emminently tweakable with a bevy of distance, population cap and duration based .ini switches.

There are so many options available to suit every taste and piece of hardware, not making this a tweakable variable is a poor choice indeed.

A population cap of say, 20 corpses would be perfect for Witcher 2, with those 20 disappearing into loot bags or monster remains after the player hits a major area transition or 24 in-game hours pass, whatever comes first.

I don't mind the disappearing corpses so much. I DO wish that the game would let me loot fallen bodies INSTANTLY though, since if I don't attend to it immediately (usually because there's still a couple more enemies on my ass), I have a tendency to forget to do it and miss out on loot.

This... shouldn't be an issue at all.

You can imagine that voracious bacteria are decomposing the corpses very, very fast. :)

Seriously though, it wouldn't be practical for corpses just to pile up. Yes, it's not realistic especially considering that you do find corpses of people not killed by you and sometimes this is part of a quest, like the soldiers in the caves beneath Flotsam.

On the other hand, Geralt carrying around 250Kg of monster parts, weapons, armors, ore, timber and other crafting materials is not quite realistic either. But this is just a game and such conventions are common in games.

I'm also very angry about corpses disappearing so fast...

Can't see how it can occurs any performance hit : did you notice a fps loss when more than a dozen nekkers are front of you ? Not me.
There is no reason that a dead nekker hurt performance more than a living one... Maybe a gain because of no more animation required.

To avoid impossible loot when occurs a pile of corpses, simply blend the loot of each body (i've seen that in many recent games).


I've figured, as some other people around here, that there is a "community.ini" file in the "users" folder, but no one is able to find out what purpose this file is so, didn't try either...

There MUST be a file or an accessible setting to set this IMPORTANT setting, that's a nonsense because actual systems mostly came out withGb or more RAM, so even if a performance hit would occurs, I can't imagine this will be a serious issue for most of gamers...


Hope that setting became fixed, or at least available to modding with patch 1.3 or incoming D'jini editor...