The Witcher 3 has received a number of updates over the past few weeks, as well as free DLC that adds all new content into the game. This content has been made available to both PC and console gamers alike. Despite having released the game, CD Projekt Red doesn't appear to be done with the game and continues to polish things up for players.
Today, The Witcher 3 received a major new update that fixes a number of issues that players have been having with the game. Namely, drowners no longer spawn out of thin air to attack the player, and quests now provide better distribution of experience points for overleveled players.
Merchants have also been touched by the hand of balance, offering more weapon types and new prices for the maps they sell. Likewise, the loot tables for various monsters and human enemies in the game now offers more variety, so you'll find different drops instead of the same old stuff for killing them.
Finally, there's colorblind support for the game's magical spells, which come in different colors.
The patch also fixes pathing problems with Geralt's horse Roach, makes it so that you don't light candles when you're interacting with nearby lootable items, and more. For the partial list of patch notes (sans spoilers) scroll down below. For the rest of them, check out this forum post. As you can see, it's a big patch.
- Fixes a possible exploit by preventing certain drowners from respawning infinitely.
- Improves the distribution of experience points gained by completing quests with recommended levels lower than the player character level.
- Merchants now offer more weapon types.
- Rebalances the prices of maps that can be purchased from merchants.
- Clarifies a number of crafting diagrams.
- Fixes an exploit whereby players could buy sea shells and sell the pearls inside them at a higher price.
- Increases the variety of loot dropped throughout the game.
- Increases the variety of items available in shops.
- Shops now only offer weapons with levels matching or exceeding the player character level.
- Slightly reduces the amount of coin dropped from chests and monsters.
- Deploys the Bovine Defense Force Initiative.
- Fixes an issue where runestones could not be upgraded to greater runestones.
- Reduces the spawn time of selected groups of NPCs.
- Geralt no longer interacts with candles placed near chests and other openable objects.
- Improves the smoothness of camera movement.
- Fixes a number of issues related to horseback riding.
- Fixes an issue where the player could not deflect arrows/bolts at longer distances.
- Introduces a number of fixes in in-game communities.
- Introduces a number of fixes related to combat.
- Vitality begins to drop if Toxicity exceeds 80%, as originally intended.
- Fixes an issue where Geralt was sometimes unable to mount Roach.
- Improves Geralt's movement, especially when he swims.
- Fixes an issue whereby Geralt could be attached to a sinking boat while aiming his crossbow.
- Fixes a number of issues related to Vitality regeneration.
- Fixes an issue whereby certain actions could be randomly blocked during gameplay.
- Fixes a rare issue whereby Geralt could not mount Roach after fast travelling between points.
- Fixes a number of minor tooltip and wording bugs.
- Adds a series of color-blind friendly features. Improves visibility of tracks, marks, footprints and scent clues. Color-blind friendly features can be enabled in the Options\Gamplay submenu.
- Introduces a number of additional fixes to alt + tabbing.
- Fixes an issue where The Witcher 3 process did not close properly if the user did not have XAUDIO installed.
- Introduces a number of general stability and performance improvements.
- Fixes an issue where in certain situations the game could crash while a save was being loaded.
- Adds some missing translations in localized versions.
- Ciri can no longer unlock fast travel points.
- Improves the behavior of sails when viewed from longer distances.
- Improves performance in selected scenes and cutscenes.
- Fixes an issue where clouds and fog could flicker on some hardware configurations.
- Fixes an issue where Geralt could pass through walls in the fish market in Novigrad.
- Removes repeated sound cues on entry into GUI panels a second time.
- Adds a collision near Kaer Gelen that could cause the player to be blocked inside the building.
- Improves the scale of selected elements of the GUI and HUD.
- Introduces a number of bug fixes and user experience improvements in the GUI panels.
- Introduces a number of small changes in the UI for gwent.
- Improves the alignment of the HUD for the 21:9, 4:3 and 5:4 screen ratios.
- Disables "Input device changed" messages and adds options to disable on-screen combat feedback and floating tags above NPCs.
- Adds an information prompt and Journal entries related to new DLC packages.
- Fixes an issue where some formulae were not displayed in the Alchemy panel when the player possessed level 1 of said formulae.
- Introduces a number of fixes in key bindings.
- Introduces new filters for the Alchemy and Crafting panels.
- Fixes a number of minor issues where music tracks were not triggered in their designated locations.