Review of the complete edition of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

This review will look a little different. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is rightfully considered the pinnacle of game creation, with countless specials, reviews, and impressions published since its release. I firmly believe that if for some reason you have never heard of the name, you will easily find exactly the information you need.

So here I will only focus on what the PC version and the current generation of consoles have to offer – and I must say that there are a lot of changes.

• Platform: PC (Verified), PS5 (Verified), Xbox Series X/S
• Publication date: December 14, 2022
• Developer: CD Project RED
  
• Publisher: CD Project RED
• Genre: RPG
• Czech localization: Yes
• Multiplayer: No
• Game time: 50 to 200 hours
• Price: approximately 1250 crowns, free for owners of the original game

PC version with fantastic graphics and technical issues

The original version of The Witcher 3 still looks very good on PC today, and in the discussions under our articles, it was easy to see that many of you have already marked the update as unnecessary in advance. But the opposite is also true. The full game boasts one of the most powerful ray tracing implementations we’ve ever seen – RT takes care of reflections, shadows as well as environmental shading which completely transforms the game as a result. The game has become much darker, and the light is now cast only by those objects that would cast it in real life. Therefore, the biggest change is first of all the interiors, which are so different that, unlike the original game, I could not do without the beam, which at least slightly illuminated the dark and now much more atmospheric world. But I can’t forget the vegetation, which has been completely redesigned and, together with the incomparably higher viewing distance and the detail of distant objects, moves the game from 2015 to a number of games that even today look fantastic.

However, the robust implementation of ray tracing and improved graphics cause a lot of issues, which led me to switch to the PS5 version of the game after a few hours of play. Enabling RT makes the game almost unplayable on all but the most powerful graphics cards, and even the developers at CD Projekt RED are aware of this and were quick to suggest that if you have stability issues, just run the game in DX11. However, such advice is at least laughable, because you are depriving yourself of the biggest visual improvement, and therefore you must have been looking forward to the news.

The robust implementation of ray tracing has made the game almost impossible to play with this technology on most PC builds.

The technical errors that I encountered in a few hours of playing the PC version were also an unpleasant surprise. Aside from little things like flickering textures or jittery environments, unfortunately changing the graphic settings completely destroyed my saved position, causing me to repeat several hours of play. But instead, I preferred the PS5 version of the game.

PS5 version or impressive graphics combined with a cinematic effect

After the experience with the PC version, the console version has become much better. After going through the entire main game and countless side quests, I haven’t run into any major technical issues other than the optimization I’ll be doing. In terms of visual processing, the console versions take full advantage of most of the technical improvements we can see on PC. So you can look forward to a huge viewing distance, as well as sharper textures and reworked vegetation. The remaining options will depend on the version in which you decide to play the game.

The console has undergone most of the improvements over the PC. The game looks great in both game modes.

If you choose performance mode, all the improvements mentioned in the previous paragraph will remain in the game and the game will run at 60fps, although there will be a slight dip from time to time. The ray tracing mode then looks much better, but unlike the PC version, it is not full. Therefore, we have to forget about impressive reflections, which are solved here in the same way as in the PS4 version, although their quality is slightly higher. However, the biggest problem with this mode is stability, because by the cinematic experience in the title, I, unfortunately, did not mean 30 FPS, unimaginable today for many people, but 24, and this is the value that the game really approaches with time. time during intense and more graphically demanding scenes.

New quest and other improvements

However, it was not the graphics or advanced technical processing that put the third Sorcerer at the top of the RPG genre. This happened because it was a brilliantly written story and quests that are breathtaking in their diversity to this day. Well, with the advent of the next generation version, the game has been enriched by another excellently crafted quest.

While we would probably expect only cosmetic improvements from most development studios when working with the Netflix series, the developers at CD Projekt RED decided to create a completely new quest, at the end of which you will receive blueprints for new equipment. The quest can be found in the Devil’s Pit near the Hanged Man Tree, and I recommend avoiding it until you reach level 17 – they are among the hardest, despite the recommended level being only set at level 15.

Other minor improvements allow, for example, to enlarge the camera or quickly switch between individual signs on the console. Also worth mentioning is the ability to hide question marks on the map, which some players didn’t like very much in the original version.