The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has had a rough ride so far on PS5. The current-gen edition of the beloved RPG has struggled with its performance in particular, and CD Projekt RED has been hard at work to get the game ship-shape. Now, patch 4.02 is available to download and install, weighing in at just over 2GB.
As the official patch notes state, the main focus of this update is to improve "the overall stability and performance of the game", though there are a number of bug fixes as well. These include rare crash instances, blurry characters during cutscenes, and other specific issues.
We've included all the PS5-relevant patch notes below:
- Improved Performance Mode on next-gen consoles.
- Fixed an issue where characters could become slightly blurry during dialogues and cutscenes on PlayStation 5.
- Whatsoever a Man Soweth... - The game will no longer crash if Geralt runs away from Shani after starting the conversation on next-gen consoles.
- Added two missing "Top notch swords!" on previous-gen consoles.
- Fixed an issue with overwriting manual saves where in some circumstances the oldest gamesave was deleted on PlayStation 5.
- Addressed performance issues in Beauclair and Novigrad that occurred after loading a gamesave.
VISUAL - PC and Next-Gen Exclusive
- Improved immersion of water appearance by adding refraction to SSR and ray-traced reflections.
- Fixed a visual issue with brick textures where black artifacts covered stone arches.
- Added a Motion Blur slider. It can be found in Options → Video → Graphics.
QUESTS & GAMEPLAY - Available on all platforms
- Battle Preparations - Fixed the lack of a dialogue option that would progress the quest during the objective "Let Avallac'h know everything's ready."
- Reason of State - Fixed an issue where the door to the warehouse could become permanently locked if the player knocked, entered and then immediately left the building.
- Scavenger Hunt: Cat School Gear Upgrade Diagrams Part 1 - Fixed an issue where the quest could stay active even after the diagrams were looted.
- Fixed an issue where trying to start a New Game+ on an incompatible save would block the player from starting the expansions in standalone mode until the game was restarted.
LOCALIZATION - Available on all platforms
- Fixed an issue with the Korean localization of Ciri's and Geralt's Gwent card descriptions.
- Fixed punctuation issues in Arabic localization.
- Updated Traditional Chinese font.
For the full rundown of patch notes, click through here.
Are you still enjoying The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on PS5? Has this patch made a difference? Tell us in the comments section below.
[source thewitcher.com, via twitter.com]
Comments 15
It’s always the same with CDPR. Bugfix after bugfix, for several years.
@Max_the_German And yet people still put them on a pedestal. I'll never understand it.
@Max_the_German At least they fix their games. On the other hand, Bethesda leaves bugs for community to fix for them.
@EpicMouse I just finished Metroid Prime Remastered. This game had no patch since release, it‘s still version 1.0.0. It is a big remaster for a new platform, like Witcher 3, while the technical differences between PS4 and PS5 (and the underlying software engines) are much smaller. Why can’t CDPR deliver a game which just works well from day one? Why can Sony Santa Monica or Nintendo?
@Max_the_German That's how it is with most devs these days so what is your point? Keep in mind that it is an open world title which is much more susceptible to bugs.
@brazzios_84
I don't think CDPR has been on any pedestal since Cyberpunk 2077 came out in 2020. I think you may be thinking of From Software.
@Max_the_German Well the RED engine is a big reason why as its a difficult engine to work with hence why CDPR ate ditching it and going full Unreal 5 going forward. TW3 is also a massive RPG with tons of moving parts and systems. As for Nintendo well Pokemon S&V currently has a bug that corrupts saves and the fix is due the end of next month so they aren't flawless.
@Max_the_German For a game of that size, they could probably bug fix for eternity. There will never be a game that is bug free and doesn't need updates. The dev teams just has to get it to a place where the bugs aren't noticeable and game breaking. The Witcher 3 is a finished product. It is just in perpetual polish mode until the dev team decides that it is not worth the continued support.
Well, I‘m an old man and started gaming on Game Boy and SNES. The games back then weren’t flawless, but pretty solid, because they had to be due to the lack of patches. I admit that today’s games are generally more complex. But there ARE still examples for very solid games, if the developer and, more importantly, the publisher decide to spend more time for QA. And would it cost more? I don‘t think so: A poor quality requires 9 months of bugfixing after release, a great quality with a release date 9 months later doesn‘t need bugfixes at all. So is liquidity the main reason for games full of bugs? I just cannot accept this, sorry.
Good stuff. The Witcher III is one of my favourite games of all time so I've been having great fun with this.
Been using the 'graphics' mode and it's a very impressive RT implementation on PS5. Still, there are tons of relatively small, distracting issues. I'm in Toussaint atm and the sky/clouds flicker constantly 😐 at least the performance in both modes has been smoothed out a lot since launch!
The original has many bugs even to this day. I can understand that adding RT, lighting, SSR, SSAO, textures, foliage, water etc. etc. adds a lot to cover with bug fixing. Glad to see that they're focussed on fixing it up still, even though they maybe should have just delayed a little longer (although pressure with budget/publisher is probably the key factor with release date)
Bethesda never Changes. CDPR every time. Yours, Fallout Fanboy and Several time Dragonbourne.
I'm surprised they're still patching PS4 version...
Weren't they done with that version years ago?
Maybe they starting tweaking again after they added items from the show.
As soon as I saw this I downloaded the update and went straight to Novigrad and ran through the town square with no frame drops, what is this black magic!
@Max_the_German why does one of my children make their bed every morning while the other one leaves it in shambles? I'll never now.
Bottom line, cdpr makes great games that may not Appeal to everyone, enough said.
In the end I had to revert to old patch after playing on 4.01. Hopefully this one will be better but I think they made it unfixable. Modded 1.31 witcher 3 simply flies on my pc and with mods I have installed over the years even looks better all while taking much less space and not overheating the rig. Hopefully they will fix this for new players but as of now I'd still recommend older version with texture mods that have existed for years. Starting the game in 4.0.1 with Directx11 version of exe in 64x subfolder of game's bin folder file helps with the worst of the issues (directx12 exe file game started with by default after the patch made it nigh unplayable for me) but it still has many of the bugs vanilla had and still I have stuttering and dips. New quest is neat but trade off is too much.
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