‘The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’ Next-Gen Update Review: Hearts Of Stone And Blood And Wine DLC
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The Witcher 3 next-gen update has been out for about a month, and all-in-all is the best iteration of the game to date. A stellar upgrade that improves on the original, the game is more beautiful and immersive than ever before, with much-needed quality-of-life improvements that have been long needed in the game. Developed by CD Projekt Red, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt update is currently available on every platform and has even outranked Metacritic scores of some of the biggest hits of 2022.
Now, unlike other reviewers, we here at CultureSlate will take a different approach, as we’re only covering the update with a playthrough of the Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine campaign. Why this is… was because almost everyone has covered the basic Witcher 3 campaign, and not many had covered how the game works regarding the DLC, which, combined, almost make up an entirely new game in terms of potential gameplay hours. So, with a New Game Plus file on Death March mode with fully upgraded, near-perfect equipment on hand, here’s what we found about the improvements in the Witcher 3: Next-gen update.
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Gameplay
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Let’s start off by saying that going from God of War Ragnarök straight to this game was a horrible idea. One is a fully optimized and Game of The Year winning video game of last year, while the other was also that… but back in 2015. Despite the updates, The Witcher 3 can’t hide some of the outdated gameplay mechanics, such as a poor platforming system (jumping in this game, especially near cliffs, is still terrible) and a clunky combat style that feels almost Souls-like but very dated. I should stress that Death March is the most challenging mode in the game and I was very much looking forward to facing bosses and battling a battalion of vampires.
I realized that none of this matters when you’re doing the alchemy swordsman critical hit build… as a very clumsy yet impossible-to-defeat Geralt spinning as a tireless blender of death will defeat the game’s hardest bosses so long as you keep spinning. Somehow, this made death march mode even less of a challenge than usual, as at this point, I was level 100, and despite bosses and enemies scaling higher… none of them could survive 3 seconds of my whirl. This is embarrassing and a flaw in The Witcher 3’s combat that’s been there since the beginning. Though the camera lock and simple dodge-strike mechanics aren’t much better either. And the sign-build style of combat seems to do no damage at this high level, making it useless, leaving you with, in most cases: blender of death.
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On the positive, the quality-of-life upgrades alone are worth the cost of the game. For example, where before, players would get furious hitting the x button to run, Geralt could now sprint just by hitting L3, which may seem like a small change until you realize: that the X button was also the pick-up button. So this tiny change makes collecting items from a sea of defeated enemies (which happens almost every minute of this game) go from a 15-second task to a 5-second one, effectively saving your time and frustration.
Speaking of which, quick sign casting is a significant improvement addition that you can activate in the game, as Geralt can now cast all 5 signs back and forth without slowing time on the menu select wheel. Though that wheel is improved, too, as you can now switch between different quest items, masks, and bombs from that menu as well.
Graphics
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The update to the game features ray tracing, which really pops with the game’s in-game lighting and shadowing. Visually, this game was created for a lot of nighttime combat and bright sunny countryside, so the shading and lighting improvements accentuate an already impressive feature of the game. Add in a few Gaunter O’Dimm reflections in the mirror, and you’ve got a visually compelling game that holds up to the aesthetics of games out right now.
But not only is The Wicher 3: Wild Hunt host better in visuals (though at 30FPS in Ray Tracing mode), but the game also has a new photography mode where you can take the most gorgeous PS photography shots of the game. And though it’s basic in that, the camera is angled and centered with few filter effects or means of artificial lighting, the natural beauty of the game’s environments and 4K pixels of detail make it so that you can capture the game’s best visual moments.
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Performance mode, meanwhile, sets the game at 60FPS for smoother combat, so I’d spent most of my gameplay here (I will stress, just like the folks at Polygon, I had stuttering issues while playing in Ray Tracing). The facial expressions and textures are eye candy, the cutscenes: are pretty, and the details on simple things such as facial movements and hair are literally breathtaking. I saw all of this for the first time at the wedding quest in ‘Dead Man’s Party,’ as that’s where I wanted to try out the party games and - ahem - romance moments with Shani. Ultimately, I ended up playing the rest of the game in this mode as well, as the slow-motion combat kills felt like I was watching the Matrix for the first time again.
Story
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Fans of the Witcher rejoice, as the plot is still easily the best thing about the series and has only gotten more popular due to the Netflix adaptation. Hands down, the best things about the game’s updated DLC are the storylines, and playing through it was a fantastic reminder of that. Heart of stone feels short yet terrifying - the tale of a cursed aristocrat and his deal with the devil to save a marriage… a solid DLC for an already great game. In my opinion, Blood and Wine is an entirely separate game in its own right, where Geralt enters the lands of knights and Fairy Tales to solve a vampire murder mystery.
Now, Blood and Wine is the happy ending Geralt, and whomever you choose is his closest loved one depending on story decisions, deserves. Rebuilding and designing your own vineyard home at Corvo Bianco feels like a fantastic place to hang your hat to retire, with the many in-game perks featured in the game for making the place your own, effectively making your DLC play through fun.
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Atop of that, there are plenty of thought-out quests, fantastic food based on authentic French cuisine, and tales based on knights errant and the lady of the lake. Though Aerondight, which is more or less… Excalibur, as I’m learning in this playthrough, will remain the same. The old one you may have gathered (and are using) from before and the new one scale for the same damage for anyone seeking to do the DLC on a second play.
To be honest. Blood and Wine, in my opinion, are well worth it alone for this game’s price, as it feels like an entirely new game. Finally, my Death March full-completion (every quest, every item, fully upgraded) playthrough of the DLC clocked in at around 60 hours for Blood and Wine alone. With about a dozen more hours if you include going through the Hearts of Stone DLC.
Pros And Cons
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We’ve gone over most of the pros in the game already, though I did miss one new feature worthy of mention: food now heals you for longer, albeit for lesser. This feels like a nice improvement, given that it always felt like a passive healing anyway.
Still, the game has a good deal of cons that carry on from the original. For example, the cluttered inventory still needs to be fixed. As is Roach getting stuck far too often on landscape obstacles such as a fence or rock, or a single dead siren body sinking your entire boat on Skellig (I’ve yet to play a CDPR game where the methods of travel actually worked properly. This includes horse riding in the Witcher and driving in Cyberpunk 2077).
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There are also physical avatar images where Geralt turns completely black when trying equipment. And, of course, you still have the occasional game break. In a game of Gwent, for instance, a horn was left in the game’s side space, leaving a lingering effect where the next round, my monster deck, continued to have the double attack in the sequential round. Like most CDPR games, I must stress you need a backup save file, as there’s always a risk of something breaking or getting stuck somewhere.
The most irritating con of the game for me: was Acid extract. It’s a well-known glitch that I hoped would have been fixed in the update, but unfortunately, it is still there. The glitch is that, for some reason, the inventory crafting items acid extract and venom extract get confused with each other in the game... Only archspore tendrils can spawn acid when this happens, whereas the game is supposed to make it so that centipede claws can be deconstructed for this highly coveted resource. This is terrible as if you’re going to spend a hundred thousand+ in coins for the game’s best armors… you actually need a lot of acid extracts to craft all of the Grandmaster armor sets. The only alternative? Buying some from the grandmaster armorer and then waiting 3 days and repeating… for hours. This is infuriating. Six years they’ve had to fix this glitch, and this update: still proves that it’s broken.
Finally, transferring your saved file is a bit of a nightmare. Whereas the PS5 has always had numerous issues transferring saves, this one absolutely sucks because you have to sign up for a GOG account to do so. Worse, you can’t bring over your trophies like for any other file transfer, so for trophy hunters such as myself, you’ll have to platinum the game all over again if you want it to count for the PS5 version. Though I will admit, getting the Roach card in Gwent does make the GOG account worth it.
The Take
The Witcher 3 is already known as one of the best games of all time. This is easily a major quality-of-life improvement and is the definitive edition you must buy if you’re trying the game for the first time: especially regarding the DLC. That said, because it’s a ‘modernized update,’ I’m holding it to today’s standards, which, I think, demarks the game a peg, as a chunk of the inherent problems they could have spent time fixing: are still, and are likely, forever, going to be there. Still, you buy this game for the story, visuals, and design - not necessarily, the mechanics and flaws that have carried on now for years. As that’ll never get fixed, it seems.
Rating: 8.5/10
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Source: Polygon