CD Projekt is back with yet another big fix for The Witcher 3's grass
March 13, 2023, was a very good day for PC Gamer associate editor Ted Litchfield. Because on that day, CD Projekt finally fixed the grass shadows in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, meaning he could finally enjoy the game the way it was meant to be. At the time, he no doubt believed that peak videogame grass quality had been achieved—and yet somehow, CD Projekt has made it even better.
The new-and-even-more-improved grass comes as part of a new patch for The Witcher 3 that takes the game to version 4.04. It's a bit unusual for big patches to be rolling out for eight-year-old games, yes, but the case of The Witcher 3 is somewhat unique thanks to the major next-gen update that dropped at the end of 2022. It brought a whole new level of visual fidelity to the game, along with new content and various changes and adjustments, but also—no real surprise here—introduced some all-new technical issues that needed to be stomped out.
Where the previous patch aimed to make improvements to the game's performance and stability, this one is more focused on granular bug fixes, adjustments, and quality-of-life changes. Some characters' hair could look «too bright» when ray tracing is enabled, for instance, and GOG achievements were apparently unlocking for the wrong version of the game—both of those issues have been fixed. Fog that looked two-dimensional in some locales should now look properly three-dee, a problem that could cause the mountains around Kaer Morhen to disappear if you adjusted the camera angle while Geralt was underwater has been fixed, and of course the big one: «Grass collision now works properly.»
The patch is actually bigger news for anyone playing Witcher 3 on the Nintendo Switch: It adds a number of new online features
Read more on pcgamer.com
