The Witcher 3 Remastered's Next Update Targets PS5 Performance as Post-Launch Steam Reviews Sit at 72%

CD Projekt Red's next update for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered will focus on performance, "particularly on PS5", plus visual adjustments, Twitch Drops fixes, Ukrainian localisation in more regions on PS5 and Xbox, and console voiceover audio, the studio said on the official Witcher account on 5 October. It gave no date: the team is "aiming to address many of these in the next update".

This report is built on that post, the Steam patch notes for hotfix 5.00c and our own count of Steam user reviews written since the Remastered update went live at 10:00 UTC on 29 September, read on 5 October at 17:40 UTC.

What is CD Projekt Red fixing in the next update?

The studio says it is also investigating other reports and asks players to file them through the CD Projekt Red support site. It also confirmed work with mod.io on bringing more mods to every platform, again without a date.

What has already been fixed?

On PC, hotfix 5.00c reached Steam on 1 October. Its notes list six changes:

• saving and loading now work when the Documents folder path contains special characters;
• voiceover no longer drops in volume after browsing the pause menu tabs;
• visual adjustments in Velen to bloom, vegetation lighting, saturation and path-traced lighting;
• a HairWorks change that caused performance and visual problems for some users was reverted;
• marketing telemetry settings now save properly;
• the Classic (1.32) version of the game can be launched again.

Hotfix 5.00c is a PC patch; console players received Patch 5.00b earlier. For everything the Remastered update changed in the first place, both patches included, see our guide to what changed in The Witcher 3 Remastered.

What do Steam reviews say since the Remastered update?

The Witcher 3 still shows "Overwhelmingly Positive" on its store page, because the lifetime total is 96.4% positive across 900,459 reviews. The reviews written since 10:00 UTC on 29 September tell a different story: 10,276 in all languages, 71.9% positive. English reviews are slightly warmer, and they improved after hotfix 5.00c.

The first two days ran at 70.2% positive; from 2 to 5 October the figure is 79.9%. Among the 983 negative English reviews, 217 mention performance, frame rate or stutter, 152 lighting, colour or visuals, and 106 crashes. Smaller groups mention combat or the camera (79), path or ray tracing (68), saves (46) and mods (43). These are keyword matches, so one review can count in several groups.

Are players still arriving?

Yes. Steam's most-played chart in its latest weekly rollup puts The Witcher 3 ninth, up from 91st the week before, with a peak of 137,724 concurrent players. That beats the 123,359 peak in our earlier report; Eurogamer, citing SteamDB, places the new high on Sunday 4 October. At 17:37 UTC on 5 October, 97,748 people were playing on Steam. The base game is $24.99 on Steam, 50% off $49.99, during the Autumn Sale.

What we don't know yet

There is no release date or version number for the next update, no detail on which PS5 modes are affected, and no list of the "other reported issues" under investigation. Crashes, the third most common complaint in negative Steam reviews, are not named on the 5 October list. We will update this page when the patch notes arrive; the rest of our coverage is on The Witcher 3 hub.