I’m making the executive decision that you can handle two pieces of interesting news at once. Hold my hand and we’ll get through this.
Via a tweet from community manager Marcin Momot, CD Projekt RED have announced that patch 1.07 for Witcher 3 will be released today. It include a laundry list of changes, the most significant of which is a new movement system option for Geralt.
Meanwhile on Steam Warner Bros. and Rocksteady have confirmed that the next Arkham Knight PC patch won’t be out until some time in August. This comes admist rumours that current estimates put the re-release of the PC version still months away.
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First, Witcher. You can read the full patch notes on the official site, but it’s fairly slow so here’s the highlights:
- Introduces an alternative movement style for Geralt. To enable, go to the Gameplay\Movement Response submenu.
- Adds a stash for player convenience. Players can now store loot in their stash, access to which is available in different parts of the world. Stash locations are marked on the map.
- All crafting components and alchemy ingredients now weigh nothing.
- Introduces a number of improvements in the game streaming system. Players should experience fewer blurred textures, NPC spawn times should be markedly reduced, and there should be an overall improvement in the speed with which game assets are loaded. Streaming system improvements should be most noticeable on consoles and systems with non-SSD drives.
This, along with tonnes of general bug fixes, stability improvements and optimisation, means the patch weighs in at just over 7 gigs. The new movement system is very interesting to me as, though I only played for a short time, I found Geralt very unwieldy to control. Initially I put this down to the low FPS my meagre system was managing to achieve, but talks with some friends revealed others had similar problems. Combo’d with the optimisation changes, this may make me take a second look at the game before upgrading my PC, where initially I was going to wait. Making inventory systems easier to manage is, as with any RPG, probably the best possible change to make.
Meanwhile, things are less rosy in the land of Batman. Warner’s statement says the patch will “address many of the issues” laid out in their initial assesment of what needed to be done. However, even if they get it to run on the majority of machines and push it into 60 FPS, it’s now been a long time coming for the patch. Many have already refunded, the initial hype for the game has died down and desperate idiots like myself have gone to a friend’s house for three days to play it on their PS4. The game itself is already a roaring success, but at this point it’s possible there is no way to ‘save’ the PC version. I expect there will be further reparations in the form of free DLC.