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The Witcher III: Blood and Wine has a lot of technical issues (minor spoilers).

Wagram

Member
This is a thread I never thought I would make, but I do believe this should be brought to peoples attention. I want to make it clear that Blood and Wine is a fantastic expansion content wise. There’s more than enough top notch content to make this adventure worthy of Geralt’s final send off (45+ hours and counting so far), but it’s a technical nightmare. I don’t feel like it has much QA at all due to the amount of issues i’ve experienced. I want to make it clear i’ve only experienced the PC releases of The Witcher so I can’t speak for consoles.

Here are some of the things i’ve encountered so far in this time:

• I had a sidequest that was unable to be completed due to an NPC spamming normal chatter upon trying to speak to him. I managed to work around it by standing on a barrel next to him mashing the A button.
• Several graphical glitches both mid cutscene and outside of cutscenes. Flickering and overlapping of characters.
• Lighting issues within some houses. Parts of them are lit normally and once you go to the top floor it becomes so illuminated that you can tell something is wrong.
• After
The Warble of a Smitten Knight
sidequest i’ve lost the ability to use lock on entirely. I can’t use it anymore and there is no fix unless I go back to a far earlier save. Apparently it may magically fix itself towards the end of the story in a specific quest. Will it? I haven’t been there yet.
• I’ve crashed about 8+ times in above said quest and it’s been incredibly frequent post that quest.
• Before the loss of lock on in above said quest. It wouldn’t work properly on the Wraith type enemies. It would lock on and break very frequently.
• In addition, Geralt has a chance of being locked on Roach unable to move in this quest.
• Several times I have entered combat unable to use any attacks. Geralt stands there and does nothing.
• I had an issue where a Slyzard (Draconid species) flew from the air and fell half way through the ground which made him invincible and unable to be killed.
• I had another issue with a pair of Draconids where one flew off and I killed the other. However, when I tried to obtain the trophy from the one I killed I was put into a perma-load screen.
• There is a new enemy scaling feature that was released. It frequently likes to bug out and set all enemies at level 1. The only fix is to load a previous save.
• There is a quest which requires you to restore a Vineyard. You have to pay crowns and wait a certain number of days before it will restore. I traveled to Novigrad and the condition was passed during this time. I returned and even though the condition was satisfied the Vineyard looked exactly the same and I couldn’t progress. Only fix is to load a previous save.

I could continue, but the point has been made. For context purposes; I’ve played The Witcher 1 (2 times), The Witcher 2 (7 times), and The Witcher 3 (once, but 322 hours) and i’ve experienced more issues in this one expansion than all of those COMBINED (all on PC). THIS IS NOT HYPERBOLE. Like I stated before, content wise this expansion is awesome. It’s a shame that they didn’t put enough QA time in and my final memories of Geralt are that of a Bethesda glitch adventure. I would wait until they patch this a bit because right now it’s a mess and it will negatively impact your experience if you are unlucky.

Has anyone else experienced an abundance of issues like I have? Considering all the 9+ review scores it’s possible i’m a special case; that or they let issues fly.
 

cripterion

Member
It's litterally littered with bugs.

I cannot dive in Skellige anymore, If I switch from gamepad to mouse the game goes all crazy and stuttery, sometimes Roach will be unable to sprint (yes even in the wilderness) and several bugs in the city where you talk to a NPC and it will get you stuck in the world (geometry around you just disappears lol)...
 

Vlaphor

Member
The only main issue I've seen so far is that I've been unable to find a key to open a cage and complete a side quest. That's it and I've done around 30 hours in the expansion.

I had one small issue where a boss teleported outside their area and ignored me as a cast signs on it, only attacking me if I used my sword. Once I killed the boss however, I went to the area where he was supposed to be and the game progressed normally.
 

tuxfool

Banned
Has anyone else experienced an abundance of issues like I have? Considering all the 9+ review scores it’s possible i’m a special case; that or they let issues fly.

Apart from the lock-on bug and the enemy scaling bug (which only affects a few immediate enemies) I didn't have any of those issues. Put in 30 odd hours.
 

Lakitu

st5fu
I'm not experiencing many to be honest but I can't seem to lock on anymore. Not that I'm using it much anyway.
 
• I had a sidequest that was unable to be completed due to an NPC spamming normal chatter upon trying to speak to him. I managed to work around it by standing on a barrel next to him mashing the A button.
• Several graphical glitches both mid cutscene and outside of cutscenes. Flickering and overlapping of characters.
• Lighting issues within some houses. Parts of them are lit normally and once you go to the top floor it becomes so illuminated that you can tell something is wrong.
...
• Several times I have entered combat unable to use any attacks. Geralt stands there and does nothing.
... sometimes Roach will be unable to sprint (yes even in the wilderness)...

Those are not Blood and Wine issues, I think. I encountered those while playing through the game last month.
 

Elatreus

Banned
It's been like this throughout the life of the game. When they do bring out patches, they almost always break something else along the way .
I wish they'd release beta patches on steam before the official patch releases, but maybe their connection with GOG prevents this? Not sure.
Most people try and overlook these problems because of how amazing the game is.
 

epmode

Member
Had a few minor bugs in Blood and Wine so far. The worst is that my lock-on function is now broken. I don't use lock-on but it's nuts that an oversight like wasn't corrected.

Otherwise, It doesn't seem much worse than the rest of the game (which is pretty good for such a massive game).
 

Danielsan

Member
I think these are 1.2 issues. I had the Roach can't sprint bug yesterday. Also not being able to dive has been an issue since last year...
 

Plissken

Member
It's a shame you are having all these issues, but please, don't blame QA. 90% of all the bugs you see in games were caught by QA, but they don't fix the bugs, they just report them. It's up to the producers and programmers to decide what is critical, and what they can live with. I'm not sure how big the team was, but even if they had 100 people looking at the game, once it goes into the hands of millions, things will happen that they never found. (Sorry for the mini rant, I have done QA for 10+ years and it always bugs me when they are blamed for a buggy game)

I've run into my fair share of issues on PS4; I have a quest in Skellige that I can't turn in as the NPC is never there; I also often get stuck on Roach, or lose the ability to sprint and have to close the game to fix it.

Hopefully they will patch some of the worst ones (Crashes, progression stopping bugs, ect). PC is tricky to test on, especially crashes and graphical issues, as there are so many possible configurations.
 
That sucks. I haven't experienced any of these issues personally. I don't use lock on though so I'll see if I have any problems with it later as that seems to be the most common complaint.
 

Drakhyrr

Member
I expected this, which is why I'm playing HoS now, and will only play B&W after a few patches.

CDPR have never released a single game without a buggy launch, so I didn't expect those to be any different.

With that said, I rest assured that most of those bugs will be fixed. It may take some time, but they've never let us down in the end.
 

Henrar

Member
This is a thread I never thought I would make, but I do believe this should be brought to peoples attention. I want to make it clear that Blood and Wine is a fantastic expansion content wise. There’s more than enough top notch content to make this adventure worthy of Geralt’s final send off (45+ hours and counting so far), but it’s a technical nightmare. I don’t feel like it has much QA at all due to the amount of issues i’ve experienced. I want to make it clear i’ve only experienced the PC releases of The Witcher so I can’t speak for consoles.

No all issues are found by QA (because the QA team is way smaller than several million people).
Even when they are found, they sometimes cannot be reproduced and because of that fixed. And when they are reproduced not all of them are fixed, because of time, budget and criticality constraints.
 

Combichristoffersen

Combovers don't work when there is no hair
OG W3 for PS4 is the buggiest PS4 game I've played (it would crash all the time), so not surprising B&W is a bugfest too. That said, W3 is still so so so so gud.
 
The only annoying thing I have is the lock-on bug. The viper armor is pink when you put it up as well, but that doesn't bother me terribly much. Haven't had super many problems, nothing that puts it near FO4 levels for sure
 
I found a pair of graphical bugs (woman inside barrel, bow on back flickering) and two houses where I could enter through the door but clearly it wasn't intended (no proper interior). It seems less polished than base game, but for now nothing game breaking.


OP, if you had that many problems including crashes you should try a repair /verify files.
 
Yep, loads of little bugs. Can't hand in two quests, monsters getting stuck in the ground, weird clipping issues with npcs....

Its a giant RPG first release, of course there are bugs. This is just the way things work. If you want a smooth experience, wait a month or two for the first big patches to take care of the major stuff. Personally I think its worth it, but you should know what you're getting into.
 

CHC

Member
Case by case basis. I don't think patch 1.20 is really any more bug-riddled than most other patches of this kind of scale (pretty major UI overhaul). There will be more patches coming, rest assured.

The bugs are annoying though. I just got the lock-on issue during Warble and it does blow.
 

LAA

Member
Yeah I've felt the same for Witcher. Not even into taking into account functional or gameplay issues, there's TONS of graphical/visual issues, which would be easy to see and relatively easy to fix, so I think the QA department is either very small or non existent. Not that I want to "rage" on CD Projekt Red, think they have done a lot right and possibly one of the best developers, but there's no getting around the fact that the they seem weak when it comes to polishing and it's harder to forgive for an AAA studio.

While I'm really loving the dlc so far, (150 hours total for Witcher 3 now! Maybe about 12 of them are for the new dlc), can't deny the lack of polish subtracts from the experience at points.
I mean it was quite a long wait for them to fix quite a lot of bugged quests for the base game, and really it shouldn't have happened. Hoping it's something they strengthen for the future.
 

sappyday

Member
Ive only encountered the loading bug. And I'm pretty sure that the game registered a different outcome in one of side quests.
In the side mission where you participate in the tourney, I defeated the other team in combat, but the cutscene afterwards made it seem like I lost. I just rolled with it but I'm not sure if that was supposed to happen or not.
 
I had the lock on bug as well. I fixed it by fast travelling out of Toussiant (specifically to Skellige), and after that it worked fine again. Would've been nice to know before I beat the DLC though :\
 

Rellik

Member
Yep its one of the buggiest experiences I've had recently. I can't go a play session without hitting multiple bugs. Never really had any before this patch and expansion.

The fact I don't really care too much and still continue to play it just shows you how damn good this expansion is. I also don't use the lock on feature so I've escaped that issue.

My biggest issue was PS4 crashing because of the game spawning too many enemies at once in those large camps. Had to pick them off one by one on the outskirts.
 

Hoje0308

Banned
I've actually not had that many bugs, but coming back to the game after six months of not playing was a bit of a shock. It really is janky as hell and I found it hard to enjoy the gameplay for a little while. The story, scenery, exploration and music are all wonderful, but I had to look past some mediocre combat and AI to enjoy all that again.
 

CHC

Member
Oh another funny bug happened in the port area of the new city. Opened a door and there was just a semicircle of like 12 identical dock hands trying to crowd through the doorway. Took a step forward and they all scattered like pool balls after a break.
 
Not even into taking into account functional or gameplay issues, there's TONS of graphical/visual issues, which would be easy to see and relatively easy to fix, so I think the QA department is either very small or non existent.

How do you know what is or is not easy to fix?

Also, blaming the QA people is shitty. It's much more likely the developers, the people who actually do the fixing, had other things to spend time and money working on than small graphical issues.
 
That's why i'm not going to play in TW3 expansions in near future. I enjoyed the original, put 100+ hours in it, but it was a buggy mess for me in first few months after release. They fix it later, but first impression destroyed all my goodwill to CDPR. I'll never touch any game from them on release, and will buy Cyberpunk 2077 only after first 20 patches. Same with TW3 expansions, i'll wait for Enhanced Edition.
 

Venom Fox

Banned
The new update also broke a few things in the main game.

Roach doesn't seem to want to appear anymore unless I spam L3.

In cutscenes NPC'S appear then randomly scream and die (most apparent in the bloody baron quest line).

When certain enemies self explode or are exploded with grapeshot their body parts get stuck mid animation lol.

I've had all my saves dissappear randomly as well when I started it up the other day so now I've got to go back through the whole fucking game.

Letho's quest auto completed the moment I started The fall of house rear don't. Now I can't find him and I don't know if he will appear at Kaer Morhen.
 

Auctopus

Member
Yep, it's really bad. Here's a few more I've experienced a fair bit...

- The bug from the vanilla game where you're riding roach and you seem to hit an invisible wall so you can't move forward. Only fix is to get off horse, walk past wall, get back on.
- Roach refuses to cross bridges. Yes, I tested it, just bridges.
- Those new massive enemy encampments, if you kill too many bandits in one space, the bodies will cause the game to hard crash to the PS4 menu.
- The only thing women NPCs would say to me would be something like "Here's comes the champion" - that includes ALL women NPCs. Had to reload.

I could withstand a lot of jankiness in the vanilla game but Blood and Wine takes it to some new extremes that made me pretty angry, to be honest. Stuff that doesn't make sense that should've been ironed out in play testing.
 
I can't open any menu that shows my inventory (inventory itself and trading). I contacted the useless support team but I haven't sent them the crash file; they told me to uninstall all mods and verify the integrity of game cache (which I did).

I deleted the Bin file and uninstalled Reshade. which enabled me to access the inventory again, BUT the crashes persisted even without reshade and without the OC on my GPU (I had a crappy one that forced me to fight a difficult boss again on Death March). I am getting the crashes again and I don't want to remove Reshade because of that piss filter they have in Toussaint; I at least want Lumasharpen and some contrast. There are some other horrible bugs that other users are reporting but I have yet to encounter them.


Seriously, before 1.21 the game was fine and I played for like 100+ hours with overclock and mods without ANY crashes or issues (only overlay wasn't working). The moment I updated to B&W, I can barely play the game--I even considered getting back to my backlog and wait for patches.

Such a shame that an amazing DLC is accompanied with one of the shittiest major patches I've ever seen--only 1.05 came close to topping that.
 
Typical. I defend the game in my previous posts and now this happens
exIoi93.jpg


In particular it seems houses are a bit unpolished.
 

LAA

Member
Typical. I defend the game in my previous posts and now this happens
exIoi93.jpg


In particular it seems houses are a bit unpolished.

I've noticed lots of popping in and out too. Houses can pop out in the vineyard too if you stand in the right place.
Have GoG version too for the record, though doesn't justify it happening on other platforms either way.
 

MAX PAYMENT

Member
I started a new game after downloading this. My game is fucked.

I'm at the part where the tutorial forces you to make an oil to fight the first griffon. But the inventory screen cannot be closed. Reloaded, restared. Same thing.
 

LilJoka

Member
Bit of popping and a few crashes so far but nothing massively bad.
Can be excused for being such a great expansion.
 

TheYanger

Member
I mean, I don't doubt all of these things, but I have only experienced one bug playing through the DLC largely twice on Xbox one (last boss falling through the floor and attacking me).
 

Artdayne

Member
I don't use lock on so I missed that bug that a lot of people have been dealing with. The only bug that I've really had to deal with is the inability to sprint/gallop occasionally while riding my horse.
 
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