What’s important to you?
Before firing up The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for its global launch tomorrow, you’ll be prompted to download a day one update. This patch is supposed to fix some issues, and generally make everything better. That’s not quite the case, however.
Early reports detailing the patched version 1.01 say that this update helps some aspects of the game while hurting others. In this video. Digital Foundry looks at the patch in detail. It seems as if the update significantly cuts down on the number of gameplay bugs and geometry pop-ins. By all accounts, the game components are more polished with this patch applied.
Unfortunately, that comes at the expense of The Witcher 3‘s cutscenes. It’s said that there’s significant stuttering and frame rate drop while playing encoded video files, to a degree that’s impossible to ignore. Eurogamer’s reported that these often bottom out around 22fps — a far cry from the solid 30 the game shoots for. The unpatched version is consistently more stable in this regard.
It’s sort of a toss-up as to whether you should avoid this patch or not. It really depends on what’s important to you. If you’d rather have a better gameplay experience, it’s probably worth downloading. But, if you want to see The Witcher‘s cutscenes in all their cinematic glory, maybe you should stay far away from this update.
Should you install The Witcher 3’s day one patch? [Eurogamer]
