News & Commentary

The Witcher 3 Remastered's Best Feature Is the Option to Refuse It

CD Projekt Red pushed a huge free update onto a game people already own, and kept the old version one menu away. Then it had to fix that menu.

On September 29, CD Projekt Red shipped The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered as a free update for everyone who owns the game. It pushed Steam to an all-time peak of about 121,000 concurrent players, more than eleven years after the original launch, and it also drew a wave of negative reviews over performance and AMD rendering bugs. On PC, players can roll back through Steam or GOG to the Classic (1.32) or Next-Gen (4.04) version. Two days after launch, hotfix 5.00c's first listed fix was that the Classic version wouldn't launch at all (PC Guide).

If you ship anything people pay for and then change - a game, an app, a plugin - this is the clearest example this year of doing the update right, and of the one part that's easy to forget.

The remaster is free, it's huge, and the player count says people wanted it. AMD shipped a driver fix within hours. Most of the coverage stopped at "a masterpiece got better."

The better story is the escape hatch. Two days after Minecraft Dungeons II held paying players at a sign-in screen, CDPR changed a game millions of people already own - and left the version they bought a menu away.

Then the hatch was broken. And CDPR put fixing it at the top of the hotfix list, which tells you it knows what that button is worth.

When you change something people already own, let them keep the version they bought - and test the way back as hard as the way forward.