The Witcher 3 Remastered now has a PC hotfix, 5.00c, with adjustments to the bloom, vegetation lighting, saturation and path tracing lighting in Velen, two days after the upgrade launched.
CD Projekt Red released the patch on October 1 for the Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store, Battle.net and Xbox Play Anywhere versions of The Witcher 3 Remastered on PC. Its notes list seven changes, and the Velen lighting is only one of them. The rest are fixes. Saving and loading had failed when the Documents folder path contained special characters. Voiceover could fall well below other audio after players moved through the pause menu tabs, marketing telemetry settings were not being saved, and the Classic (1.32) version would not launch. On GOG, earned achievements did not appear in the unlocked list. A change that caused significant performance and visual problems for some players with HairWorks enabled has been reverted.
The Velen work comes with the least detail. The notes call it "various visual adjustments" and give no before-and-after values, so how far each setting moved, and in which direction, is not stated. Two of the four areas line up with work CD Projekt Red had already described for launch: a reworked bloom and improved lighting and shading for grass and foliage, listed among the remaster's changes. The hotfix is revisiting systems that shipped with The Witcher 3 Remastered only two days earlier.
A companion update to The Witcher 3 Remastered, 5.00b, reached PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and the Xbox Play Anywhere build on PC the same day. CD Projekt Red says it also adjusted lighting there, including some interiors that appeared too dark, and added that a PC hotfix for a reported saving problem was in preparation. Players hit by the Documents path bug or the HairWorks regression get the clearest relief, since both are plain defects. The Velen retune is a matter of taste, and with no values published, each player will judge it on their own screen.
