The Witcher 3 Next-Gen Update includes some tweaks, and cracks others

The good news is that The Witcher 3which is already a good-looking game, is about to get even more beautiful when you are The next generation update has been released. The bad news is that for anyone playing the game on PC, a lot of your favorite mods from the past seven years aren’t going to make it work anymore.

Like CDPR Explanation in a blog post, “Updating the game means we’re changing different files, so mods that modify those exact files stop working.” And when it comes to making these updates, CDPR has prioritized changes that make the core game better, while keeping the old stuff intact for tweaks.

Acknowledging that it’s been six years since the game’s last major update to the PC version of the game, though, CDPR says it’s “a long time to get used to one’s favorite mods,” and so in an effort to make “this transition to be as smooth as possible,” it compiled a list With some community favorite mods, I tested them and shared which ones work with the next-gen update and which ones don’t.

Some of them work! Unfortunately Many of them, especially scripting-based ones, don’t. As CDPR says, “Because we’re changing scripts in the update because a new task has been added, most of the script-based modifications will be gone.” For mod creators interested in this, a team of “mod experts” from CDPR will be on hand to “provide assistance and advice to mods in the post-release forums when possible.”

Helping to mitigate this somewhat, however, is an accompanying announcement that the next-gen update will ship with some fan-made tweaks stashed in it at launch:

In addition, we include several popular mods in the update (they will be available depending on the platform). We have obtained permissions from the makers, compensated them, and they will be included in the updated game credits. Mods and asset optimizations were reworked as needed, and the game was modified to work with them. There was even a case when a developer got so caught up in modding when including a mod that they simply ended up reworking that particular aspect of the game. So, in a way, the game comes with some mods already built in.

That’s neat! Especially the payment part.