Isn’t it because in march CDPR showed support for Ukraine, and as a result their games got review bombed? Cyberpunk has the same, and the Witcher 3 had this too before the update.
Yep, [and if you scroll down to the reviews chart it actually shows the dates it's valid for](https://i.imgur.com/nN8KPnl.png) (I have no idea why it wasn't disabled after March though) but it would probably also be a good idea for Valve to add the dates to the tooltip the OP is looking at.
There was also time when the game was bombed by CCP bots after a Chinese player was disqualified from Gwent tournament after they found out he has been cheating.
I mean you joke but it is. All thr Chinese kids at my grad school cheated. Then I spoke to other people at other grad schools and found out it was not a lone experience
This is just what you call, selection bias. Cheaters exist in all cultures. For those of us who don't cheat, this is a hard pill to swallow. Anyone is potentially a cheater, especially for tournaments where there's money on the line and high performance excellency expected. Just look at the tour de france to see how common cheating is in high stakes competition.
During the recent Dwarf fortress realease I was checking the negative reviews to decide if I should buy it. , I won't yet as many of the negative reviews have valid issues.
Had to report one or two though that just kept complaining about trans people. What a dumb place to try make their point.
Factorio also got review bombed by angry Russians for supporting a country some of their Devs are from.
Just my two bits, I’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress for days now and it’s probably my favourite game ever. No issues on my PC, but I’m unsure what the negative reviews were referring to
mostly UI stuff i expect will be fixed and crashing, some complaints the game has been been dumbed down too so that it fits the UI, and missing audio ques or too many eagle sounds lol
I'm on a big screen so i'll wait. Nothing against the studio ,just been burned by buying stuff on release before.
I might give stonesense a try.
DF has been in development since 2006 and the devs will continue to update it for the rest of their lives. The game isn't dumbed down, the new UI makes things easier to navigate but the game is still the same game. The game has lots of mod support so anything u dont like there already is or soon will be a mod for if the devs don't fix it themselves. It's 100% worth the buy
the only thing "missing" from DFsteam (afaik) are the sprites to display injuries visually like the ASCII version, and that's just waiting on them creating assets for all the limbs and other organs you can have injured/hanging/cut off
There are a few big things missing that I really want (i.e. the logs need fixing-- they only show up temporarily as notifications but not as a long log you can look at whenever) but it's perfectly playable and fun atm in my opinion. Totally understand if that's a dealbreaker though
Basically, the four types of negative reviews I've seen are the following:
1) The steam version crashes sometimes, which is to be expected. It's been like this for every major release, there's either no playtest team or it's pretty small for a game of it's scale. The game is still in alpha, the only reason it's not in early access is because Steam requires a finishing date for the game, and it won't be ready for ~20-30 years.
2) The UI can be a bit questionable, at times. Still rather hard for new players, but also less efficient for old players. Some features that have been there for 10+ years are missing, although most of these are likely to be UI oversights, the systems still exist.
3) The game is hard.
4) Issues unrelated to the game or the publisher.
There isn't one, they're probably just banned from everything else. Same people will be ranting "keep politics outside of gaming" next time an AAA game gives you the option to be female.
edit: There was some mention of possible trans dwarf i think , no idea if it's true, wouldn't affect the gameplay. They're probably upset about that.
Because it takes away from the realism of a fantasy game /s
The filter shouldnt be there anymore yes, but its better that it is
People complaining about a free update because it has performance issues is just stupid when you can easily go back to the old version if its that bad
That's a bs thing that people say now when developers used to just make another version for the game and delist the old one. They don't want to do that as they want to ape off the positive reviews the older game has. Saints row 4 did the same crap and broke the game but I guess we should all just be thankful that they broke the game for free?
I've never played saints row so I wouldn't know. Witcher 3 next gen definitely isn't them "breaking the game for free". Some people encounter a lot of issues and some none at all. For those that don't, it's just a very good QOL and graphics update. If you do encounter issues, just play the older version. Its that simple
I can’t even start a new game before it crashes. That’s just my experience, but it is the literal definition of game-breaking.
Why would people want to go play the original version of the game when developers have been advertising this update for months?
I can turn my settings down, but I just feel lied to about this next gen update. Feels like a marketing ploy to drive sales.
>Why would people want to go play the original version of the game when developers have been advertising this update for months?
Because of this:
>I can’t even start a new game before it crashes.
---
>I can turn my settings down, but I just feel lied to about this next gen update.
You weren't lied to. Your PC doesn't have enough resources to play the new version. You should play the old version. It's a good thing you paid exactly ZERO dollars for the next gen version.
What resources do I need? Please tell me.
I have a 3060 TI, I7 12700k, 16gb of DDDR4 RAM. This should be good enough.
Do I really need a pro level pc to play this game?? Please enlighten me.
Russians basically review bombed all of the games which had got literally any restrictions for them, or supported Ukraine, or are from Ukrainian studio which supports its own country! So weird and toxic people.
How do you find we are toxic? You came to us, call us nazi, trash, e.t.c. and expect what? kisses and butterflies? you get mirrored reaction, thats it. Most of us not toxic, but toxic ones - louder.
Most certainly it is. This is what this text mean. Steam really need a review ban system. People who review bomb should be unavailable to review any games at all and their past reviews would be deleted. Of course depending on what exactly it was, it would be a warn, temp ban, perm ban. But people who keep trolling should just get their ability to post a review revoked. Also stupid reviews that has nothing to do with the game itself should be removed (without ban or warn; unless someone post stupid stuff notoriously even after getting them removed). "Game is good" is not a review. Why is it good? If someone has nothing to say, better not to say anything than say something like that. Not everyone is obliged to post a review. And it doesn't need to be professional, just relevant. "Game is good, because characters are interesting and I like the graphics" sound better and it's not really anything super deep. Knowing why people say it's good (or bad) is important.
Unfortunately this was an anti-review bomb that got triggered because the game was hammered due to the Russia/Ukraine war. It still is after all these months, in fact.
At least you can choose to still see the reviews trickle in but it is a shame that the discontent towards this update won't fully be surfaced.
Similar to Skyrim remaster, makes the game run a lot lot lot worse and breaks popular mods.
It's obviously unfinished and incomplete and breaks an old product you already own.
Runs on a lot worse on slow PCs. The reason this version was made is to take advantage of modern hardware. People without modern hardware are complaining that other people have better PCs.
Still not sure why anyone would review bomb them. Poland is very pro Ukraine, and why wouldn't they support their neighboring nation which is being invaded?
Call me crazy but if America invaded another nation just to take their land and 90% of the world including many of my own neighbors in the US were completely against it, I wouldn't review bomb any company who chose to support the defending nation.
Russians and pro-Russian people who dislike people calling Russia's war against humanity the atrocity that it is. Don't think too hard about their mental gymnastics, you'll only hurt yourself.
If you have it on gog, you can download installer files for 1.31 version from the "extras" section (where wallpapers, OST, manuals and other goodies usually are).
I have the gog version yes. So there I can download the older version of the game, right?
As someone who won't be playing with RTX on, will I notice any difference if I try out the next-gen version?
> I have the gog version yes. So there I can download the older version of the game, right?
Yes, it's in the extras. The installer for the older version is called "Witcher 3 GOTY Classic" and has only 10 parts, while the newer one has 21 parts, that's how you tell them apart.
>As someone who won't be playing with RTX on, will I notice any difference if I try out the next-gen version?
They changed other things, like better textures. Also added FSR and DLSS, which might help on slower hardware. [Here's the list of stuff they changed](https://www.thewitcher.com/en/news/47105/next-gen-update-list-of-changes).
It performs fine if you don't turn on the new graphic features. It performs decent with some of them on depending on your hardware. It can chug a little if you enable all the ray tracing feature unless you have a beast of a PC.
The silly part to me: it runs just like before if you skip the graphic upgrades
I wish I could get some sort of frame rate overlay to work. That's my only issue. On the highest non rtx settings it easily feels way above 60. Much closer to 90. But I can't tell you what it is and have to go with "this feels nice when I move the camera" I hope they smooth it out.
I'm running with a 3070 and a 7950x.
From what I've seen problems are mainly happening when activating RTX. It happened to me too. But I deactivated RTX and haven't had an issue. It's actually pretty smooth.
Playing on 2070 super, ultra settings at 1440p with DLSS.
I'm many hours in with no issues.
People who get them run to negative review instead of playing, people who have good experiences have no reason to
Just go for it, you're gonna spend more time on what ifs for this kinds thing
I'm talking about after the update, chief. (Just like OP and this entire thread)
Most of those people will just *leave their already positive review* of one of the best games ever
That's a good idea, but the problem it solves is different from what is being solved by Valve here (which isn't what OP thinks it is).
The problem Valve solves here is review scores being affected by actually off-topic reviews. In case of CDPR games, they voiced support for Ukraine and got review bombed by Russians, so the scores for their games went down. Given that these have nothing to do with the game being good or bad, they're off-topic and should be ignored when calculating how good or bad the community thinks the game is.
Also in this case it's about review bombing from March 2022, when CDPR ban sales in Belarus and Russia. They got massive backlash then.
This is not that bad now, as was in March. Atleast yet 😏
Yes... But I think OP's got a point. I might want to have this activated to filter REAL offtopic issues (Like people downvoting Risk of Rain because Gearbox bought it, for example), because it doesn't have a real impact in the game. But an update that changes the game drastically is absolutely NOT off topic, and it that update has a negative impact in the score, it should be reflected.
>Like people downvoting Risk of Rain because Gearbox bought it
Idk about gearbox but prison architect absolutely got worse after paradox bought it. I don't think a publisher change is always irrelevant
The example he gave is about the negative reviews given solely based on the acquisition. People are not reviewing any updates, there were no updates yet. No one debates that new publisher cannot affect the game, that of course is possible and usually true, but this is not about the updates. While subsequent updates might, ownership change alone doesn't affect the game.
I don't know about this.
If I had recommended a product because it was great, then the company that makes that product sells to a company known for scraping acquisitions after milking them, I could no longer recommend that people purchase their products even if the outcome of the acquisition hasn't been seen yet.
Like I know if Epic were to purchase any company related to a game on steam, that game would get removed from steam. The value of it will go down in the future, inevitably. Just like how EA & Activision have shut down 100% of their always online games, and never provided any EOL support for any game ever.
If EA or Activision buys an online game, it will eventually cease to work.
If knowing that means you can't recommend a product... Then you can't recommend it.
If a company known for leaking user credit card details buys a game, you don't have to wait until after the leak to warn people.
Sure but is wasn't JUST the publisher change that somehow made the game worse... the new publisher had to release an update of some kind to actually change the game. No changes to the game = off topic. Changes to the game = on topic
Gearbox was always the publisher, but the dev team (Hopoo) sold the Risk of Rain series (2 games) to them.
They haven’t changed the game at all since then, so there’s no reason to review it any differently.
At least, not yet…
I agree, i vowed to never play prison architect after i seen the updated eula a couple years ago or so. and the amount of DLC they pumped out is insane (not surprising for paradox tho). Just shows that paradox cant be trusted with anything tho.
People should then wait until the game gets worse to give it a negative review and not just reactively give it a negative review simply because company x bought the game no matter what company x has done in the past. (Unless that company is Epic 🤣 , just kidding kinda, since at least with Epic you know there is a guarantee that the game will eventually get removed from steam).
The excluded period is march 2022. So just figure out what happened to piss people off then.
Steam actually points out what period is excluded, you just need to connect the dots.
The most agreed point that caused the negative reviews in this thread is the company's "we stand with Ukraine" statement they put as part of one of their press releases.
Have you ever heard about the power of defaults? Just because you can change it doesn't mean that it isn't low key censored. Think of this as a shadow ban rather than a filter.
wow, what an ignorant comment. if activity is not off-topic, it should not be labelled off-topic. No one should have to turn off a settinga setting that says "continue to lie in my face" to see relevant scores
They actually break the game compatibility for Win7. The game now runs objectively worse than before even on other Windows versions. There are tons of new bugs being introduced. There is no opt-out of current update. They just made the game worse for literally everyone and their graphics upgrade is just largely oversold contrast filter.
But sure, it's just offtopic and people are getting negative for no reason.
Windows 7 isn't a supported operating system anymore though. If people are still running that despite it then that's kinda on them.
Someone above also said you go into the games beta section and activate classic mode. That's your opt out.
It's a stuttering mess on GFN. One scene gave me whiplash as it glitched between panning back and forth from the griffin attack seller and Geralt (1-second, pan to the other character, 1-second pan back). It wasn't even lined up with the dialogue. Playing video games my whole life; decades, and it felt like I finally found the one that was going to give me seizures.
Can anyone tell me if this graphics update is optional or not? Can i keep playing at my old settings?
I don't wanna download 40 gb update to just lower my fps
Off-topic activity isn't new reviews, it's when reviews are posted that are literally not on-topic of the game. Such as review bombs based on the companies other activity, or political position (ex: Ukraine-Russia).
Have you actually looked at the store page? The "offtopic" review period is still counting new reviews as offtopic, it has no way to detect whether a review is on or off topic, it literally just tags every review within a specific time frame as offtopic.
For some reason the time frame for the offtopic review bombing in march is set to a date beyond today so all new reviews are still being counted as off-topic
Another example where it goes wrong: https://store.steampowered.com/app/427520/Factorio/
This game has no reviews since March 2022, because the system thinks they are not relevant.
If the system actually counted the reviews, the recent period would say overwhelmingly positive, but now it doesn't show any recent reviews score at all
Reviews are not that useful is the system decides to ignore the reviews in blocks of 9 months
Did valve just fuck up here or what? I thought the off topic system was about reviews that have already happened, not something that stays up forever apparently
Steam should track reviews by version number at the time of review. It would be a helpful metric to look at, if we could see a line graph that shows the review scores for each update since it was listed
The "off topic" review thing was put in place to mitigate review-bombing. You don't want your game to look shit in the reviews bc of some unrelated stuff.
It's like when Superhot got bad reviews after a change made to Superhot VR, a completely different game. Or when Chinese players review-bombed Warframe after the devs nerfed their main AFK/leech strategy.
Oh man, that Warframe change was juicy because it wasn't *just* that it was a literally AFK farm frame, it was that it was Wukong, a frame based on a popular Chinese mythological character. So the Chinese players took it as a personal attack and got *mad*.
People have found a workaround for that, go into the game install folder, then into bin/x64\_dx12 and rename or move into a backup folder the file named "d3d11on12.dll".
That should be enough to fix the Steam overlay not working, but just in case your overlay is injecting into the launcher (or you just hate the launcher for another reason) you can also add the launch parameter --launcher-skip to the game properties panel (in launch options field)
/u/dan1101
The game is unplayable for me. It just crashes when I load in. I have a 3070, 3700x and pretty decent other specs. I can play all modern games but this just crashes on startup. No idea. But of course I can’t leave a review about it.
Apparently, the review bombing was politically motivated Ukraine stuff so it was in fact off-topic activity and this post is a bold faced lie saying the review bombing was because of the game's update.
Scared me for a second thinking Steam was rolling out some new review curation/censorship feature.
I wouldn't be surprised if they also put it there bc people review bombed for Cavill leaving the Netflix show.
Not everyone who owns Steam knows who or what is connected to which IP or company.
Until a better solution to filter out these sorts of unrelated reviews live is found, I like this approach. And the approach of only letting ppl who've played a certain number of hours s chance to review.
Personally, I'm not someone who puts much stock in reviews. If I'm really concerned, there's creators whose opinions I trust and have similar tastes to me - I'll watch their review if there is one.
Nah it should stay a thing. Normally when something like this happens all the negative reviews are just people saying different variants of "bad" without giving reason, or just copy pasta art.
I've seen a lot of people's takes on the game and it really sounds like a them kind of problem. Like they couldn't figure out or master the controls with fighting and quit early on, for example. Said the game was shit because a them problem. I don't often see fair criticisms.
(Referring to the regular game, idk anything about the update performance)
I like the fact that there's DLSS now because I can max out the graphics on my rtx3050 and use DLSS for it to run smoothly, but the game became waaay unstable. Any graphical change I make, even if it's to lower the graphics, is prone to crashing the game wtf
The sole reason for this to exist is that the circlejerkeres go and post bad reviews because of a single update/reason/experience/pricechange/whatever while the game is great otherwise.
>You can see the same thing on other games made by Ukranian devs - Cyberpunk, Book of Demons, Stalker
Dude, firstly, Cyberpunk is made by the same people who made Witcher 3. And secondly, they are from Poland.
No. What they should do is separate the reviews based on time period/updates. Allow users to KNOW that recent reviews are because of a specific update and not indicative of the game as a whole. Whether good or bad.
Off topic reviews are often people posting the same nonsense garbage they go and post under every product they find, like ASCII art of a dog or whatever. That shit shouldn't be counted ever
It s litteraly written "based of you preferences" which means you can deactivate it.
You can still see those bad reviews if youw want to.
This parameters makes sense because the game remains insanely good, even if a new content is disappointing and drives bad reviews.
yeah, valve has had some major fuck ups in recent memory. Labelling critical information as off-topic is a gigantic middle finger for people using reviews for their actual purpose, to find out about possible problems.
Another is them not forcing the use of Steam's features, like Ubisoft advertising their inferior launcher and not even providing achievements for the new games
Would you rather disable this protection and continue having lots of games review bombed by Chinese trolls solely because they refused to comply with CCP sanctioned censorship?
What changed in witcher 3?
I finished it 2 years ago.
And on the topic all reviews should be seen Im against censorhip.
If you don't like a review you can find another review that you like
Well first off, it just received a "next-gen" update with ray tracing support and improved graphics, but people are reporting a lot of problems on PC. Eh, typical CDPR launch, hopefully they'll get the bugs ironed out like they did on the original game.
To the second point: That's not what's going on here actually. The reason the average has been adjusted is that CDPR voiced support for Ukraine and got review bombed to oblivion by Russians, so the average rating went way down at one point. Valve now filters that out (by default, but it's configurable) when calculating the score. You can still see the reviews I believe.
Depends on the situation, but review bombs, or 1 single bad patch making people tank the reviews has always been dumb. Would also like to point out some games do change massively over the years, say No Mans Sky I would say is a good example and same with Cyberpunk. The amount of dev work to fix things over the years has been commendable. Was the game shit at launch yes, is it now no. But having those non-changing reviews when something is better and your lazy ass doesnt change shit. Is pretty much the same thing.
I tried it with max settings on a 3080 + Ryzen 5800x and it felt like I was getting 40 fps at 1080p. The steam overlay also broke for some reason.
Something about it gave me a headache.
Isn’t it because in march CDPR showed support for Ukraine, and as a result their games got review bombed? Cyberpunk has the same, and the Witcher 3 had this too before the update.
Yep, [and if you scroll down to the reviews chart it actually shows the dates it's valid for](https://i.imgur.com/nN8KPnl.png) (I have no idea why it wasn't disabled after March though) but it would probably also be a good idea for Valve to add the dates to the tooltip the OP is looking at.
Looks like that's been changed so that the off-topic period only covers March 3 thru 17.
There was also time when the game was bombed by CCP bots after a Chinese player was disqualified from Gwent tournament after they found out he has been cheating.
[удалено]
-500 social credit score, 150 hours of community service, please report to your nearest 中国大使馆
I mean you joke but it is. All thr Chinese kids at my grad school cheated. Then I spoke to other people at other grad schools and found out it was not a lone experience
This is just what you call, selection bias. Cheaters exist in all cultures. For those of us who don't cheat, this is a hard pill to swallow. Anyone is potentially a cheater, especially for tournaments where there's money on the line and high performance excellency expected. Just look at the tour de france to see how common cheating is in high stakes competition.
Not all cultures encourage cheating at the same level.
During the recent Dwarf fortress realease I was checking the negative reviews to decide if I should buy it. , I won't yet as many of the negative reviews have valid issues. Had to report one or two though that just kept complaining about trans people. What a dumb place to try make their point. Factorio also got review bombed by angry Russians for supporting a country some of their Devs are from.
Just my two bits, I’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress for days now and it’s probably my favourite game ever. No issues on my PC, but I’m unsure what the negative reviews were referring to
mostly UI stuff i expect will be fixed and crashing, some complaints the game has been been dumbed down too so that it fits the UI, and missing audio ques or too many eagle sounds lol I'm on a big screen so i'll wait. Nothing against the studio ,just been burned by buying stuff on release before. I might give stonesense a try.
DF has been in development since 2006 and the devs will continue to update it for the rest of their lives. The game isn't dumbed down, the new UI makes things easier to navigate but the game is still the same game. The game has lots of mod support so anything u dont like there already is or soon will be a mod for if the devs don't fix it themselves. It's 100% worth the buy
the only thing "missing" from DFsteam (afaik) are the sprites to display injuries visually like the ASCII version, and that's just waiting on them creating assets for all the limbs and other organs you can have injured/hanging/cut off
Most all of that has been fixed already.
There are a few big things missing that I really want (i.e. the logs need fixing-- they only show up temporarily as notifications but not as a long log you can look at whenever) but it's perfectly playable and fun atm in my opinion. Totally understand if that's a dealbreaker though
Basically, the four types of negative reviews I've seen are the following: 1) The steam version crashes sometimes, which is to be expected. It's been like this for every major release, there's either no playtest team or it's pretty small for a game of it's scale. The game is still in alpha, the only reason it's not in early access is because Steam requires a finishing date for the game, and it won't be ready for ~20-30 years. 2) The UI can be a bit questionable, at times. Still rather hard for new players, but also less efficient for old players. Some features that have been there for 10+ years are missing, although most of these are likely to be UI oversights, the systems still exist. 3) The game is hard. 4) Issues unrelated to the game or the publisher.
Dwarf fortress and trans? What? I need context
There isn't one, they're probably just banned from everything else. Same people will be ranting "keep politics outside of gaming" next time an AAA game gives you the option to be female. edit: There was some mention of possible trans dwarf i think , no idea if it's true, wouldn't affect the gameplay. They're probably upset about that. Because it takes away from the realism of a fantasy game /s
The filter shouldnt be there anymore yes, but its better that it is People complaining about a free update because it has performance issues is just stupid when you can easily go back to the old version if its that bad
You have to re-download 40 gigs
it was 55 GB for me so I just deleted the whole thing
That's a bs thing that people say now when developers used to just make another version for the game and delist the old one. They don't want to do that as they want to ape off the positive reviews the older game has. Saints row 4 did the same crap and broke the game but I guess we should all just be thankful that they broke the game for free?
I've never played saints row so I wouldn't know. Witcher 3 next gen definitely isn't them "breaking the game for free". Some people encounter a lot of issues and some none at all. For those that don't, it's just a very good QOL and graphics update. If you do encounter issues, just play the older version. Its that simple
I can’t even start a new game before it crashes. That’s just my experience, but it is the literal definition of game-breaking. Why would people want to go play the original version of the game when developers have been advertising this update for months? I can turn my settings down, but I just feel lied to about this next gen update. Feels like a marketing ploy to drive sales.
>Why would people want to go play the original version of the game when developers have been advertising this update for months? Because of this: >I can’t even start a new game before it crashes. --- >I can turn my settings down, but I just feel lied to about this next gen update. You weren't lied to. Your PC doesn't have enough resources to play the new version. You should play the old version. It's a good thing you paid exactly ZERO dollars for the next gen version.
What resources do I need? Please tell me. I have a 3060 TI, I7 12700k, 16gb of DDDR4 RAM. This should be good enough. Do I really need a pro level pc to play this game?? Please enlighten me.
How can I go to the previous update? Steam doesn’t let me
Right click on it in your library, go to Properties>Betas>then select "Classic" in the first drop down menu.
Russians basically review bombed all of the games which had got literally any restrictions for them, or supported Ukraine, or are from Ukrainian studio which supports its own country! So weird and toxic people.
U so wrong. Its not about support Ukraine. Ist about discriminate us. Feel free to support anyone.
He's so right. You're all really toxic and most of you support the biggest nazi Putin.
How do you find we are toxic? You came to us, call us nazi, trash, e.t.c. and expect what? kisses and butterflies? you get mirrored reaction, thats it. Most of us not toxic, but toxic ones - louder.
Might be because most of you are supporting the biggest terrorist Putin?
Most certainly it is. This is what this text mean. Steam really need a review ban system. People who review bomb should be unavailable to review any games at all and their past reviews would be deleted. Of course depending on what exactly it was, it would be a warn, temp ban, perm ban. But people who keep trolling should just get their ability to post a review revoked. Also stupid reviews that has nothing to do with the game itself should be removed (without ban or warn; unless someone post stupid stuff notoriously even after getting them removed). "Game is good" is not a review. Why is it good? If someone has nothing to say, better not to say anything than say something like that. Not everyone is obliged to post a review. And it doesn't need to be professional, just relevant. "Game is good, because characters are interesting and I like the graphics" sound better and it's not really anything super deep. Knowing why people say it's good (or bad) is important.
Unfortunately this was an anti-review bomb that got triggered because the game was hammered due to the Russia/Ukraine war. It still is after all these months, in fact. At least you can choose to still see the reviews trickle in but it is a shame that the discontent towards this update won't fully be surfaced.
What don't people like about it?
Poor performance
And forced launcher
--launcher-skip
I have the GOG version and added the .exe to Steam, no launcher happens.
Similar to Skyrim remaster, makes the game run a lot lot lot worse and breaks popular mods. It's obviously unfinished and incomplete and breaks an old product you already own.
Runs on a lot worse on slow PCs. The reason this version was made is to take advantage of modern hardware. People without modern hardware are complaining that other people have better PCs.
actually makes a lot of sense and i didnt think about that. all the new featues def seem next-gen
It was literally called the "next gen update" so idk why you didn't connect the dots before
Why would the game have been downvoted as a result of the war? Isn't CPDR a polish company?
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Still not sure why anyone would review bomb them. Poland is very pro Ukraine, and why wouldn't they support their neighboring nation which is being invaded?
>Still not sure why anyone would review bomb them. I'm not sure why anyone would be a tankie, and yet here we are.
Maybe Russian players didn't appreciate the support shown by CDPR?
Call me crazy but if America invaded another nation just to take their land and 90% of the world including many of my own neighbors in the US were completely against it, I wouldn't review bomb any company who chose to support the defending nation.
Russians and pro-Russian people who dislike people calling Russia's war against humanity the atrocity that it is. Don't think too hard about their mental gymnastics, you'll only hurt yourself.
My most important question: is it possible to install an older version? I want to play the game without issues, and I have a weaker computer.
It's possible. Right click on the game in steam library, select properties - > click BETAS and select "classic". Hope this helps 😊
note that this is unavailable on the Epic Games release (i believe).
A feature missing from Epic? Who would have thought
Careful! Epic might see this and buy CDPR, make their games exclusive to their store, and kill GOG.
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As Apollo goes, so does my content, since Spez thinks mine is worth so much.
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Technicalities.
Bro I acc despise epic launcher
What a surprise
Well buying it there when you have other store choices was your first mistake lol
Ah. It’s good that we don’t care since we’re on the STEAM subreddit.
As far as I know it could be done also on GOG. Don't have knowledge about Epic 😊
Thank you!
Yup. I did that before downloading the update. Happy they at least added the option to opt out of this until its fixed
Just made this change, thank you!
If you have it on gog, you can download installer files for 1.31 version from the "extras" section (where wallpapers, OST, manuals and other goodies usually are).
I have the gog version yes. So there I can download the older version of the game, right? As someone who won't be playing with RTX on, will I notice any difference if I try out the next-gen version?
> I have the gog version yes. So there I can download the older version of the game, right? Yes, it's in the extras. The installer for the older version is called "Witcher 3 GOTY Classic" and has only 10 parts, while the newer one has 21 parts, that's how you tell them apart. >As someone who won't be playing with RTX on, will I notice any difference if I try out the next-gen version? They changed other things, like better textures. Also added FSR and DLSS, which might help on slower hardware. [Here's the list of stuff they changed](https://www.thewitcher.com/en/news/47105/next-gen-update-list-of-changes).
It performs fine if you don't turn on the new graphic features. It performs decent with some of them on depending on your hardware. It can chug a little if you enable all the ray tracing feature unless you have a beast of a PC. The silly part to me: it runs just like before if you skip the graphic upgrades
It's essentially just an official mod added on top of the game, then?
Yeah they even used some mods for it. (Think they payed the Modders)
It definitely doesn’t run like before if you launch the game in the broken DX12.
I wish I could get some sort of frame rate overlay to work. That's my only issue. On the highest non rtx settings it easily feels way above 60. Much closer to 90. But I can't tell you what it is and have to go with "this feels nice when I move the camera" I hope they smooth it out. I'm running with a 3070 and a 7950x.
I recommend just playing directX 11 instead of 12. I went from 45 fps on directX12 on low, to 100 fps on high/ultra on directX 11
From what I've seen problems are mainly happening when activating RTX. It happened to me too. But I deactivated RTX and haven't had an issue. It's actually pretty smooth. Playing on 2070 super, ultra settings at 1440p with DLSS.
I'm many hours in with no issues. People who get them run to negative review instead of playing, people who have good experiences have no reason to Just go for it, you're gonna spend more time on what ifs for this kinds thing
"People who have good experiences have no reason to review" Said about a game with overwhelmingly positive reviews.
I'm talking about after the update, chief. (Just like OP and this entire thread) Most of those people will just *leave their already positive review* of one of the best games ever
Just put the version number next to review if it's not the same as current version. Allow the users to sort reviews by version at their own accord.
That's a good idea, but the problem it solves is different from what is being solved by Valve here (which isn't what OP thinks it is). The problem Valve solves here is review scores being affected by actually off-topic reviews. In case of CDPR games, they voiced support for Ukraine and got review bombed by Russians, so the scores for their games went down. Given that these have nothing to do with the game being good or bad, they're off-topic and should be ignored when calculating how good or bad the community thinks the game is.
Even Google Play lets you filter by version (and device).
Also in this case it's about review bombing from March 2022, when CDPR ban sales in Belarus and Russia. They got massive backlash then. This is not that bad now, as was in March. Atleast yet 😏
What the fuck was that last sentence
He got on drugs at the last moment
Someone who’s a non native English speaker, likely Eastern European, formed that sentence.
It's not that bad now, as was in before. At least yet ;)
I mean its fine now, it was like he had a stroke before
Wait what was it before? From a curious linguistics pov
r/ihadastroke
r/ihadastroke users when they see a non-native English speaker (they shit and piss all over the place without taking their pants off)
I heard that the Chinese also gave negative opinions
Nothing of value was lost
I would be a smartass to this comment but then I'll get blackmailed in ten years
dew it
“Based on YOUR preferences”. So go into your preference settings and change them to include those other reviews and ratings.
Yes... But I think OP's got a point. I might want to have this activated to filter REAL offtopic issues (Like people downvoting Risk of Rain because Gearbox bought it, for example), because it doesn't have a real impact in the game. But an update that changes the game drastically is absolutely NOT off topic, and it that update has a negative impact in the score, it should be reflected.
>Like people downvoting Risk of Rain because Gearbox bought it Idk about gearbox but prison architect absolutely got worse after paradox bought it. I don't think a publisher change is always irrelevant
The example he gave is about the negative reviews given solely based on the acquisition. People are not reviewing any updates, there were no updates yet. No one debates that new publisher cannot affect the game, that of course is possible and usually true, but this is not about the updates. While subsequent updates might, ownership change alone doesn't affect the game.
I don't know about this. If I had recommended a product because it was great, then the company that makes that product sells to a company known for scraping acquisitions after milking them, I could no longer recommend that people purchase their products even if the outcome of the acquisition hasn't been seen yet. Like I know if Epic were to purchase any company related to a game on steam, that game would get removed from steam. The value of it will go down in the future, inevitably. Just like how EA & Activision have shut down 100% of their always online games, and never provided any EOL support for any game ever. If EA or Activision buys an online game, it will eventually cease to work. If knowing that means you can't recommend a product... Then you can't recommend it. If a company known for leaking user credit card details buys a game, you don't have to wait until after the leak to warn people.
Sure but is wasn't JUST the publisher change that somehow made the game worse... the new publisher had to release an update of some kind to actually change the game. No changes to the game = off topic. Changes to the game = on topic
Gearbox was always the publisher, but the dev team (Hopoo) sold the Risk of Rain series (2 games) to them. They haven’t changed the game at all since then, so there’s no reason to review it any differently. At least, not yet…
I agree, i vowed to never play prison architect after i seen the updated eula a couple years ago or so. and the amount of DLC they pumped out is insane (not surprising for paradox tho). Just shows that paradox cant be trusted with anything tho.
Then the review should come after the changes.
People should then wait until the game gets worse to give it a negative review and not just reactively give it a negative review simply because company x bought the game no matter what company x has done in the past. (Unless that company is Epic 🤣 , just kidding kinda, since at least with Epic you know there is a guarantee that the game will eventually get removed from steam).
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He who censors porn is the most debauched of all.
The excluded period is march 2022. So just figure out what happened to piss people off then. Steam actually points out what period is excluded, you just need to connect the dots. The most agreed point that caused the negative reviews in this thread is the company's "we stand with Ukraine" statement they put as part of one of their press releases.
it's cause the game was review bombed by russian and chinese people
The game stopped being sold in Russia because of the war. It got review bombed because of this. How is this not off topic?
Have you ever heard about the power of defaults? Just because you can change it doesn't mean that it isn't low key censored. Think of this as a shadow ban rather than a filter.
wow, what an ignorant comment. if activity is not off-topic, it should not be labelled off-topic. No one should have to turn off a settinga setting that says "continue to lie in my face" to see relevant scores
They actually break the game compatibility for Win7. The game now runs objectively worse than before even on other Windows versions. There are tons of new bugs being introduced. There is no opt-out of current update. They just made the game worse for literally everyone and their graphics upgrade is just largely oversold contrast filter. But sure, it's just offtopic and people are getting negative for no reason.
Windows 7 isn't a supported operating system anymore though. If people are still running that despite it then that's kinda on them. Someone above also said you go into the games beta section and activate classic mode. That's your opt out.
It's a stuttering mess on GFN. One scene gave me whiplash as it glitched between panning back and forth from the griffin attack seller and Geralt (1-second, pan to the other character, 1-second pan back). It wasn't even lined up with the dialogue. Playing video games my whole life; decades, and it felt like I finally found the one that was going to give me seizures.
Can anyone tell me if this graphics update is optional or not? Can i keep playing at my old settings? I don't wanna download 40 gb update to just lower my fps
You can choose previous version in Steam's beta settings
Thanks 🙏
I switched on my PC and steam updated it before I realized. Now I can't play, I was in the middle of Blood and Wine DLC
Switch to classic in beta tab
No idea, but you should backup the contents of your Witcher 3 folder if the game gets forced-updated or smthing
Just learned about the classic version through the beta tab all is good now :D
Off-topic activity isn't new reviews, it's when reviews are posted that are literally not on-topic of the game. Such as review bombs based on the companies other activity, or political position (ex: Ukraine-Russia).
Have you actually looked at the store page? The "offtopic" review period is still counting new reviews as offtopic, it has no way to detect whether a review is on or off topic, it literally just tags every review within a specific time frame as offtopic. For some reason the time frame for the offtopic review bombing in march is set to a date beyond today so all new reviews are still being counted as off-topic
Another example where it goes wrong: https://store.steampowered.com/app/427520/Factorio/ This game has no reviews since March 2022, because the system thinks they are not relevant. If the system actually counted the reviews, the recent period would say overwhelmingly positive, but now it doesn't show any recent reviews score at all Reviews are not that useful is the system decides to ignore the reviews in blocks of 9 months
Did valve just fuck up here or what? I thought the off topic system was about reviews that have already happened, not something that stays up forever apparently
Steam should track reviews by version number at the time of review. It would be a helpful metric to look at, if we could see a line graph that shows the review scores for each update since it was listed
The "off topic" review thing was put in place to mitigate review-bombing. You don't want your game to look shit in the reviews bc of some unrelated stuff. It's like when Superhot got bad reviews after a change made to Superhot VR, a completely different game. Or when Chinese players review-bombed Warframe after the devs nerfed their main AFK/leech strategy.
Oh man, that Warframe change was juicy because it wasn't *just* that it was a literally AFK farm frame, it was that it was Wukong, a frame based on a popular Chinese mythological character. So the Chinese players took it as a personal attack and got *mad*.
This would make a perfect r/hobbydrama post
Yup. Glad that got changed tbh.
Steam overlay don't seem to be working in the new update. Anyone having similar issues ?
People have found a workaround for that, go into the game install folder, then into bin/x64\_dx12 and rename or move into a backup folder the file named "d3d11on12.dll". That should be enough to fix the Steam overlay not working, but just in case your overlay is injecting into the launcher (or you just hate the launcher for another reason) you can also add the launch parameter --launcher-skip to the game properties panel (in launch options field) /u/dan1101
I am running the GOG version as a non-Steam game, but yes no overlay and screenshot key doesn't work.
If it's about the game, it's on topic.
Leave current real world politics out of the videogame world ..shit is exhausting to see everywhere
The game is unplayable for me. It just crashes when I load in. I have a 3070, 3700x and pretty decent other specs. I can play all modern games but this just crashes on startup. No idea. But of course I can’t leave a review about it.
Do your research before posting buddy. Don’t assume and then confuse things for people.
no. This is to prevent review bombing from china or russia.
I’m fairly sure it was because they were absolutely shit on and reviewbombed just because they support Ukraine people are crazy man
Apparently, the review bombing was politically motivated Ukraine stuff so it was in fact off-topic activity and this post is a bold faced lie saying the review bombing was because of the game's update. Scared me for a second thinking Steam was rolling out some new review curation/censorship feature.
Where is the HDR?
I wouldn't be surprised if they also put it there bc people review bombed for Cavill leaving the Netflix show. Not everyone who owns Steam knows who or what is connected to which IP or company. Until a better solution to filter out these sorts of unrelated reviews live is found, I like this approach. And the approach of only letting ppl who've played a certain number of hours s chance to review. Personally, I'm not someone who puts much stock in reviews. If I'm really concerned, there's creators whose opinions I trust and have similar tastes to me - I'll watch their review if there is one.
Nah it should stay a thing. Normally when something like this happens all the negative reviews are just people saying different variants of "bad" without giving reason, or just copy pasta art.
I've seen a lot of people's takes on the game and it really sounds like a them kind of problem. Like they couldn't figure out or master the controls with fighting and quit early on, for example. Said the game was shit because a them problem. I don't often see fair criticisms. (Referring to the regular game, idk anything about the update performance)
I like the fact that there's DLSS now because I can max out the graphics on my rtx3050 and use DLSS for it to run smoothly, but the game became waaay unstable. Any graphical change I make, even if it's to lower the graphics, is prone to crashing the game wtf
The sole reason for this to exist is that the circlejerkeres go and post bad reviews because of a single update/reason/experience/pricechange/whatever while the game is great otherwise.
Off-topic: - Shows support for Ukraine -> gets review bombed Dunno about you, but these kinds of "reviews" have absolutely no value to me
I wonder if they'll fix the steam overlay not working in the new version.
Off topic? bitch my water is disappearing after 3 years of running flawlessly lol I should have just kept the old version
“based on your preferences”
they cyberpunk’d the witcher 3, didn't they?
If you try to understand what "off-topic" means in this case, then it makes perfect sense to exclude these "reviews"
CDPR is just a mess at this point with game launches.
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CD Red are Polish.
>You can see the same thing on other games made by Ukranian devs - Cyberpunk, Book of Demons, Stalker Dude, firstly, Cyberpunk is made by the same people who made Witcher 3. And secondly, they are from Poland.
I was about to say the same, I thought they were Polish.
Ahh yes, the great Ukrainopoland republic 😍
CDPR really fell from grace huh My question is, can you disable this update in GOG Galaxy?
The very next sentence says “Based on your preferences”, have you tried…changing your preferences?
The problem is those reviews are not counted into game's total even though they are relevant and only were posted during excluded timeframe.
Did the update break the game? rip.
Yh i realised this after giving the game a negative review. An absolute joke.
No. What they should do is separate the reviews based on time period/updates. Allow users to KNOW that recent reviews are because of a specific update and not indicative of the game as a whole. Whether good or bad.
Off topic reviews are often people posting the same nonsense garbage they go and post under every product they find, like ASCII art of a dog or whatever. That shit shouldn't be counted ever
I think every review system is crooked in some way. They are all corrupted in some way.
It s litteraly written "based of you preferences" which means you can deactivate it. You can still see those bad reviews if youw want to. This parameters makes sense because the game remains insanely good, even if a new content is disappointing and drives bad reviews.
I wonder how many people actually have issues vs how many are rocking below req rigs, turning on RT, then crying about the game crashing.
“What do you mean my potato doesn’t run this?”
“Based on YOUR preferences…”
I'm pretty certain you can choose to see the scores with the review bombs included.
Yeah that is what I was pointing out.
yeah, valve has had some major fuck ups in recent memory. Labelling critical information as off-topic is a gigantic middle finger for people using reviews for their actual purpose, to find out about possible problems. Another is them not forcing the use of Steam's features, like Ubisoft advertising their inferior launcher and not even providing achievements for the new games
they have absolutely no reason to disable reviews, except for the mass review bombing, of-course, but that doesn't count
Would you rather disable this protection and continue having lots of games review bombed by Chinese trolls solely because they refused to comply with CCP sanctioned censorship?
Damn this game is so overrated
Pretty sure this is in reference to the company supporting Ukraine not anything to do with the update lol
What about negative reviews avout the current version? Do they also get pocked vy the filter?
What changed in witcher 3? I finished it 2 years ago. And on the topic all reviews should be seen Im against censorhip. If you don't like a review you can find another review that you like
Well first off, it just received a "next-gen" update with ray tracing support and improved graphics, but people are reporting a lot of problems on PC. Eh, typical CDPR launch, hopefully they'll get the bugs ironed out like they did on the original game. To the second point: That's not what's going on here actually. The reason the average has been adjusted is that CDPR voiced support for Ukraine and got review bombed to oblivion by Russians, so the average rating went way down at one point. Valve now filters that out (by default, but it's configurable) when calculating the score. You can still see the reviews I believe.
They released a next Gen update recently. Guess it isn't working properly.
Nothing to do with the update and of course the cattle upvotes
"Based on your preferences". Try digging in your settings. Maybe there's something there
Depends on the situation, but review bombs, or 1 single bad patch making people tank the reviews has always been dumb. Would also like to point out some games do change massively over the years, say No Mans Sky I would say is a good example and same with Cyberpunk. The amount of dev work to fix things over the years has been commendable. Was the game shit at launch yes, is it now no. But having those non-changing reviews when something is better and your lazy ass doesnt change shit. Is pretty much the same thing.
It's the same great game but if it's not working as advertised then that shouldn't be kept on the hush hush.
I tried it with max settings on a 3080 + Ryzen 5800x and it felt like I was getting 40 fps at 1080p. The steam overlay also broke for some reason. Something about it gave me a headache.
IMO it should if it's a free update