So I guess watch the video above and then read on. Now in the latest Bombcast Brad said that this game is without a doubt a GOTY contender and that statement was made without any debate or argument. Now I'm not here to argue against it because I too share that sentiment, I'm around 20 hours in and utterly gripped by this fantastic living breathing world.

However my question is what level of jank (bugs, glitches etc...) are acceptable for a game to still be considered great? We've seen incredibly polished worlds like GTA V (by no means perfect there are of course glitches in there, but the over level of polish elevates it beyond those minor issues) and at the other end we've had absolutely janky games like Assassin's Creed Unity basically dead upon arrival because of it's problems. Ask anyone about it and they will often say "oh isn't that full of glitches and unplayable". It could be argued yes it had major problems but was still playable to some extent. I mean two of the glitches in the video above show falling out of the game environment to varying degrees...something I know was a problem on AC Unity.

So where do games like the Witcher stand? Is it a question of size? Is it acceptable that The Witcher has it's level of problems and that it will never likely reach I suppose the desired level of polish whilst most gamers play it. CD Projeckt Red have historically been good at improving their games long term so I expect it would change. However The Witcher isn't unique in this Bethesda games are almost famous for it at this point and their last two games have been GOTY contenders.

Is it game breaking issues? I mean none of my above issues were gaming breaking? The sound glitches are annoying and last for around 30 seconds and then it's gone, the second one I dropped back to the ground pretty much straight afterwards and the finally I dropped through the bottom of the world reappeared high in the sky and landed safely back on my boat. However that seems flawed as I had numerous crashes playing Fallout 3 where I lost hours of progress (and learnt the lesson of saving all the time)

If it doesn't get to the point of actually frustrating me, then I'll deal with almost anything.

Is the game good? Is the game good enough to justify the bugs? Are said bugs frustrating (i.e save data loss)?

If question number one or two is a 'no', then yes, the bugs already squash a terrible game or make a game terrible. Question 3 is a matter of preference. For the record I had one crash in about 10ish hours of playing and I'm having fun.

I have been a part of this site for a long time and have never tried to promote myself. However, I made a little clip with the ps4 editor to show a hilarious encounter I had and it actually just happened early today when I was playing.

http://youtu.be/_dlnpLglARM

For those who don't watch, essentially I am having a conversation with an important character and the exact same character is in the background doing standard npc shit. I also had this occur except the character I was talking too and a solider were having a battle to the death in the background....

Wait it that a dig at me? I'm not trying to start a fight or anything just asking. I didn't even think the video in the post could purely be seen as self promotion just wanted to share examples of the type of jank I was talking about and my own experiences seemed a nature starting pointing. (apologies in advance if this is nothing more than you just being....humble?)

@flameboy84: oh sorry, didn't mean to make it sound like I was going after anyone. I'm just know giantbomb is pretty strict sometimes with posting links and videos of onself. It's probably not not needed but regardless I meant no offense.

Same. Have had really no issues with the Witcher as far as what is considered "jank". No bugs or anything weird. Not to say they don't exist (obviously they do, but PC version has been great for me). I've put up with some crap before though and that won't ruin something for me if its worth it.

There obviously was the famous Skyrim debate and that won despite some objections about general bugs and the jacked up PS3 version so we know the answer already, anyways, as far as Giant Bomb goes.

In regards to open world games specifically: people often hate on Bethesda for bugs and "jank" but clearly, this is the cost of a huge open game. Where are these flawless huge open games? Not saying it's all excusable and some don't do it better than others, it's just clear there is a correlation. I go into a game like Skyrim expecting some cost for the size. Same with the Witcher. But as I say, lucky enough to not have that issue. You bring up Unity for an example and that is a little different to me. Open world, sure, but not the same scope as Witcher or Skyrim, with their RPG qualities. And also, that game just wasn't so hot. If it was good enough, people would have looked past the issues or stuck around or eventually praised it.

I disagreed with a lot of Brad's criticisms of the Witcher 3 (he says the movement is something to be patched, where in reality it's just a choice and one I love) but in the end he is loving the game because it's clearly of a high quality.

So far, it's my GOTY and nothing is close. 40 hours in tho with plenty to go.

How much am I willing to put up with to keep playing the game?

Just because I'm willing to put up with a lot doesn't justify releasing a game that has major bug problems, but I'm willing to forgive the occasional crash or funny open world glitch in a game as big as The Witcher 3. Bugs that corrupt your save are unacceptable.

I have a high tolerance for annoying and/or broken shit if everything else is done well.

The only problems I'm facing are the slippery walking/ running with the controller and the low framerate. I can deal with the walking, but FPS...

In fact, after a lot of tweaking I was able to run UNITY on ~40fps on medium settings. Witcher 3? 15-20 FPS on low. WTF?

As long as the "fun" factor is higher than the "jank" factor, it's all good.

if it's unplayable it's a problem.

I actually think people are selling me on the "what I'm willing to put up with" before it's too much. I've not gone back to Ori because of a bug where I lost 3 hours of progress twice because my game just didn't save...so I'm either never gonna go back to it or just play it all in one go. So I guess that's perhaps the crux of the matter there is never going to be general consensus on what people will put up with....much like there is very rarely a definitive GOTY that everyone agrees on. (except for this year where it's clearly The Witcher 3 so far!)

I find that Witcher 3 has several small problems that can be worked around, but everything else is of such freakishly high quality mixed with a massive amount of it that I can't complain at all. GOTY easily. It has to be. If a better game came out this year, it would kill me with amazement.

I have a 760 and a i 5 and I get 60 FPS on mostly high with a couple medium settings at 60 FPS. It's a bummer you are having that problem but I am not sure how, really. It runs very well for me.

When frustration > fun. The minute I stop laughing at the rough edges, or when I start to focus on those edges over the actual gameplay, that's when I've hit the tipping point.

There's a good amount of clunk in The Witcher 3, but it haven't stopped focusing on the fun (yet).

As long as none of the issues are fully game breaking then I don't really care so long as the base game is good, which this one is. Even with all the jank it's probably my favourite game of the year so far.

I have a lot of patience for issues in big games like this. Skyrim was my GotY of its year and I was playing on consoles and experienced a ton of slowdown once the save size on my PS3 got bigger.

I feel pretty much the same way, although I'm still not sure I can characterize how poor Geralt controls as a small problem. Still though, even a problem like that doesn't mean Wild Hunt isn't by far the best game I have played in quite some time. I think it says a lot about the overall quality of The Witcher 3 that I'm willing to overlook a problem like imprecise, clunky controls. In other games, controls like this could have ruined the entire experience.

10 hours in and I haven't run into anything, so that's acceptable.

If it results in some good videos, then it's encouraged!

Open world games are basically guaranteed to come with a certain amount of jank, and some are worse offenders than others. But at the end of the day, a good game is a good game. As long as the game isn't completely broken and causing more frustration than fun, I'm fine with it. I even put up with Fallout: New Vegas on release, and that game was seriously FUCKED up in some major ways, to a level that I would actually deem unacceptable. Easily the most hard locks I've ever gotten in a game. I still loved it, though, and it was eventually patched to high hell to get rid of a good majority of its problems. Even its DLC was broken and had to be pulled from the store and patched.

I would always encourage developers to leave the funny open world jank in their games, because that shit can get hysterical in ways no other kind of game can.

In my experience, The Witcher 3 is surprisingly light on bugs and jank. I've had a few weird moments, but nothing I would call distracting, and certainly not unacceptable.

Well people would probably blame it on my GPU (GT 650m), but as I said, it ran Unity at 40 fps, and runs GTA V at around the same fps at medium/high settings. So this is definitely unusual.

But I know I'm not alone, there's been a lot of controversy brewing over nVidia drivers messing things up for Kepler based cards : https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/833016/geforce-700-600-series/gtx-780-possible-fail-as-performance-in-the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-/62/

For me too much jank is excessive crashes and broken scripting in quests. Too many wonky animations can be bad too because it breaks immersion but let's not forget that GB gave Skyrim GoTY which had its fair share of jank and was hella broken on PS3

Considering at this point I've completed 109 quests and not a single one has been broken in the slightest, I consider that acceptable and quite frankly impressive for a game of this size nowadays right out of the gate.

The worst things that have happened to me in this game have been that stupid blacksmith in Blackbough, and two crashes, but I've never lost more than ten minutes of progress thanks to the autosave. The rest of the jank I've encountered has been funny little glitches like people floating, a horse standing inside another horse, music cutting out at hilarious times, and enemies continuously dying over and over in the following cutscene completely ruining any dramatic moment.

The movement is fine, though. No, it's not the best, but you get used to it. Small corridors suck if we want to get nitpicky about it.

This thread is a parody right? Like because so many people have been complaining for no reason?

I totally get it!

I've got like 30 hours into this on ps4 and really haven't encountered anything unusual. In addition to the typical generic frame rate hitches, I've had one crash which cost about 5 minutes of gameplay. I also got a prompt once saying my save file was corrupt so it would be deleted and re-saved. That didn't cost me a second of progress. And that's pretty much it.

As a 780 Ti owner, I've been monitoring this situation closely. As it stands, a freaking 2 GB GTX 960 can run Wild Hunt better than my 780 Ti. That is just all kinds of wrong.

A few pages back in that thread you linked, an Nvidia rep named Manuel said that they were looking into poor Kepler performance. That was a few days ago, I don't think there have been any updates since then on the matter. Here's what the Nvidia guy said exactly: "We discovered a couple of issues in regards to Kepler GPUs and are working on driver updates."

There is also a giant thread about Kepler over on CDPR's forum here.

In that thread, someone posted what was allegedly a response from Nvidia Technical Support on the Kepler issue:

We are aware of this issue and NVIDIA engineering team is currently working on it. I will also have this case escalated to our Level 2 Technical Support group for further attention.

AMD owners are getting the shorter end of the driver stick yet again though, there STILL isn't a Catalyst driver update out for Witcher 3. At this rate, there is going to be another new GeForce driver out for Witcher 3 before the first Catalyst release.

The controls were my biggest gripe with the game for a little while, too, but I don't even notice them most of the time now. Just, er, align yourself with a door as you move towards it and walk through it, don't run through it. I find that this game's controls aren't too far from a Rockstar games - you don't turn on a dime or stop as soon as you let go of the analog stick. Combat controls are just fine and that's probably why I'm OK with regular movement controls being a little clunky. Still, if they were going to take cues from Rockstar, they could have taken cues on how a horse should control.

@believer258: Yeah, I'm right there with you. I have gotten used to the controls. They could certainly be better, but at least they're usable.

I'm still not a pro at combat though, but I'm slowly improving. However, I think I'm bad at combat because I'm just not great at games, not necessarily because the controls are holding me back.

I have a terrible lust for jank.

Crowds of enemies can still mess me up bad if I'm not paying attention but I've become more patient in the sense that I'm more willing to get 1 or 2 hits in and then back off and let them come towards me so I can parry or dodge around them. Drowners can still be serious assholes when there's a bunch of them in tight spaces. All I can do in those situations is roll the hell away because I'll die in an instant if I stay in the middle of a drowner crowd

@colourful_hippie: Eh give yourself some credit, I can still die pretty easily to 2 or 3 drowners, forget about a whole crowd of them! I'm playing on Blood and Broken Bones.

I'm more forgiving of jank if a game is showing some ambition. I'd rather developers try to push the boundaries and fall short in a few places than just stick to a played out formula and nail it.

I think the overall standard of Wild Hunt is incredibly high considering the scope of it. There are clearly places in which it could be improved (climbing, traversal etc), but for me it's still easily one of the best games made in the past ten years.

The only problem I've had with Wild Hunt is not being able to fire my crossbow for a time but after I reloaded my save it was fine.

Witcher 2 was pretty much the same way. One powerful guy was a warm up compared to a fuckload of Nekkers or Drowners. Nekkers were the bane of my existence in The Witcher 2 and not much has changed since - those little fuckers can still mess me up if I'm not careful.

I had a lot less trouble with the combat when I started placing more emphasis on the dodge button instead of the roll button and stopped locking on so much. Only lock on when you're fighting one person, two at most. Also, unlike The Witcher 2, signs other than Quen are useful, especially Aard and Ignii. Knocking a few guys down so you can get a few swings in on some others has helped me a lot. I'm enjoying the combat more than The Witcher 2's now - actually, probably more than any other RPG of this type. Way more.

@mb: Yeah i've been following the situation closely too. Every time I open up chrome I search for the new driver that's supposed to come out soon :/ But i'm not really holding my breath, as suggested by most on those threads. Rolling back drivers has made no difference either, as it has for many, and I'm currently using the 353.00 hotfix drivers that I found somewhere (seems to be beta or something)
I haven't installed the 1.04 patch yet either, as people seem to be having issues with that too. Hopefully some sort of solution comes forward soon.

Deadly Premonition is (non-ironically) one of my favourite games, which shows that I'll deal with jank up the wazoo if the story sucks me in.

Witcher 3 has nowhere near that amount of jank and I'm loving the rest of it.

@armaan8014: I haven't had any problems with 1.04, in fact it slightly improved performance for me across the board.

@mb: I guess I'll try it out after all then :D Anything to make it run better

Edit: Or maybe i'll just hold back for a while after all. Did some more searching and it might not be worth the risk (since I'm not sure how to remove a patch for this game)

http://steamcommunity.com/app/292030/discussions/0/613958868371554014/

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/835140/geforce-700-600-series/witcher-3-patch-1-04-impaired-gtx-780-performance/

I have a lot of tolerance for janky shit if the core of the experience is good enough.

I only play games free of jank.. so unfortunately I will never be playing another video game ever again.

I like obsidian games... so i have a pretty high tolerance for jank. it's when it's added to other problems that I have an issue.

@armaan8014: You can just back up your entire installation directory. If the patch goes bad for you, revert to your backup.

It's weird, but some glitchy/janky games actually have a lot of longevity for me. The Elder Scrolls games have always been janky, for example, and it kind of adds to the appeal for me. I love some of the hilarious shit that happens in that game. They're generally things that don't get in the way. If an NPC gets off his horse and then teleports off a bridge and dies - that's hilarious to me. Witcher 3 so far seems to have those kind of bugs and not much that gets in the way.

I don't think a bug or glitch in a game has ever bothered me. Even when I lost 9 hours of progress in TLOU the day it came out I just went to bed that night and started over the next day. I lost 30+ hours in Dark Souls and just started over again. I've had at least 40 crashes with the Witcher 3 and I'm still looking forward to booting it up in a few hours. I don't care if I fall through worlds or get stuck in walls; if a character be T posing then so be it, they T posing. It is what it is. If they walking into a wall and not getting to the spot I need then reload. Most of the time things can be solved by a simple reload. I don't understand why people get all hot and bothered about this stuff.

Playing on the PC the only issues with this game I've run into are, yup, controls. There are some platforming sections (effectively) and since the character kinda controls tank-like outside of combat, this can be frustrating. The horse as well is just fine..unless I'm trying to make sharp turns, switch backs or move through narrow spaces...

But all of that is nit-picking. Whatever level of jank this game would have to reach to make me not want to play it? its no where close.

And I think that's the overall estimation right? Like this is "9 or 10/10..yes there are bugs but the rest of the game is so damn good you don't give a shit" for a lot of people.

Mind you, I bought a 960 specifically to play this game, and so my exact rig is being supported exactly by drivers or etc. I avoided some of the jank, I think, by spending 250ish$ If the game were crashing on me? if the little bit of pop in and etc I was getting was constant and overwhelming? I might feel differently. If other folks are experiencing a lot of issues, its understandable they might get frustrated. I've not seen an overwhelming "This game is utterly broken crap for me!" though.

@bladededge: Not really related to the OP but just thought I'd say if the pop-in you're referring too is mostly character hair and loose models like Geralts medallion in cutscenes that comes from setting the Sharpen filter to High if you have it on that. Reduce it to low and the pop-in will happen less and off even less so.

This might also help with NPC pop-in in Novigrad too not sure though I didn't test that.

@mb: Hmm thanks.. I might try it out if things don't improve soon.

It's the same kind of jank Rockstar games have, I didn't see anyone else complain about that. Mainly because people have come to expect that from Rockstar games, so it's not an issue. Witcher 3 feels very much like a Havoc Engine game.

@cale: Oh my you're seriously a jank master! I don't mind bugs and glitches much either (love any euro-rpg that comes out, Witcher 1 is my all time favorite, love games such as Risen etc) but losing hours of progress would totally kill me :/

Is there jank in witcher 3? Yes, like most games. Have I seen a bard standing on a fruit stand made of cloth dancing? Yes. Have I seen drowners floating in the sky and falling out of it? Yes. Have I seen some pop in at the point where you cross from Velen to Novigrad? Sure. Is any of this game breaking? No. Does any of it make me do anything more than go "lul"? No. Does any of it actually negatively impact the gameplay in a significant way? No.

So does the Witcher 3 have an acceptable amount of Jank? It sure does.