The Witcher 3 Remaster's First Hotfix Rescues Broken Saves

Two days after the remaster landed, CD Projekt Red shipped hotfix 5.00c, and the first line of its notes is the one that mattered most: saving and loading failed outright if the path to your Documents folder contained special characters. The same patch quietens a sound bug, reverts a change that wrecked performance with HairWorks, and restores the ability to launch the classic 1.32 build.

What was announced

The studio published the notes for hotfix 5.00c on October 1 for the Steam version of the remaster. Six fixes, and the order tells you which hurt most.

First: the game could not be saved or loaded if the path to the Documents folder contained special characters. That is a fault that hits players whose account names are not plain Latin — a large share of the game's audience in Europe and beyond — and for them the remaster was effectively unplayable rather than merely buggy.

Second: voiceover audio could become significantly quieter than the rest of the sound after moving through the pause-menu tabs.

The rest are smaller. Visual adjustments in Velen, covering bloom, vegetation lighting, saturation and path-traced lighting. A revert of a change that caused significant performance and visual problems with HairWorks enabled for some players. Marketing telemetry settings not saving properly. And the restoration of something people asked for loudly: it was not possible to launch the classic 1.32 version of the game, and now it is.

What it means for players

A broken save system two days into a free upgrade is the worst possible fault, because the upgrade replaced the version people already owned. Anyone who hit it had no working game and no older build to fall back on — which is exactly why the 1.32 launch option being broken at the same time made it worse.

That classic build matters beyond nostalgia. The remaster reset skill points and reworked the skill tree, so a long-running save plays differently now; being able to launch 1.32 is the route back for anyone who wants the game they had.

The HairWorks revert is the honest entry in the list. Rather than tuning a new feature, the studio undid its own change after players reported it, which is a faster fix than a rewrite and a reasonable call this close to release.

What happens next

CD Projekt Red publishes its notes per platform, and these cover Steam. Fixes for the console and other PC builds follow their own schedule, so the same numbered hotfix does not necessarily land everywhere at once.

The studio closed the notes by thanking players for their patience while it continues investigating reported issues, which is the usual signal that more hotfixes are coming rather than a single cleanup patch.