The Witcher 3 Next-Gen New Mods Introduce Dynamic Combat Camera, Darker Nights

The Witcher 3 next-gen introduced a lot of improvements to the massively popular role-playing game by CD Projekt Red, but this doesn’t mean that there aren’t things left to improve or fix, not counting obvious issues like ray tracing performance.

Modder Darkenway shared today a very interesting mod called Dynamic Combat Camera, which automatically switches camera between the Default and Close settings in combat depending on the number of enemies. This is an extremely welcome feature, since the Close camera setting doesn’t work that well in the vanilla game due to enemies tending to attack from off-screen without any visual indication.

Automatically switch between Default and Close camera mid-fight, depending on the number of enemies you are facing at any time.

Behavior is as follows :

• 1 enemy -> Camera switches to Close camera preset
• 2 or more enemies -> Camera switches to Default camera preset
  The camera is reset when the combat is over.

One more issue that has affected immersion in The Witcher 3 since its release are bright nights. Earlier this week, the Darker Nights mod was updated to work with the next-gen update, making nights darker and much better looking, with or without ray tracing features.

The Witcher 3 is now available on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Learn more about the next-gen update by checking out Alessio’s hands-on.

The free The Witcher 3 Next-Gen update is finally here, at last, featuring a host of quality-of-life and gameplay improvements in addition to all the technical enhancements. On PC, players can enjoy a brand new Ultra+ graphics preset. Then, on top of that, they can enable four ray traced effects: global illumination, ambient occlusion, shadows and reflections, with the latter two unavailable on consoles.

With everything turned on, the game looks absolutely fantastic. Granted, it had a great base to begin with, but the textures are clearly higher quality here (partly thanks to the integrated mods), and the draw distance is massively improved, just like the accuracy and sharpness of reflections and shadows. The star of the show is the ray traced global illumination, though, which elevates the game’s lighting to new heights.