The Witcher 3's next-gen vaginas are going away
CD Projekt has confirmed that the addition of detailed vaginas to female monsters was in fact a mistake, and will be removed.
There was already plenty of nudity in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but the next-gen update that arrived in December upped the ante somewhat. As we saw last week, both the Crones of Crookback Bog (in their human forms) and the vampiric bruxae that appear in the Blood and Wine expansion were given significantly changed pubic areas in the update, taking them from a "Barbie doll situation" to the full monty, complete with visible labia and nicely coiffed public hair.
You can see the changes thanks to screens posted on Reddit, which for obvious reasons I would not recommend clicking on if you're at work and they're not cool with full frontal nudity.
(Or, I suppose, anywhere that M-rated content is considered inappropriate. Anyway, apply your judgment as you see fit.)
???? Last-gen Crones:
???? Next-gen Crones:
We speculated that the new look came courtesy of one of the many user-made mods incorporated into The Witcher 3's next-gen update, particularly since CD Projekt didn't seem aware of it it: The studio told Kotaku shortly after the new-and-improved graphics were discovered that it was "looking into it and will have more information in the coming days." Sure enough, it later confirmed that mistakes were made, and will be changed.
"The textures in question are an unintended result present in the release version," CD Projekt said in a statement. "This is something we are working to address."
It all seems a bit overcooked to me. CD Projekt has never been shy about nudity (at least when it comes to women—I don't recall any male characters running around au naturel, although apparently it was discussed at one point) and this seems like a fairly minor tweak as far as that goes: They're still unclothed, just slightly more detailed. The landing strip trim is maybe a little anachronistic, but that's what mods are for, right? Geralt got new hairdos, after all, so why not the Ladies of the Wood?
Unfortunately, CD Projekt declined to comment on its reasoning for the vagina reversion, or to say when it expects the change to be made. It did confirm separately that it's working on new performance patches for the game, however, aimed at improving CPU core utilization, DirectX 12 stability, ray tracing, horizon-based ambient occlusion, and crash issues.