The Witcher 3's wandering merchants carried quest fixes around the game without players realising

One dev who worked on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt had a good think about their most useless piece of video game knowledge in response to a Twitter stumper, but still came up with something interesting anyway. Patrick Mills was a quest designer on The Witcher 3 and senior quest designer on Cyberpunk 2077 for CD Projekt RED, and shared a neat bit of trivia about The Witcher 3’s wandering merchants on his own account this week. Mills revealed that the script for these lads would dish out fixes whatever stage you were at in the game.

“In Witcher 3 we needed an always running bit of logic to deliver some patch fixes (so you'd get the fixes applied no matter where you were in the game),” Mills tweeted, “so a huge number of fixes were added to the script that governed the "wandering merchants" found in all areas of the game.” This revelation about The Witcher 3’s wandering merchants came about when Mills responded to a question posed by SuperPodSaga that went viral earlier this month.

Responding to a question about whether the merchant could be killed, and if that would stop the fixes from being applied, Mills admitted that he wasn’t sure if it was possible to bump off this handy itinerant. He insisted the fixes would still deploy even if you could. “It's basically a matryoshka, with the fixes hidden inside his script, but not really reliant on it (just that it's always active),” the dev pointed out.

“This guy walks all over the land delivering quest fixes out of his bag like santa,” Mills added. “I dunno if this qualifies as useless, those quest fixes were very useful.” Mills said that “hundreds and hundreds of fixes” were carried around through the game by the wandering merchants, although their usefulness didn’t last. “It's not like this anymore, eventually his burdens were lightened and the fixes were moved to a more reasonable (but less interesting) place,” he said.

In Witcher 3 we needed an always running bit of logic to deliver some patch fixes (so you'd get the fixes applied no matter where you were in the game) so a huge number of fixes were added to the script that governed the "wandering merchants" found in all areas of the game https://t.co/aGBxrXHgIT pic.twitter.com/GjcuZBIPOE

— Patrick Mills (@PKernaghan) January 24, 2023

The repackaged and reworked next-gen version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched in December, but was a wee bit borked. Hardware editor James found that The Complete Edition’s performance was worse even without ray tracing switched on. CD Projekt promised to work on fixing the issues, and have released some hotfixes since to stabilise the game’s performance. Still, perhaps it might be time to send the wandering merchants back out again to help fix the game?

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition is on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store for £35/$50/€50.