CD Projekt RED has noticed players found an easy way to get unlimited money in The Witcher 3. They've decided to deploy a very creative punishment for this exploit.
The exploit centered around killing cows. Players would clear out a group of them, collect their hides and then meditate. The cows would then respawn and players would kill them again. They would repeat the process as needed until they had a tidy pile of hides that they could sell to nearby merchants.
The latest PC patch notes for The Witcher 3 hinted at a potential fix with this line: "Deploys the Bovine Defense Force Initiative." The solution's more amusing than I could've expected, though. Now, when players meditate to respawn the cows, they're ambushed by a giant horned monster called a chort. In this video, it's level 27. Watch it happen after the jump...
The chort isn't too complicated to fight. All he does is charge and try to swipe you with his claws. However, he's no pushover. To make matters worse, another one respawns as soon as you've killed the first. While the player in the video is able to handle several of them in a row, they succeeded in preventing him from farming cows over and over.
The Witcher 3 is a single-player game so exploits aren't as damaging as they would be in, say, Call of Duty. Still, they seriously disrupt the balance of the game. CD Projekt put a lot of effort into making sure that players don't get too much gold. Quests don't give out too much money and what little cash the player does earn has to be spent on repairing their gear. Merchants also have limited pools of money like in Fallout so players can't just sell off piles and piles of junk.
If players get too much money, they can buy all the gear they need and will be able to steamroll through missions. This isn't a problem just for the base campaign but also for the two expansion packs CD Projekt has planned for Witcher 3.
The developers could've just removed the exploits through more mundane means, like decreasing cow spawn rates or the sell price for their loot. It's great that they went for a more entertaining solution, just as Rockstar did with the Duke O' Death exploit for GTA Online.
