Sounds like something is not right with your game, or your PC. What are your PC stats? Do you have the game set too high for your horsepower?

Since there are separate people designing the graphics and items updates (DLC) and others are fixing the code I see no problem in getting both done side by side. I'd also assume your settings might be too high for your hw.

The "free stuff" was actually developed months ago. They are simply releasing it slowly to keep interest in the game.

The character pop in issue is a known problem, and being dealt with now.

The problem where it sounds like you have come here to bitch about a pretty good game rather than talk to CDPR support directly, well I can't help you with that one.

idk

Huge surprise, CDPR fanboys defending them for this mess.
The driver crash is a widely known issue that CDPR haven't even acknowledged. As is the game just closing. And the NPC spawning in front of the player.

But I agree with one thing said here; this DLC WAS developed months ago. They just cut it from the game, to release it a little at a time to make it seem they are great.
If another developer cuts content to be released later, free or paid, they get slaughtered for it.
But because this is the beloved CDPR, they are doing a great job.
Why can't people just admit that this developer wasn't nearly ready for a job this size? They over-reached, by a huge margin, and released a sloppily made piece of shit.

And for those interested, I am running a 4Ghz 8 core CPU, with 8GB RAM and a GTX 960 4GB GPU.
And the game is LOWER than recommended settings, lower than the default settings set by the game, lower than suggested by geforce experience.
Don't assume I know fuck all about PC's, I have been gaming on them since the commodore vic20 in the early 80s.

And I'm running it on High (above recommended for my system) on an i7-930 @ 2.8GHz, 6Gb RAM, 2Gb AMD 7850 and have fewer issues than you are reporting. So maybe it is not the game, and is still something to do with your setup?

Never had a driver failure. Had one CTD in 70+ hours of gameplay. And have had a very prompt response from CDPR about issues when I have contacted them directly.

However, it's obvious from your alias that you only created your account here to come and throw a wobbler, so my recommendation is to go back to CDPR or gog and ask for your money back, or suck it up and wait till the next patch comes out and see if that addresses your concerns.

The driver crash is 100% limited to nvidia graphics hardware.
Some people have reported it can be fixed by rolling back to previous drivers, some say it doesn't work. For me it didn't work.
And this "account", I have had for years now. As long as I have been buying games on here.
I bought the gog version of the game to support CDPR, and they screwed up. They cut crappy content from the game, just so they could release it a tiny bit at a time to try and divert attention from how badly optimised and coded the game is.
From NPC's popping in right in your face, to the horse stopping when you try and steer even when going as slow as possible, and to NPC's bugging out so you can't finish quests, the game has many many problems.
All of my hardware is brand new, I have built dozens of systems like it over the years, have been PC gaming since the commodore vic20 in the early 80's.
I know what I am doing.
And I am not the only person reporting this exact issue. Perhaps if you had heard of a little thing called steam, you might have seen on their forums thousands of people reporting this exact same issue.
The reason I posted on here about it was to see if anyone here had found a fix, since CDPR don't seem to acknowledge the many problems with the game (and so won't be likely to fix them), and nobody on the steam forums has found a solution.
If you don't have anything productive to add, don't add anything. But don't expect to get away with trying to belittle my hardware or my knowledge of how computers or games work, because I know exactly what I am doing, I have been doing it since before you were born

Thing is though.. I have still v1.02 and none of the problems you mentioned.. none.

The game has crashed occasionally.. maybe half a dozen times in total out of around 50+ hours of gameplay...

So yes, I acknowledge there are some people experiencing problems but it's not widespread as you would like to believe.. it's happening to you, that sucks, it's happening to other people, that also sucks.. but it's not happening "all the time, to all the people".

If you want genuine support, go speak to CDPR. If you want to bitch and moan, continue on here but expect the same in return.

HAHAHAHA!

Was mentioning "a little thing called steam" supposed to be a burn? Go back there then. I should have recognised the entitled tone when I read it.

The more appropriate action to take would be to go directly to CDPR and get support there. It's still a brand new game and not everyone's experience can be good. Sometimes things just fail to pan out, especially on PCs with all their multitude of configurations. CDPR have put out a great game with some excellent story and gameplay. And yes, unfortunately it does not work perfectly for everyone. However coming here and starting a perfectly valid thread with an insult to about the very game you want help with just makes no one want to engage with you.

Huh... Can you give like, two examples of a dev releasing stuff they developed before hand for free and getting tons of backlash for it? Cause I can't even think of one. I can think of tons of devs that charge for stuff and then get only a small amount of backlash for it but keep doing it because idiots keep paying them for it...

In any case, it's not exactly clear that CDPR can even do anything about the driver crash issue. New Nvidia drivers have been horribly unstable for months now. It could be Nvidia that needs to fix things.

I hear your pain but what card are you running and what driver?

I know it doesn't help but I am running an Nvidia GTX 770 with the latest driver and have never had a graphics issue.

When I first started playing the game I would crash pretty regularly, I've no idea what was causing the crashes because there were no error messages given. I'd just get a black screen in game (with all the sound still running correctly) and I'd need to use the Task Manager to "End Task" to get out of it. However, shortly after the first patch it stopped happening and I haven't had another issue in nearly 80 hours of game play.

As for everything else, my first response would've been to look into your hardware as well, because it really does sound like somthing is wrong on that end.

I'm running i7-4770k with 16 gig of RAM and a GeForce GTX 750 Ti on Windows7. I am running the game between High and Ultra on every setting (with both forms of motion blur turned off, because they make me dizzy) and I'm not having a sigle issue with the game, the graphics, the performance, etc.

So, TL:DR - you have a much bigger issue than just the game itself or your hardware and you need real support.

I have a 670 and it was running fine when I first started it. I was using driver 347. something. Then I upgraded to the latest drivers and started getting freezes, so I rolled back, only then I started getting freezes with that driver as well. Then I upgraded again to the one that just came out yesterday and the freezes became a lot less common... and then one of them completely stopped my card from working at all.

The last few nvidia driver releases have been a steaming pile of... you get the idea.

That's not an issue with the game at all, that's an issue with nvidia and their apparent lack of being able to make a decent driver anymore.

Personally I haven't had any driver crashes (though I've seen many people reporting they do) but the nvidia driver before the one that was released yesterday cut my FPS in half sometimes, I haven't tried the latest one yet. This is 100% nvidia's fault and nothing to do with the game - I've experienced slowdowns in benchmarking apps and other games too and it's an issue that's already been reported on nvidia's forums.

NPC pop-in happens to me too, but nowhere near as much as it does for you by the sound of things.
It's an issue CDPR are aware of, hopefully it might be one of the things fixed with the 1.07 patch.

I have a GTX 670 2GB, and the game has crashed 3 times for me in over 200 hours of play (and none of the crashes were due to the graphics drivers).