Will older saves work correctly with newest patch from Wesp5, or after each such patch (especially patch+ one), one has to restart the game anew? In my case I now have patch 9.5, and consider updating to 9.6. I don't think I ever had a playthrough which would span a new patch upgrade before.

Using old saves with a new patch will surely mess the game up. Finish the game with 9.5 and then start a new one with 9.6!

That's what I suspected. Thanks for the confirmation!

I can definitely confirm this to be the case. I had "Install updates" in Galaxy set to "Automatically" and got 9.6 (and didn't notice really). I was in downtown area at the time and basically game went completely bonkers with missing NPC, being unable to complete quests, getting stuck after dialogs etc.

The good news for me was that Galaxy rollback to version 9.5 seem to work fine and after loading earlier save, things are back to normal.

Happened to me too, couldnt get back to the beach part without crashing the game. Rollback update sure is useful...