CD Projekt Red has revealed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered with an announcement trailer, and it’s a lot bigger than a resolution bump. The remaster is set for September 29 and will be a free upgrade for people who already own the game.
This isn’t just new lighting on a 10-year-old RPG. The announcement lists a combat overhaul, a revamped skill tree, improved traversal and responsiveness for Geralt, better horse handling for Roach, and enhanced monster behavior.
There are new finishers, updated Sign effects, refined animations, a transmog system, reworked looting, a new quest tracking system, modernized tutorials, UI and menu navigation changes, and new accessibility features.
One neat addition: “immersive meditation,” which shows time actually passing in the world around Geralt instead of hiding it behind a menu screen. PC modders have done versions of this for years.
The visual list is long
Updated textures, a foliage shading rework, improved HDR, a global lighting overhaul, ray tracing improvements, a new shading model, subsurface scattering, a new tone mapper, refreshed motion blur, ray-traced hair, and GTAO: that’s Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion, not Grand Theft Auto Online.
PC gets the heavy stuff. Path tracing and ray reconstruction are listed as PC features, alongside native DirectX 12 support and improved rendering parallelization. The current PC build has long been criticized for running DX12 through a compatibility layer that hammers performance.
Upscaler support is listed as DLSS 4.5, FSR 4, and Intel XeSS, though the exact XeSS version is still unclear from the announcement materials. Updated system requirements haven’t been shared yet.
On consoles, the announcement mentions PS5 Pro support, Xbox Play Anywhere, and a Nintendo Switch 2 version with its own features. The game is also listed as coming to Battle.net, which is unusual for a non-Blizzard title. Cross-platform mod support is included too, which would be the first time console players get official access to Witcher 3 mods.
Then the big one: Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are reportedly becoming free for anyone who owns the base game. Both have been paid expansions since 2015 and 2016, with Blood and Wine alone adding the whole Toussaint region.
A brand new expansion was also teased, but it isn’t part of the September launch. Current information points to it arriving later, likely next year. No title, premise, or price yet.
