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After 11 years, The Witcher 3 is getting a new story expansion and a remaster. CD Projekt Red has announced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered, which is coming in 2026 and will be a free upgrade for all current owners of the game, paving the way for the shiny new DLC coming next year. It isn’t just a technical update, either: CDPR is making changes to The Witcher 3’s combat, skill system, and hey, transmogs!
Witcher 3 Remastered release date
The Witcher 3 Remastered release date
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered launches on September 29, 2026. That’s only a month away from the day it was announced, which is a treat! It was revealed just before the teaser trailer for the new expansion Songs of the Past, but that’s not coming until 2027.
The remaster is a free update and the original DLCs are now free
The Witcher 3 Remastered will replace the current “Complete Edition” on storefronts when it launches in September. It will also be a free upgrade for anyone who already owns the base game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The original two story expansions Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine have also been made free for all base game owners in an update the same day as the remaster announcement.
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There’s a good chance you do already have those expansions either from the Game of the Year edition years back or the more recent Complete Edition that’s been the default version for sale since 2022. If not though, they’re yours now!
Witcher 3 Remastered features
Here’s what CDPR told PC Gamer about the remaster
Our own Josh Wolens got to see The Witcher 3 Remastered (and the Songs of the Past expansion) played at Gamescom in August and talked with CDPR about the upgrades a bit.
CDPR’s executive producer of external projects Jakub Kutrzuba told Josh that it wanted to think about what The Witcher 3 would play like if it were launching in 2026.
“We put a lot of our time into how the game actually plays,” says Kutrzuba. “So, the animation system, the camera work, small quality of life improvements, accessibility changes, enemy behaviour in combat, maybe the pathfinding for the roads, etcetera—these are areas of the game which we know could cause some frustration here and there.
“We went through all of them and asked ourselves, ‘What can we do about it, without rebuilding the game from scratch?’ And we have changed a lot… the game just plays smoother, you know? There’s no immersion-breakers anymore, I would say.”
What’s new in the remaster?
At the end of its announcement trailer, CDPR listed a ton of changes coming in the remaster. A lot of the inscrutable acronyms here are graphics tech to do with making the game prettier, which is great, but does pad out the list with relatively minor changes like “improved motion blur.”
- Enhanced combat
- Improved traversal and movement
- New Witcher signs FX
- Revamped mount handling
- Enhanced monster behaviors
- Skill tree revamp
- Armor transmogrification
- New combat finishers
- Expanded photo mode
- Cross platform mod support
- Immersive meditation
- Refined animations
- New quest tracking
- UI improvements
- Looting rework
- Refreshed motion blur
- New accessibility features
- Updated textures
- Foliage shading rework
- Tutorial modernization
- HDR improvements
- GTAO
- Improved menu navigation
- Ray tracing improvements
- Global lighting rework
- New shading model
- Subsurface scattering
- New tone mapper
- PlayStation 5 Pro support
- Xbox Play Anywhere support
- Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive features
- Nvidia DLSS 4.5
- AMD FSR 4
- Intel XESS 2.0
- Path tracing on PC
- Ray reconstruction on PC
- Raytraced hair
- Native DX12
- Rendering parallelization
Read the full article here