CD Projekt Red closed out Gamescom Opening Night Live by announcing a remaster of The Witcher 3, and the price for anyone who already owns it is nothing.
The upgraded version arrives September 29 and includes both of the game’s previous DLC expansions. Existing owners get it free. That extends to Switch players too: if you bought the game on the original Switch, the Switch 2 upgrade costs you nothing either.
The changes go deeper than new lighting
Yes, there are the visual updates you’d expect from a remaster. But CDPR also went into the guts of the thing.
The skill tree has been revised. So have the combat systems, with tweaks to the camera and targeting plus a set of new finishers. Moving around as Geralt should feel smoother, and mount handling has been adjusted.
That last one gives me pause. Roach’s funny, glitchy moments are load-bearing at this point, and it’d be a small tragedy if the studio patched every one of them out.
A decade-old game is still getting new content
Earlier this year, CDPR announced that The Witcher 3 is getting a third DLC next year called Songs of the Past. The team showed a short gameplay teaser at Gamescom as a post-script to the remaster news.
Adding an expansion to a title that’s more than 10 years old is unusual. Then again, fans are waiting until at least 2028 for the next proper sequel in the franchise, so consider this the bone being thrown.
And there’s still an effort underway to build a modern remake of the first Witcher game, if you’d like to go even further back.
