CD Projekt Red wanted to show you a better-looking Witcher 3. A lot of fans looked at the footage and decided the 2015 version still wins.
Next week, the studio releases The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, a big overhaul of its 2015 role-playing game. That timing makes sense. The game is more than a decade old, so you could fairly expect it to need some work before it feels new to players in 2026. Judging by how fans reacted to the latest clip, though, it may need less than anyone assumed.
Eleven seconds of fire and water
The official Witcher X account posted a side-by-side comparison of the remaster and the 2015 original. The clip runs 11 seconds. Geralt casts the Igni sign and sends a blast of fire at a Drowner, and the two of them are standing in a marsh, so there’s plenty of water to catch the light coming off the Witcher’s hand.
The point was obvious: show off the new graphics and the improved effects. It didn’t go over well. “Why does the remastered [version] look worse?” one reply asked.
The replies mostly agree
That reply wasn’t an outlier. A surprising majority of the responses said the same thing. “Old one looks so much better!” one user wrote.
Another went for sarcasm: “Did you put the before and after text on the wrong square because the left looks way better?”
Most complaints came down to reflections and color. “The color and fire stands out more and looks more alive” in the 2015 release, one user explained. They have a point. The original footage has a stronger orange tint, and the flames seem to move more on the water than they do in the remaster. If anything, the clip mostly proves how well the original has held up.
The graphics are only part of the update
The remaster changes a lot more than lighting. It adds improved animations, reworked combat, better movement and mount handling and adjusted enemy behavior. The skill tree has been rebuilt too.
There’s also cross-platform mod support and a handful of new accessibility features. And the best part costs nothing: anyone who owns the original base game gets the whole overhaul for free, along with every expansion released so far.
A new expansion is coming too
The remaster lands ahead of Songs of the Past, a brand-new paid expansion due next year. CD Projekt Red developed it with Fool’s Theory, the studio making The Witcher remake, which is still in development.
Songs of the Past is expected to be about the size of Blood and Wine. That’s a lot of content. Whether it’ll look better than 2015 is apparently now an open question.
