The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered is out now, free for owners

CD Projekt Red released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered on 29 September, and it costs owners of the 2015 original nothing. The upgrade landed on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2 at 10:00 UTC, bundling both expansions — Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine — into a build that has been rebuilt on native DirectX 12 with multithreading rather than bolted onto the old renderer.

Anyone who owns the game on Steam or GOG can upgrade free. Console owners pay a token amount on two paths: PlayStation 4 to PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch to the new Switch 2 version. It is the rare case of a publisher charging for a decade-old game's makeover only where the storefront forces it.

What the free upgrade actually changes

The headline listing is huge, but the changes players will feel first are in the skill system. Skills are now arranged in a proper tree, every skill has three ranks, and unlocking a new one needs its prerequisite skills rather than a wallet of points. CD Projekt Red has flagged the obvious consequence in bold: existing skill points are reset, so anybody returning to a hundred-hour save has some rebuilding to do.

Gear gets the same treatment. A new Reforging service lets you change a weapon's or armour's appearance without touching its stats, unlocked by having the relevant equipment or crafting diagram in your inventory, and only at master craftsmen Yoana and Hattori. Dyes applied from Blood and Wine carry over to the reforged item, which is the kind of detail that decides whether a transmog system gets used or forgotten.

Geralt himself has been reanimated: new finisher and idle animations, a more natural jump (distance and height unchanged), faster ledge climbing, ladder climbing and vaulting, and smoother gap-closing in combat. Roach gets a dedicated control sensitivity slider, a toggle-free sprint and polished mounting, dismounting and gallop animations. The camera work is more interesting than it sounds, with a wider exploration camera and a dynamic combat camera that pulls back when you are being surrounded.

Visually, the upgrade leans on The Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project, the well-regarded community mod, for updated textures and models, then layers on image-based lighting, ground-truth ambient occlusion, ray-traced local shadows, updated screen-space reflections and shadows, subsurface scattering for skin, and a rebuilt HDR calibration panel. It is a long list, and the practical test will be whether a 2015 open world finally stops looking like a painting of itself.

Accessibility is expanded too: boosted health regeneration, the ability to ignore item weight entirely and to hold your breath indefinitely are now individual toggles, gathered into a one-press “Bard's Ballad” preset for players who want less friction and more story.

Velen is busy again

Steam's charts did not need persuading. Tracking site SteamDB logged a peak of about 120,000 concurrent players on 29 September, with other trackers putting the figure above 105,000 within hours of release — remarkable numbers for a single-player role-playing game that first shipped eleven years ago, and a reminder that a free upgrade is the cheapest marketing a back catalogue ever gets.

Not every change has been welcomed. The flying birds that drift across the Continent's skies were famously modelled in hilariously low detail, and a corner of the internet spent the week before launch worrying that a remaster would tidy them out of existence. Early play reports, as catalogued by AUTOMATON, suggest the low-poly pigeons survived the upgrade — a small mercy for a meme that CD Projekt Red's own Japanese account has happily posted about since 2024.

The remaster is not the last of it either. CD Projekt Red has already announced Songs of the Past, a new expansion returning Geralt to the Path, which is still listed as coming soon on Steam — so the remaster is best read as groundwork for selling more of the same witcher to the same people.

Our opinion

Free upgrades are easy to romanticise, and this one is genuinely generous, but it is also a trade. Everybody gets a prettier Continent; in exchange, every veteran with a carefully tuned build logs in to a wiped skill screen and a tree to relearn. That is a fair deal, not a gift, and it is worth saying plainly because the marketing will do the opposite.

What the numbers actually prove is narrower and more interesting than “people love The Witcher”. A 120,000-player launch spike on Steam days before CD Projekt Red starts selling a new expansion shows the studio has something most publishers would pay for and cannot buy: a back catalogue that people will reinstall on command. The remaster is not a remake of a classic so much as a live test of that audience — and on day one, it passed.