One of the drawbacks of the original The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was it’s less-than-stellar combat which paled in comparison to most of the other aspects of the open world fantasy RPG such as it’s central narrative and characterizations. But developer CD Projekt Red is about to release a significantly overhauled version of their seminal RPG featuring improved combat and a whole lot more mechanical advancements aimed at delivering a far more enjoyable gameplay experience, thus ironing out all the kinks of the original Witcher 3.
The remastered version of The Witcher 3 comes with tweaked combat, improved traversal and movement, revamped mount handling, enhanced monster behaviors, a skill tree revamp, armor transmog, an expanded photo mode, new finishers and much more, ensuring a significant improvement over the original in terms of moment-to-moment gameplay.
Also, other additions include cross-platform mod support, new quest tracking, immersive meditation, refined animations, UI improvements, a looting rework, refreshed motion blur, new accessibility features, a tutorial modernization along with visual updates such as HDR improvements, a foliage shading rework, ray-tracing improvements, a global lighting rework, new shading model, subsurface scattering and more. There’s also support for Nvidia DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4, Intel XESS 2.0, path tracing and ray reconstruction on PC, native DX12 and rendering parallelization along with ray-traced hair.
The developers also spoke briefly on The Witcher 4 which is currently in development and is slated to be released on 2028: “The Witcher 4 features a huge and immersive open world, intense and action-packed gameplay, and a deep, impactful story that we hope will stay with you for a long time. Simply put, this is our biggest, boldest, and most ambitious game to date.”
“Now I know you’re eager to learn when it’s coming. That’s the question we’re hearing from you all the time. So while we’re not showing The Witcher 4 at the event, and we’re not ready to share an exact date, I can tell you this: The Witcher 4 is targeting a 2028 release window.
“I know it’s a bit of a wait and you’d love to play it sooner, but let the team cook. It will be worth the wait. Until then, there will be plenty more of The Witcher to come, including Songs of the Past when it launches in 2027. And you can be sure gamescom is also in our plans for the coming years.”
The Witcher 3 was confirmed to reach 50 Million sold units in 2023 which means the decade old RPG had managed to move 10 Million additional copies in the past two years, which is extremely impressive and rare for a title that originally came out back in 2015.
The Witcher 3 Remastered is scheduled to come out as a free upgrade for all owners of the base game on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on September 29.
