Story Highlights
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered launches September 29 as a free upgrade for existing owners.
- CD Projekt Red’s reveal trailer packed in more than 30 individual gameplay, visual, and technical improvements.
- All current owners already have free access to the Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions, starting today.
CD Projekt Red used Gamescom Opening Night Live to drop one of the biggest surprises of the show: an 11-year-old game getting an overhaul this substantial.
A Free Upgrade, Not A Paid Remake
CD Projekt Red confirmed at Gamescom that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered launches September 29, 2026. It’s free for existing owners on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. The game is also coming to two brand new platforms for the first time: a native Nintendo Switch 2 version, and Battle.net, through a new partnership with Blizzard Entertainment. Anyone who buys the game on Battle.net will unlock a Geralt-inspired skin in Diablo 4.
There’s an extra bonus that landed immediately. Every current Witcher 3 owner now has free access to both original expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, starting today, well ahead of the Remastered launch itself.
Every Change Confirmed So Far
The reveal trailer packed in far more detail than a typical remaster announcement. Here’s everything confirmed:
- Enhanced combat with new finishing moves and skills
- Boosted, more dynamic traversal and vaulting
- Revamped mount handling
- Enhanced monster behaviors
- A skill tree revamp
- Transmogrification support
- Expanded photo mode
- Cross-platform mod support
- “Immersive meditation”
- Refined animations
- New quest tracking
- General UI improvements
- A full looting rework
- Refreshed motion blur
- New accessibility features
- Updated textures
- Foliage shading rework
- Tutorial modernization
- HDR improvements
- GTAO (ground truth ambient occlusion)
- Improved menu navigation
- Ray tracing improvements
- Global lighting rework
- A new shading model
- Subsurface scattering
- A new tone mapper
- PS5 Pro support
- Xbox Play Anywhere support
- Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive features
- Nvidia DLSS 4.5 support
- AMD FSR 4 support
- Intel XeSS 2.0 support
- Path tracing on PC
- Ray reconstruction on PC
- Raytraced hair
- Native DirectX 12
- Rendering parallelization
That’s a genuinely massive list for a free upgrade, spanning everything from combat feel to how light bounces off Geralt’s hair. CD Projekt Red hasn’t detailed how the more demanding visual features, like path tracing, will be split across different performance and quality modes yet.
Development Behind Remastered And What’s Next
Remastered is being co-developed with Yigsoft, a Hungarian studio that’s already worked with CD Projekt Red on Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and the previous Witcher 3 Complete Edition. The Witcher 3’s original base game and expansions have sold more than 65 million copies combined and racked up over 250 Game of the Year awards since its 2015 launch.
Remastered arrives ahead of Songs of the Past, the game’s third expansion, which also got its first proper look during the same showcase. Songs of the Past sends Geralt to a brand new region called Letten and is being developed by Fool’s Theory, a studio staffed with Witcher 3 veterans. It launches as a paid expansion sometime in 2027, and it’s already available to wishlist. For everything else confirmed at this year’s showcase, our Gamescom Opening Night Live rundown covers the rest of the lineup.
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