The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered gives a decade old game a facelift worthy of yet another playthrough

Tomorrow sees the re-launch of a decade-old game that every RPG released since is still compared to: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The Witcher franchise is a universe very close to my heart. Prior to 2015, I didn't have any interactions with it, but The Witcher 3 brought it crashing into my periphery, and I've never looked back.

In 2015, I suffered a family bereavement that resulted in me being signed off work sick for a number of weeks. In those weeks, I holed up in a room, didn't get dressed, and fired up this new game everyone was raving about... The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and completely lost myself in it. So began a new obsession; I went back and played The Witcher 2, and I ordered and devoured all of the books, even downloading translations of later ones that hadn't been translated into English yet.

I was utterly transfixed by the world of Geralt, Ciri, and Yennefer, and really used my obsession to completely distract myself from the real-life breakdown I was having. It was like therapy (and probably much cheaper), and since then I've had more than just a normal love of the game, as I genuinely credit it for dragging me out of a dark period of time.

I was more than a little emotional when Songs of the Past was announced, as it gives me an opportunity to go back to this world once more. Well, I say an opportunity; I've had multiple playthroughs of The Witcher 3 over the years and seen the various updates it's gone through, way up to 4.04, and now we are blessed with a whole damn remaster.

The original game was an effortless 5 out of 5 at launch. If I could rate this new Version 5.0 remaster higher than a 5, I would in a heartbeat. But you didn't come here to read my blithering diatribe on why I love The Witcher franchise so much; you want to know what's actually new with the remaster and whether it’s worth diving back onto the Path. Well, let's get down to it.

Fluid combat and a modernized progression system

The biggest criticism of the original Witcher 3 was the combat system, and it’s a criticism I never really shared with the masses anyway. I have always liked it, jank and all, but I think CDPR has done a good job with introducing smoother swing connections and subtle animation tweaks. Geralt practically pirouettes with grace while swinging his sword and I find the dynamic camera the most noticeable improvement here as it swings much more naturally during large encounters.

We also get brutal new Sign-integrated execution animations (like explosive Aard finishers) that make moment-to-moment skirmishes feel infinitely more interesting. The fire effects on Igni alone have made using signs feel more impactful.

Character progression has received a shake-up too. The core skill tree remains structurally familiar but with subtle adjustments that make individual abilities feel much better suited to the faster tempo of modern action-RPGs. It's been simplified so you don't have to choose exclusively between strong or fast attack builds, for example.

Toxicity, mutations and bomb skills have all moved into Alchemy with some cool poison scaling options I've yet to try out but once I get my hands on the Viper set I'll give them a whirl.

Transmogrification is finally here too. Abeit you have to 'unlock' it later in the game in Skellige. You can map the visual appearance of any piece of armor or weapon onto your preferred stats, meaning you no longer have to sacrifice fashion for function. Modders have been doing this for years, mind you, but us console peasants can finally look as stylish as we like.

The visuals and technical overhaul

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If you thought the 2022 next-gen update was the ceiling of how good this old game could look, Version 5.0 blows that out of the water. Powered by heavy optimizations, path tracing, and ray reconstruction, the lighting and environmental fidelity surpassed my relatively low expectations. Character models and the bouncing torchlight off faces in particular look great during the night cycles.

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Environmental assets are starkly improved, something most visible when looking at the foliage around you. Surface textures have more detail than before, and distant mountains have been completely rebuilt to an incredible standard. Stepping into Velen or Novigrad almost feels like a brand-new setting with the reworked lighting and asset density.

Now it's not all perfect; there are some areas in the game that seem either a little too washed out or too dark following the visual upgrade, but we were told in the preview phase that we would encounter occasional visual issues or inconsistencies, as well as some minor gameplay bugs. These had been reported to the dev team and should be fixed ahead of launch, fingers crossed.

Quality of life and UI upgrades

The UI has also gone through an overhaul, transforming into something far more compact and intuitive that fits a modern RPG release rather than a decade-old classic. Menu navigation has been improved, and you open back up to whatever tab you were last looking at. Loot now merges, too, so you can just loot a bunch of corpses at once rather than one at a time.

Roach still occasionally fights pathing or handles awkwardly on sharp turns which is frustrating during the race quests, but traversal overall feels much cleaner, and hey I love Roach being a little awkward, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Also, thank the lord we now actually have Xbox Play Anywhere. Cross-progression was always pretty good between platforms via the Red launcher, but I don’t have to switch launchers anymore when playing on Xbox and then switching to my ROG. I can just switch between Xbox PC and console now without fiddling with passwords.

What I will say though is where the 4.04 version worked perfectly on my Xbox ROG Ally X, the Remaster stutters considerably and some floor textures just refuse to load. I think many of these issues will be solved with an early patch, as previously mentioned, but I'm going to hold off on playing the upgrade on my handheld until these fixes are implemented.

So do you really need another 100 hours in The Witcher 3?

For repeat visitors to The Continent like me, it's a great excuse to fire up the game again and refresh my knowledge of the story not long before Songs of the Past arrives next year — and of course it's completely free if you already own it.

What really gets me, though, is the sheer level of respect behind it all. CDPR didn’t really need to spend a fortune or break a sweat on this release. Given the game’s self-sustaining popularity, they could have just pushed out the update on a Tuesday and let word-of-mouth do its thing. Instead, they’ve poured resources into an enormous presence at Gamescom, hosted panels at BlizzCon, and handed out early review access to a massive wave of creators, large and small.

I really think it’s commendable to see a studio treat an 11-year-old game like a major tentpole launch simply because they know how much their community still cares about it. Let alone just giving out two massive expansions (Heart of Stone and Blood of Wine) for free. If I could give this a 6 out of 5, I would!

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