It's hard to believe it's been over a decade since The Witcher 3 first released, and even harder to believe they found a way to make Geralt's tub transformation even shinier. The seminal open world RPG's hotly anticipated remaster has finally arrived, and it's pulling people back into the Continent all these years later (now more than ever on Steam, according to SteamDB).

The new screaming high is a whopping 123,359, which it just reached an hour ago as I write this. It's settling down now, but still pretty impressive given that its peak in August was just over 30,000. The game might be getting on in years, but it's still one of the best in its genre.

When PC Gamer's Shaun Prescott first reviewed it in 2015, he scored the game a mighty 92% and called it "a big, beautiful, sprawling action RPG full of rich stories, and suffused with an oppressive darkness."

It may not have been a huge stride forward for the style, instead feeling like innumerable tiny steps: a bar-setting journey through Andrzej Sapkowski's setting with all the graceful execution of an Olympic gold medalist's platform dive. "The Witcher 3 doesn’t bring much that’s bracingly new to the modern RPG. It’s a series of refinements," he wrote.

It probably helps that the remaster is free if you already own the base game, which has been a Steam sale mainstay since it released to all that universal acclaim. Even with all the new bells and whistles, it's half-off as we speak for Steam's autumn sale. If you want to dive in for the first time or start a new playthrough you'll definitely finish, check out all the mods which have gotten compatibility upgrades or read our guide on how to improve Geralt's fashion sense.

The past is a foreign country, and they do things differently there. At least, this is how I explain PC Gamer of yore's selection of Metal Gear Solid 5 for Game of the Year 2015. Meaning no offence to MGS5—a game I spent several hundred hours obtaining every achievement in, just to have an excuse to play more—speaking personally? Nothing's knocking The Witcher 3 off the pedestal of 2015's greatest triumph.

And now CDPR has gone over the whole thing with a fine brush, tweaking and enhancing it to second-quarter-of-the-21st-century fidelity. You might say, 'Didn't that happen several years ago?' Poor reader, that was merely a "next-gen update." Now is the time of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered.

There is already discourse, to no one's great surprise. Are the graphical enhancements good? Are they bad? Do they wrench The Witcher 3's beating aesthetic heart from its chest and stomp it into the dirt? I'm not exaggerating; people really are talking like this. Ignore them. It looks excellent. In the course of play I've found myself stopping regularly just to survey a sunset skybox, or the way tender motes of light slip through Geralt's beard. Actually, I've not been doing that second one. Don't put in the article that I'm doing the second one.

There is a way in which certain game worlds become home. They become actual spaces, fixed in your mind like places from your past. That's The Witcher 3 to me: its battlefields; its main city; and clean, icy Skellige, which arrives towards the game's end like a therapy session after it has spent tens of hours oppressing you with the first two regions. Going back feels like, well, going back—walking streets that were yours as someone younger, looking at nondescript corners and patches of pavement and remembering the specific, personal myths and legends that played out there in now-dead ages.

And it looks excellent, of course. Better than it did before, which means just as good as you remember it. So not only is The Witcher 3 Remastered like going home, it's like going home and finding someone has, in your absence, been in and aired the place out, run a duster around, and reupholstered the furniture. There are some lovely little additions too—minor new features and mechanics to smooth your way through the world.

You can, for instance, now see all your myriad quest objectives on the world map, and you can flip between focused quests (and objectives) right there with a squeeze of a gamepad trigger. The HUD is less cluttered, and a new loot feed tells you what stuff you've picked up or been given, which is rather nice for the myriad quests that end with someone telling you 'Here, take this,' without ever telling you what 'this' is.

There have been changes to the game's combat, too. Some fiddling to sand down some of the old jank. This may be very noticeable to some people, but I confess it's not to me. If, 11 years ago, you fired up The Witcher 3 and bounced off in revulsion at how its swordplay and sign-slinging felt, I don't think you're going to experience a sudden conversion here. That's no bad thing. I'd be upset if The Witcher 3 no longer felt like The Witcher 3, but I do wonder if CDPR was perhaps overegging the pudding with its stated goal of making the game feel, mechanically, like it released in 2026.

The Witcher 3 Remastered is a lovely little present and, with a brand-new expansion called Songs of the Past currently pencilled in to arrive some time in 2027, an excellent excuse, especially now both of the other expansions are free.

Obviously, I need to generate a new, 100%-complete save to take into the new DLC. And hey, I obviously need to see every inch of the game's newly remastered world.

What an autumn treat: a series of warm, placid nights await me, curled up on a sofa and making my way through Geralt's Big Adventure again. It's like 2015 never really went away.

In the mere two days since The Witcher 3: Remastered released on PC, its Nexus Mods page has been a hive of activity, featuring updates for all sorts of customization packages for the game—including ones you'll only install if you're a coward.

By my count, more than 450 Witcher 3 mods are either newly released or updated since September 29, an overwhelming number if you thought you'd just poke your head in and see what's been going on. One thing that's going on is that a lot of mods are now using AI image generation to create thumbnails that immediately give me the ick. Why create a fake, AI-glazed screenshot for your HUD mod when we all know what The Witcher 3 actually looks like? Baffling!

Another thing that's going on, thankfully, is that some modders with names like GrimReaper2121 are still putting in good work with creations such as De-mastered Geralt. And loads of mods that date back to the 2010s, making them mainstays of The Witcher 3's mod scene, have been updated to play nice with the latest patch.

Here's a quick list of some notable ones:

• The Witcher 3 Mod Manager
• Fast Travel From Anywhere
• Boat Races
• No time for Gwent
• Complete Animations Redux
• Sort Everything
• AutoLoot Advanced Settings
• HUD Scaling Fix (All Aspect Ratios)
• Enhanced Camera
• The Stable - Roach-Horse Customization Mod
• Increased Creature Loot
• More Money For Traders
• Hoods
• New Clouds
• Jump in Shallow Water
• Disable storybook intro warnings videos

That last mod comes bundled with a perfect example of the kind of pure modder artistry you get when you use good ol' MS Paint for a thumbnail instead of some weird, cursed AI image generator.

This is the kind of thing we need more of in the world:

We also should all spend more time jumping in shallow water, preferably with our besties. That's the good stuff.

What happened

• The Witcher 3's good (and available early) Griffin armour set is notorious for giving Geralt a 'dadbod' with the silhouette of a jaunty paunch.
• Some people, weak of heart and deficient of spirit, find that objectionable.
• The dadbod armour remains in The Witcher 3's recent remaster.
• Rejoice! A mod to fix it is already remaster-compatible.
• But you will be judged for using it. By me.

Is it morally wrong to slim down Geralt?

The Witcher 3 Remastered is out today, a seriously beefy update to one of the greatest RPGs of all time, and if you've noticed that there sure seems to be a lot of negative reviews flooding in on Steam, consider that a reminder that it's time to update your drivers.

This applies most specifically to owners of AMD GPUs: After hundreds of users dropped negative reviews for the remaster due to technical and performance issues (many of which praised the game effusively otherwise, such is the way with user reviews), CD Projekt said on X that new AMD GPU drivers have been rolled out and urged users to update before starting the game.

Response to the suggestion has been mixed: Updating the drivers appears to have fixed the problem for some, while issues persist for others, and some players just don't care for the onslaught of eye candy. (Frankly, that's how I feel about the whole "wetter Geralt" situation.) Ultimately, while there's no such thing as a silver bullet in PC gaming, it is good advice: Having problems? Update your drivers.

We all know that path tracing is a bit of a GPU hog, and if you plan on running it in the remaster of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, you're going to need a beefy and relatively new rig for this graphical mode. However, to get the game up and running on the lowest settings at 30 fps, you won't need a very recent GPU.

With The Witcher 3 Remastered going live today, CD Projekt Red has shared what you can expect to run with every major CPU and GPU brand, with Low graphics at 30 fps requiring a relatively meagre Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 / AMD Radeon RX 550 XT / Intel Arc A580, plus an Intel Core i5 8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600.

However, for path tracing, you will need an Intel Core i9 13900K or AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080. To get the estimated 60 fps at 4K, you will have to not only run DLSS, but you will need to use frame generation. That does mean it should fare better at 1440p or 1080p. CD Projekt Red does not specify which level of upscaling (though it says it's on Auto, whatever that means) or what level of frame generation is present for this setting.

As we saw in our investigation of Pragmata's path tracing earlier this year, we are expecting The Witcher 3 Remastered's path tracing to offer better shadows and highlights to generally make the world feel more 'real'. However, whether or not it's worth the hit to performance will be dependent on your tastes (and your rig). I'm not personally sold on even ray tracing's benefits all of the time, so it would be a tough sell for me, even if I had a rig good enough to run it.

Also notably, the RX 9070 XT isn't listed as an option for this top-tier graphics mode. That's most likely because this GPU struggles more than equivalent Nvidia ones to deal with path tracing, and at any rate it's less powerful in general than the RTX 5080 listed.

At the higher end, the 24 GB memory requirement may be tough for some rigs, what with the memory crisis continuing to rage. Still, the bottom end of this table isn't too bad. The GTX 1660 was a mid-range graphics card that launched seven years ago. That does mean that your rig you played the original The Witcher 3 on at launch won't be able to run the new remaster even on low settings, in case you were wondering.

But if you own the original game, you will be able to play the new remaster for free, and the Complete Edition is half off if you somehow don't already have it. With a new expansion out next year, it might finally be time for that replay.

The Witcher 3 Remastered is coming out on September 29, which is tomorrow. That doesn't leave you a lot of time to make up your mind about whether you want to jump back in. So I, with a certain amount of assistance from CD Projekt Red, am here to help.

To begin, we must answer a question:

HAVE YOU PLAYED THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT?

If you answered no, and you have any appreciation for RPGs at all, then your situation just got a whole lot easier because, resoundingly, yes. Yes, you do want to jump in. With that out of the way, I will refer you to our guide to Witcher 3 Remastered release times around the world, so you can get on it.

If you answered yes, on the other hand, it gets a bit more complicated. We've already covered the lighting that had us like, 'Damn,' and wetter Tub Geralt, surely a compelling argument in favor. But if it's details you're after, here's the lowdown on what CD Projekt says are "the most important changes" coming to the new game.

Actually, before we get to that, we've also now got full and detailed system specs for a range of systems—CD Projekt revealed the new minimum spec earlier this year, but this new listing goes all the way up to the very high end. Note one change from the previously announced minimum: 60GB of SSD drive space is required instead of the previously indicated 70GB, but you'll need 95GB if you get The Witcher 3 Remastered on the Epic Games Store. (I don't know why, sorry.)

As far as the rest of the rundown on "important changes," there's a lot going on here and it's not just a visual glow-up. A handful o' highlights:

Of particular note are the new Accessibility options, including the new "Bard's Ballad" preset that aims to "reduce cognitive load for players who experience mental fatigue or have difficulty concentrating" by streamlining or disabling certain mechanics and features "for a smoother, more focused adventure."

I think this is a great idea: I generally like The Witcher's fussy systems (don't forget to brew your potions before a big fight!) but I can also easily understand why some people would want to just get to the good stuff without having to futz around.

Also note, for veteran Witcher-players who are still on the fence, that all of this is free for existing owners—consider yourselves nudged in the direction of do it.

Anyway, finally, here it is: Every change in The Witcher 3 Remastered that CD Projekt felt was important enough to write down.

Visual and Rendering

• Implemented an improved shading model.
• Updated multiple textures and models based on assets from The Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project.
• Improved lighting and shading for grass and foliage.
• Updated the visual effects of Signs, including their upgrade versions.
• Added new visual effects for skills.
• The game now features native DirectX 12 rendering with multithreading for better performance and visuals.
• Updated tone mapping for improved colors, lighting, contrast and detail.
• Added GTAO (Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion) as a new Screen Space Ambient Occlusion option.
• Added Ray-Traced Local Shadows.
• Updated Screen Space Reflections.
• Updated Screen Space Shadows.
• Updated the HDR calibration panel by adding new options and other improvements.
• Improved Motion Blur with a higher-quality, more cinematic look.
• Updated Subsurface Scattering for more natural skin rendering.
• Improved terrain and material rendering for more natural lighting, shadows, reflections, and highlights.
• Implemented new Image-Based Lighting (IBL) for improved ambient lighting and reflections across different environments.
• Reworked Bloom for more improved lighting effects across different environments.

Gameplay

• Improved the skill system. Skills are now organized into a skill tree and each skill has three ranks. Unlocking new skills now requires having the necessary prerequisite skills rather than spending a set number of skill points. IMPORTANT: As a result of these changes, your skill points have been reset.
• Rebalanced the skill tree by refining skill bonus values, effects and synergies.
• Renamed some skills to better reflect their effects.
• You can now Reforge your equipment to change its appearance without affecting its stats. Only master craftsmen (Yoana and Hattori) offer this service. Unlock appearances by adding new equipment and crafting diagrams to your inventory. Dyes from Blood and Wine applied to equipment will carry over to the reforged item.
• Polished the combat behavior of many non-boss monsters, including their attack patterns, counterattacks, movement, reactions, flight and the application of effects.
• Added a new "Horse control input sensitivity" slider in Settings → Controls.
• Improved Roach's and Geralt's movement, player control and animations:
• Refined Geralt's jumping animation so that it feels more natural and polished. Note: This doesn't affect jump distance and height.
• Added new finisher animations for Geralt.
• Added new idle animations for Geralt.
• Improved Geralt's ledge climbing, ladder climbing and vaulting animations as well as his speed for more responsive, fluid movement.
• Improved Geralt's gap closing animations in combat for smoother gameplay.
• Added a new exploration camera with increased FOV.
• Added a new dynamic combat camera to increase visibility when fighting enemies.
• Improved target-lock switching when moving the camera in combat.
• Updated collision avoidance when riding Roach.
• Polished animations for mounting and dismounting Roach, as well as cantering and galloping.

UI/UX

• Meditation now features a timelapse instead of a UI screen for a more immersive feel.
• The skill screen is now reorganized into a more intuitive skill tree layout.
• Updated the map screen to make switching between tracked quests easier. Untracked quests now have a distinct marker and can be tracked by selecting it.
• Increased the number of maximum markers on the map.
• Added new map markers.
• You can now hide herbs, boats and corpses on the minimap in Settings → Video → Interface for a cleaner, less distracting view.
• Improved quest notifications by combining quest updates into a single HUD notification.
• Nearby loot can now be grouped into a single window, so you no longer need to browse through multiple loot windows. You can enable this feature in Settings → Gameplay.
• Added a loot feed that displays recently collected items on the left side of the screen. You can disable it in Settings → Gameplay.
• Added item tooltips to the loot window, allowing you to preview an item's details before picking it up.
• Renamed the "HUD Configuration" section in Settings to "Interface".
• Updated the CD PROJEKT RED Account connection, My Rewards and telemetry consent menus.

Photo Mode

• Updated the Photo Mode UI and vastly expanded its features and options:
• You can now choose from multiple different characters to place in your shot.
• Added a selection of poses and expressions for Geralt and placeable characters.
• Added a confirmation prompt before exiting Photo Mode to help prevent accidental exits.
• You can now lock the camera position in Photo Mode to make sure you capture the perfect shot.
• Added the option to apply different environment presets to your scene.
• Added the option to save camera presets, allowing you to save and reuse camera positions and angles.
• You can now change the aspect ratio of your screenshot.
• Added the option to toggle a first-person camera mode so you can see the world through Geralt's eyes.
• You can now enable or disable camera collisions with objects and walls.
• Set the perfect scene by changing the weather and time of day.
• Adjust the intensity of weather effects like rain or storms.
• Added an option to toggle Rule of Thirds lines in various aspect ratios, with optional cinematic black bars.
• Camera coordinates will now be visible in the UI.
• Added an option to hide surrounding NPCs.
• Added placeable props, giving you even more ways to create the perfect scene. Just don't ask where they all came from.
• The cursor is now visible in Photo Mode on PC when using a mouse.

Accessibility

• Added a new Accessibility section to the Settings menu. Moved existing accessibility-related options there.
• Added the Bard's Ballad preset. You can enable it when starting a new game on the Just the Story difficulty or during the game in the Accessibility section. It is designed to reduce cognitive load for players who experience mental fatigue or have difficulty concentrating. It streamlines gameplay by simplifying certain mechanics and disabling select features for a smoother, more focused adventure. You can enable the preset in the Accessibility tab and customize it by enabling or disabling the following options:
• Vitality Regeneration Boost - Gives the possibility to adjust its activation threshold ("Activates below (%) Vitality") and the rate at which Vitality increases ("Regeneration Intensity").
• Infinite Breath - Geralt can't run out of oxygen while swimming and diving.
• Unlimited Item Durability - Your gear will never wear down, so there's no need to visit craftsmen for repairs.
• Unlimited Boat Durability - Boats are indestructible, making jagged rocks and sirens no longer a concern.
• Ignore Item Weight - Travel the Path carrying as much as you want.
• Faster Boats - Sail faster across the seas. The seas around Skellige just got a little bit smaller.
• Toggle Witcher Sense - Toggle on and off without having to hold the button.

Quality of Life

• Streamlined tutorials to keep them concise and focused on teaching core game mechanics. We think Vesemir would approve.
• Added an option to quickly disengage from combat. Hold the dodge button (Alt/〇/B) to unlock from your target, then press the sprint button (L Shift/X/A) to run away.
• You can now collect loot without dismounting Roach.

Modding

• Added Cross Platform Mod Support, an in-game tool powered by mod.io that allows you to easily browse and install player-created mods to customize your game. You can find it in the game's main menu in Mods. Log in with your CD PROJEKT RED Account, connect it to mod.io and start browsing. You can find more information about the Mod Manager here.
• Various engine, UI and other improvements for REDkit, making it easier for modders to create, manage and customize their content.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where it wasn't possible to change Right Stick Sensitivity if the settings were accessed directly from the main menu.
• It's now possible to set Stick Sensitivity to the value of 0.69.
• Fixed an issue where HDR settings would sometimes not appear on consoles.
• In the Eternal Fire's Shadow - Fixed an issue where the Forgotten Wolf School Gear Diagrams weren't displayed in the UI after being received as a reward.
• Wine is Sacred – Fixed an issue where fast traveling out of Toussaint during the "Search the wine cellar with Anna Henrietta" objective could block quest progression. This fix is not retroactive, so players who encountered this issue will need to load a save from before it occurred.

Other

• Added Ukrainian text localization.
• Added support for Xbox Play Anywhere.

PC-specific

• IMPORTANT: Make sure you have the latest graphics drivers installed. Grab them here: NVIDIA, AMD, Intel.
  • Added support for Path Tracing.
  • Added support for NVIDIA DLSS 4.5, together with Ray Reconstruction.
  • Added support for AMD FSR 4, including Frame Generation and Anti-Lag 2. FSR 4 is supported on AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series and newer graphics cards. On unsupported GPUs, the game will use FSR 2 instead.
  • Added support for Intel XeSS 2.0, together with Frame Generation and Low Latency.
  • Added Ray-Traced HairWorks for improved lighting and shading on hair.
  • Added support for DualSense controller haptic feedback.

That the quest 'Family Matters' stands out as the best quest in The Witcher 3—a game filled with great storytelling and characters—is a true testament to the skill of its creators. That's why it's so exciting that one of the main forces behind it, writer Karolina Stachyra, has returned to CD Projekt after a decade away.

Stachyra's LinkedIn profile indicates that she's been working with the studio as a freelance consultant since February, and returned as a full-time writer in August. The quiet comeback went unnoticed until the weekend, though, when b0ysbrokenheart posted about it on X.

And here's the good stuff:

CD Projekt confirmed that Stachyra is indeed back in the fold, but declined to comment on what she's currently working on.

WHY ARE PEOPLE EXCITED?

We laid it out in 2015: What appears to be a simple missing persons job for Geralt slowly, painfully unwinds into "The Witcher 3’s most emotional and disturbing quest," driven by the conflicted, compelling, and deeply tragic character of the Bloody Baron. As we put it back when all this was new:

"It takes very real, important subjects—alcoholism and domestic abuse—and deals with them in a brutal, heartbreaking, and honest way. But, thanks to the blood-curdling botchling, it still feels like part of The Witcher’s dark fantasy world. It’s superbly written, brilliantly acted, and the branching paths make it well worth replaying. It’s The Witcher 3 and developer CD Projekt RED at their absolute best, and was the highlight of the game for many players."

As the writer of the dialog and cutscenes in Family Matters, not to mention her work elsewhere in the game and on the Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions, Stachyra's return to CD Projekt—following turns as narrative director at Techland and GSC Game World—is great news for RPG fans, regardless of what game she's working on.

And since we're left to speculate on that, consider this: Ciri, the lead of the upcoming The Witcher 4, was a central character in the Family Matters quest and key to demonstrating the depth and nuance of the Bloody Baron, who treated her like a surrogate daughter. Might an adoptive family reunion be in the works? It's not the worst idea I've ever heard.

Original

Remastered

Let's cut to the chase: you come to this site for one reason and so do I—to examine photos of Geralt of Rivia in the bath. The Witcher 3's remaster launches tomorrow, so here is the most important before and after you will see on a videogames website.

You know? I do think he looks better now. Shinier, anyway. Isn't that the point of a good soak, to shine yourself up?

We still don't know a huge amount about The Witcher 4. But we do know it represents two big changes for the series thus far. The first change is, of course, that Ciri will replace Geralt as the lead character. The second is that CD Projekk will replace its in-house REDengine with Unreal Engine 5.

There's been considerable speculation as to why CDP is abandoning tech that's delivered some of the most cutting-edge visuals of the last decade, with some fans suggesting that Cyberpunk 2077's difficult development and compromised initial release might be a factor. But the studio's co-CEO Michał Nowakowski has formally dismissed this suggestion, stating the decision had more to do with CD Projekt's general ambitions than Cyberpunk specifically.

Speaking on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast (via GamesRadar+), Nowakowski addressed the claim that Cyberpunk was the straw that broke REDengine's back: "A lot of people think like this, but this is a bit of a false assumption," he explained. "Because the issue with Cyberpunk was not really REDengine itself.

Instead, Nowakowski said that CD Projekt never really wanted to be an engine developer in the first place, stating that. "The dream of the company was actually never to make technology." He conceded that CD Projekt did want to make "visually and technically cutting edge games", for which in-house tech seemed to be the optimal solution for the studio. But what ultimately drives the company is "telling the stories in the most convincing and immersive way."

Hence, when CD Projekt's leadership saw The Matrix Awakens demo of Unreal Engine 5, they decided that adopting third-party tech would be preferable to continuing building their own tech. "If we form a relationship with Unreal and if we work on certain things which are specifically required to make games of the size and scope and certain technicalities about it that we need for games, it could actually work."

With this in mind, CD Projekt pitched a "strategic collaboration" to Epic, where they would not simply license the tech but influence its direction from the inside. "We're actually, I think, the only team in the world outside of Epic that deals with the inside of the 'black box' that the engine is. Nobody else is doing that except for us and them, which we do through collaborative efforts together," Nowakowski remarked.

It'll be interesting to see what impact CD Projekt's input has on Unreal Engine 5 going forward, since the tech has thus far gained a reputation for being a stuttering mess. I'm also intrigued as to whether CD Projekt's input is limited to Unreal Engine 5, or whether the studio's voice carries through to the AI-heavy Unreal Engine 6—given Nowakowski's previous statement that the company isn't "planning to rely on AI making complete games".

The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt Remastered releases on September 29 as a free upgrade for everyone who already owns the game. That's pretty exciting, even if you're like me and have played it through several times already: any excuse to reacquaint with the Butcher of Blaviken is welcome in my household, and the Songs of the Past expansion, scheduled for next year, feels like a dream.

Still, rather than replay The Witcher 3 over and over again I could opt to read the Andrzej Sapkowski books the games are based on. I could do that, but leaving aside the fact that reading doesn't have graphics or visceral interactive combat, there sure are a heck of a lot of Witcher books.

Thankfully a boxset exists gathering 8 of them. Amazon is currently selling this big ol' box for only AU$68, which is 50 percent cheaper than the usual AU$140. That RRP isn't too much to ask for eight sizeable fantasy novels and short story collections, so carving half that price off feels very generous indeed.

Significant caveat: since this boxset was released in 2024, it's missing the most recent instalment, Crossroads of Ravens, which released in September 2025. That's not something you should worry too much about: as my colleagues note in their rundown of The Witcher novels, Crossroads of Ravens is a standalone prequel, so you'll probably want to read the rest of them first anyway.

Once you do get the boxset (and they've very highly regarded in these parts) you'll probably want to know which order to read them in. This is not as straightforward a question as you would think: thankfully we have a resource for that.

To highlight what a good deal this is: the Kindle edition, an incorporeal digital license that you can't display on IRL bookshelves, is currently going for AU$94.99. Don't do that.

The Witcher 3 is getting an expansion, Songs of the Past, over a decade after its release—along with a pretty hefty remaster. And you might think hey, how is CD Projekt Red working on all of this and The Witcher 4 at the same time? The answer, like many studios, is that it's not doing it alone.

The studio's partnering up with Fool's Theory, a studio led by former CDPR folks, in a sort of cousinly collaboration. When speaking to PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens, Jakub Kutrzuba, an executive producer at CDPR, was asked if it was at all intimidating or scary to share The Witcher 3 with outside studios:

"Yes, yes it is, because we care very much about what we are doing here. Using this analogy of a baby? This is very correct. As a parent, I also think twice about leaving my baby with someone. But I know that there are people over there who are not me, who take the best care ever of them, and I think this is the case here. "

It helps that, as mentioned, Fool's Theory has former CDPR developers on its leadership (the studio was founded by Jakub Rokosz, a senior quest designer at the company). Kutrzuba says: "the fact that we have a really long history with many people from Fool's Theory … that helped a lot, because it's not like we needed to really understand the mindset and philosophy, make sure that we operate on the same level and we have the same aspirations.

"That was [already] clear, so that helped a lot. But it's never easy. Especially when we are thinking about collaborating on something where there is a lot of creative work, we are looking at these studios and the talent from the perspective of the narration. It's not an easy thing to tell a good story … but we would say this is what we want, right?"

In terms of searching for future partners for more projects—which'll be a necessity if they continue to broaden their scope—Kutrzuba says it's all a matter of making sure they've all got some basic assumptions down:

"There are studios over there like us who care about players, who care about what they are doing. It's not just a business for them. They want to do art. We want to do art, yeah? We consider games as art, and not everyone [does] over there.

"We know that having someone who operates in the same mindset is very helpful, because it helps us to be on the same page quicker. So we are also looking for some familiarity here and there, but I think that final part—and this can be maybe even the most important part—is the common understanding of quality.

"Because usually we are aiming very high, and it's so much easier to work with someone when you know that we have the same understanding of some abstract common words like what quality is, what high quality is, what CDPR quality is, what is a good story."

That understanding of story and art really is the main pillar, Kutrzuba insists: "If you don't have that, if you have a different understanding of the same terms, it creates a lot of tension during the development. So we are trying to make sure that before we start, we are partnering with people who understand these basic terms the same way as us."

The Witcher 3 is the perfect videogame. Is that hyperbolic? Maybe a bit. But it's unquestionably one of the greatest RPGs of all time, a game that arrived with a 92% review score and somehow got better through years of fixes, upgrades, and expansions, the last of which provided a perfectly satisfying conclusion to the epic of Geralt (and an even higher review score).

In his review for that brilliant denouement, former PC Gamer editor Tom Senior committed himself: "If one of these expansions came out every year I'd still be playing The Witcher 3 in 2020." Good news for Tom, then, because a surprise third expansion, Songs of the Past, is on the way in 2027, and a full remaster of the base game and first two expansions is set to drop ahead of that—later this month, in fact. CD Projekt Red has big ambitions for that remaster, aiming to make it not just look and run better, but to feel better too—like a new game, rather than a 2015 release with a fresh coat of paint.

There's clearly a lot going on, and it invites a question: Given the esteem in which The Witcher 3 is held, and the hard-earned ending it granted Geralt, is there any worry about messing with it? For CD Projekt's vice president of narration Marcin Blacha, who served as the lead writer of The Witcher 3 and story director on its two expansions, the answer is an easy 'no.'

"For me, The Witcher 3 is not a monument and is not untouchable," Blacha told us in a recent interview. "It is still vivid in my memory, and it is still something that is not maybe a point of reference, but something that still may be improved. When I'm playing The Witcher 3, I still find some places that I think maybe nowadays, I would do it differently.

"So, you know, adding a new expansion is not such a huge deal. In fact, discovering we still have it, you know, we have this thing, and we are still able to create a story that fits not only vanilla Witcher 3 but also Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. It is still a very uplifting feeling—a time machine that brings me 10 years back, when I was younger and maybe more passionate and more enthusiastic."

The remastered update is focused on visual and gameplay tweaks, but if he were going to fiddle with narrative elements, what sort of things would Blacha do differently? "Maybe some things I would make more nuanced," he continued, like adjusting Dandelion to make him a bit wiser and more supportive rather than just comedy relief, or adding more choices and consequences in Geralt's dealings with the world around him.

But Blacha also acknowledged that some of those changes would arise not from any problems or shortcoming in the game, but simply because—rather like Geralt—he's changed over the years.

"It may be as well, my process of aging, when I see some things from a different perspective. Maybe the problem is not in the game but in me, looking at the game with a different eye," Blacha said. That doesn't mean Songs of the Past will be the videogame equivalent of a grumpy old man sitting on his porch yelling at the kids, though.

"We have a crew that has both veterans from The Witcher 3, but also developers that joined Fool's Theory or the project quite recently," Blacha said. "So I hope it is not a geriatric expansion. It will be fueled very much by the passion of writers and quest designers and developers of Fool's Theory in general."

The Witcher 3's remastered update is set to launch on September 29, and will be free for anyone who owns the base game. The Songs of the Past expansion is currently slated for a 2027 launch.

If you need evidence that the team behind The Witcher 3's upcoming expansion, Songs of the Past, is composed of Bonafide Witcher Sickos, try this: the expansion's lead writer wrote her bachelor's thesis on Hearts of Stone almost a decade ago.

Fool's Theory's Paula Mejsner took a comparative literature scalpel to The Witcher 3's first expansion in her 2017 thesis—long before she got to work on the game itself—titled (in English) "Videogames as a way of experiencing literature: Analysis of the 'Hearts of Stone', a DLC to 'The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt'".

When I sat down to chat with her about her work on Songs of the Past, I had to do something that I'd never forgive someone else for doing to me: I asked her about it.

"That was at the time when I played Hearts of Stone, and The Witcher, and I was studying comparative literature. That's when I fell in love with The Witcher… [the thesis] touches upon what I said when it comes to how rich The Witcher is, when it comes to literary references."

Specifically, Mejsner wrote about how The Witcher channeled the spirits of classic Polish literature, "like The Wedding from Wyspiański and the whole character of Gaunter O'Dimm, as this devilish character that is also based on many, many other pieces of culture.

"I wanted to analyse it, and I did this to probably prove to some of my professors that games are worthy, and they are also texts of culture."

As for how the Mejsner of 2017 would feel about actually getting to write an expansion? She'd be pretty thrilled. "To be honest, I'm pretty proud with myself, that I did manage [to work on The Witcher]. But, you know, as always, there's been a lot of luck in the process. But yeah, it truly is a dream come true, because this is what I dreamt of when I wrote my thesis. It's pretty awesome to write Geralt."

The Witcher 3, being one of the best RPGs of its era, naturally has a lot of very good quests—quests with weighty, significant choices that give you pause to think. In speaking with PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens, story director Marcin Blacha says that pause is a sign that he and his team have done something right in a story choice.

"First of all, the choice has to make you think," Blacha says, "So it cannot be obvious. You cannot simply go after one of the choices by simply pressing A all the time, so that's the first thing. Second of all, in addition to having this balance, it needs to have its own gravitas. It must be serious. It must make you think about either life or humans or this particular problem or the difficulties that the characters may have right now.

"I always repeat that when you have a really big choice in The Witcher 3, it must be constructed in such a way that the player puts the controller away, stands up, and starts walking, thinking about the choice, and then goes back, and then the player picks one of the choices."

Which tracks—when I think back to the most impactful choices of the RPGs I've played, there's usually at least been a jarring, 'sit back and think' moment that's knocked me back into my chair, if not off it entirely:

"So it is about thinking," Blacha continues. "It is about making the player immersed into the game and the problems that characters have, but also saying something about either who we are or how the world works, or how difficult life can sometimes be."

In regards to the upcoming DLC, Songs of the Past, and whether it'll have any hard choices to make? "Obviously. I mean, we are not trying to avoid difficult choices, and we are not avoiding making players uncomfortable. So I can promise that you will have both in Songs of the Past, and sometimes you will regret [your choice] and you will need to load the game to repeat your choice."

As if September wasn't busy enough, The Witcher 3 is calling us again. CDPR's remaster will be launching as a free update on September 29. The studio's goal with this new version is to make it feel like a 2026 game, rather than a 2015 game that's been dusted off. And while this is the second time it's had a glow up, the team has been focusing on different things.

"The next gen update a few years ago, it was quite a substantial update," executive producer Jakub Kutrzuba tells us. "At the same time, it was driven by the new generation of consoles, so there was a specific need. We wanted to bring the game to the new generation, and it was very much technical oriented." With the remaster, however, CDPR's brief has been a lot broader.

"With the remaster, it is even bigger and it's also quite heavy, maybe even heavier on the technical level," says Kutrzuba, though it should still run fine on Steam Deck. "But what is more important is that we are touching these aspects of the game which weren't touched since we launched it. I'm talking about the animation. I'm talking about the gameplay. I'm talking about the quality of life, how you actually play the game."

CDPR realised that only doing another technical update "would probably not be enough". The team wanted to make it "shine again" and give both veterans and new players an experience that wouldn't contain any "bad surprises" or anything that would make them think that The Witcher 3 got old.

"We wanted to make it [comparable] with any other game which is launching these days," says Kutrzuba.

This meant that CDPR had to change the animation system, the camera work, enemy behaviour in combat, pathfinding, and then add all sorts of small quality of life improvements. Anywhere the team identified the potential for frustration, it made changes. Anything that could be done without "rebuilding the game from scratch", basically.

Kutrzuba says the best evidence that CDPR has succeeded is that the team can't go back to the old version of the game. "It's so easy to get used to these new improvements that it's hard to go back."

I can't deny I'm excited. But also, I don't have time to play all the brand new games coming out, so I definitely won't be replaying The Witcher 3 in 2026. Next year when the new expansion arrives, though? Yeah, I'm gonna be all over that.

The Witcher 3's recently revealed expansion Songs of the Past will bring more to CD Projekt's acclaimed fantasy adventure than a new region to explore and quests to pursue, it will also introduce a new weapon for Geralt of Rivia to wield—a gnarly silver chain. Well, "new" might not be a wholly appropriate term for it. Geralt's chain weapon—which appears in the novels—was originally seen in the opening cinematic for 2007's The Witcher, making it one of the earliest things players see in the trilogy. But it hasn't appeared as a tool players can use until now.

Apparently though, CD Projekt has previously considered introducing the chain, having discussed it more than a decade ago during The Witcher 3's original development: "We were talking about implementing the chain even during the original Witcher 3." Jakob Rokosz, Songs of the Past's Game Director, told BBC News (via GamesRadar+). "But it was impossible to do at the time for various technological reasons and challenges,

Rokosz didn't go into detail about what those challenges were. But reading between the lines, it sounds like they had to do with the chain's animations or physics engine. "A few things had to click together, because we were actually able to address those challenges and issues," Rokosz explained, noting that they did this during the remastering process for The Witcher 3. "Then we were able to implement a weapon that just feels natural and very fluid and basically realises the fantasy you either read in the books or have seen in the trailer."

But the chain isn't appearing solely because CD Projekt can do it. Senior quest designer Despoina Anetaki, who was also being interviewed by the BBC, explained that the weapon "fits with the narrative theming" of Songs of the Past. "It fits with the new enemies that work with the chain," she continued. "We were able to do crowd control with the swarmions that swarm you and you have to keep them away from you."

Swarmions, I should point out, are a somewhat unimaginatively named new enemy-type coming to Songs of the Past. It also sounds like the chain will act as an alternative to (or outright replacement for) the crossbow introduced in The Witcher 3. Anetaki describes it as "a very cool weapon for players who might be sick of the crossbow by now," suggesting it's designed to play a similar role.

If you want to know more about Geralt's silver chain, our own Joshua Wolens saw the weapon in action at Gamescom last month. Like the crossbow, the chain slows down time when you use it and lets you target specific body parts. Joshua had plenty else to say about Songs of the Past too, like how it focuses on Geralt's friendship with Dandelion, and how much livelier its new region feels than those of the base game and its expansions.

CD Projekt has a lot going on these days: The Witcher 4, Cyberpunk 2, a new Witcher 3 expansion and remaster, a remake of the original Witcher, probably some other stuff I've either forgotten or don't know about, and a couple of long-simmering mystery projects that are still only known by their codenames, Sirius and Hadar.

You'd be forgiven for forgetting about them, given their low profile and drawn-out development times, but in today's H1 investors call, CD Projekt's vice president of investor relations Karolina Gnaś reassured everyone that they're still happening—just not anytime soon.

Asked about Sirius, Gnaś mentioned the recent cuts to the development team, saying—as CD Projekt did when the layoffs happened—that the changes were made to meet "the current needs of the project."

"Pre-production is ongoing, and at this stage we are focused on testing different solutions and ideas we develop," Gnaś said. "This project is very different from our other projects because it's focused on multiplayer. So there's a lot of learning and testing in this particular one."

Sirius first came to light in 2021, when CD Projekt acquired The Molasses Flood, known for The Flame in the Flood, to work on a new game eventually revealed to be based on The Witcher. But the project ran into trouble a couple years later, and was paused and rebooted; in 2025, CD Projekt's plan to maintain The Molasses Flood as an effectively independent studio also came to an end.

Despite how little we know about Sirius, we know even less about Hadar. It's an all-new property, not based on The Witcher or Cyberpunk, although it will be similar to the extent that it aims to deliver "an emotional, open world experience." But aside from that? It's "progressing dynamically," whatever that means, but it's definitely not progressing rapidly: It too has been in the works since 2021, and Gnaś said it remains "in the concept phase," essentially where it was five years ago.

But it does sound like things might be ready to start picking up speed. "We currently have over 30 people and expect to hire more, up to 50 developers by the end of this year," Gnaś continued. "Right now the team is mostly focused on testing different approaches and ideas, and prototyping some gameplay elements." And then, with an amusing note of finality: "This is it."

Frankly, I'm not too bothered. I am genuinely curious about Hadar, because it's an original thing; Sirius, not so much, because multiplayer's not really my bag and a Witcher game that not all Geralt all the time is fundamentally less interesting to me anyway. But CD Projekt's got enough big stuff cooking I already know about, so if it wants to horse around with these other things until 2033 (or whatever—I have no insights here, 2033 is just suitably far off), that's fine by me.

These are big days for The Witcher 3: It's not only getting a full-on story expansion in 2027, a remaster of the base game is also coming later this month. Even better, anyone who owns the original Witcher 3 will get the remaster for free. That's pretty generous as these things go, but in an interview with The Game Business, CD Projekt co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said there was never any thought of doing it differently.

"It was never a question we asked ourselves," Nowakowski said. "We were going deeper into the development of Songs of the Past with Fool's Theory, and we started chatting: 'Why don't we make the game more modern? Everything felt like it was developed 10 years ago.' Because it was developed more than 10 years ago.

"We started chatting about what we could do to improve it. It started with small things and then it turned into this larger project, and we suddenly realized we had a remaster on our hands."

There's little doubt that existing Witcher 3 owners would've been willing to pony up for a modernized version of the game, especially with a new expansion on the way, but "we never thought about it this way," Nowakowski said. The Songs of the Past expansion is where CD Projekt will make money, but as far as the remaster goes, "we really felt this is the CDPR way to gift it to the players who already own it. It was just never a question we asked ourselves.”

CD Projekt doesn't exactly need the money—the company shared its H1 financials today, which saw revenues up nearly 25% over the same period in 2025 and an even bigger bump in profits from ongoing operation—but even so it's a nice move, particularly given that the remaster will include the Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions, making them free for anyone who only has the base game.

Full details on the remaster haven't been shared yet, but based on what we do know it sounds extensive, covering everything from visual improvements to "enhanced combat" and new finishers, new monster behaviors, a revamped skill tree, and my personal favorite, "immersive meditation." It's set to go live on September 29, and will replace The Witcher 3: Complete Edition on digital storefronts.

I don't like waging into gaming romance wars—things got a bit dicey with Ada and Claire—but it seems that I am yet to learn my lesson because here I am again with the news that Geralt's one true love isn't Yennifer or Triss, it's his trusty and talkative bard, Dandelion. At least Geralt's gaming voice actor Doug Cockle believes there's something special between the two.

During a chat with PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens at Gamescom last week (where he also saw Songs of the Past in action) Geralt's voice actor Doug Cockle revealed that, yes, he thinks Dandelion may in fact be his character's better half, but there's a catch: "I would say yes, but in a very platonic way.

Cockle says he doesn't want to liken their relationship to the cliche that is "bros over hoes" because "it's a horrible phrase" but there is a seed of truth to it in how Geralt prioritises Dandelion over some of the other characters in The Witcher 3.

"I think there is a bit of that in Geralt's and Dandelion's relationship that you know," Cockle says. "Whenever Dandelion is in trouble, Geralt drops everything, and he's off to save him."

Just look to The Wild Hunt's first main quest in Act 1, Poet Under Pressure, in which Geralt has to track Dandelion down, kill the Witch Hunter, and free him as he's tied to a chair in a halflings' hut.

"Depending on your choices in The Witcher 3, I think [Geralt] does drop Yen or Triss or somebody," Cockle adds. "Yes, it's one of his romantic interests. You know, at the drop of a hat, just goes. I gotta go [and save Dandelion]."

The quest that comes to mind here is Count Reuven's Treasure where Geralt has to ignore the sounds of Triss being tortured to get information on Dandelion's whereabouts. Although there are other reasons as to why this is the best decision, and Triss can certainly hold her own.

With all of this in mind Dandelion's voice actor John Schwab is eager to point out that just because Geralt is always around to aid Dandelion "that doesn't mean that Geralt is like 'Yay! It's saving Dandelion time again'." To which Cockle adds "yeah, it's 'awe he's in trouble again' you know". Imagine that said in a somewhat exasperated tone—it shouldn't be too hard to do so.

It's often said that good artists borrow, and great artists steal. And given Doug Cockle, the voice actor for Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher 3, has been in the rare position of getting to see a character he's played for years in videogames debut on streamed TV, portrayed for a stint by Henry Cavill (and now Liam Hemsworth), you might wonder if he has taken any notes.

"No," he tells PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens at Gamescom 2026. "Because we were first."

John Schwab, voice actor for the longtime friend of Geralt, Dandelion, joins in with some friendly ribbing of Netflix: "And I still haven't got a call for a cameo. Have you?" he asks Cockle. "No!" Cockle replies, to which Schwab emphatically says: "Come on, guys!"

Cockle does say that he's asked the showrunners—though it's unclear if this is a joke or not—to "bring me in every episode. Just put me in the background. Pull a Stan Lee or something, y'know? Pull a Stan Lee. But did they do it? No."

Despite the friendly elbows going on, though, Schwab is quick to give his compliments: "I like Dandelion, I like Jaskier, he's a fun guy. I really think [Joey Batey] has really done a good job in finding the depths, and it's gone a completely different way.

"But just like—you know, Doug, did you play Benedick in Much Ado [About Nothing]? Doug wasn't the first person to play that part. So you kind of created your Geralt," to which he pins on: "I think they stole stuff from you—come on, let's be fair."

Doug responds: "Well—mmn," as Schwab quite literally snickers in the background. "Henry is on record saying that my performance as Geralt—I can't remember if he used 'informed' or 'inspired' his approach to how he did it, as well. He didn't copy me, he went 'Doug's Geralt is cool, I want to do something like that', and then he turned it into his own. Which is what all artists do and should do, anyways. And he did a fantastic job of it."

We're going to get Cockle do his own, bespoke fantastic job in The Witcher 3's upcoming DLC, Songs of the Past, which Josh saw in action.

As is the case with a lot of older games (I regret to inform you that The Witcher 3 is 11 years old) that get the remaster treatment, there's been some anxiety over whether The Witcher 3 Remastered will run properly on the Steam Deck—especially given it'll be a free update. It's always frustrating when some new glossy graphics pack messes with your hardware.

Well, fear not—speaking to PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens ahead of Gamescom 2026, CD Projekt Red's executive producer of external projects Jakub Kutrzuba has told us that The Witcher 3 Remastered will run just as well on your Steam Deck, thanks to general optimisation improvements with the new rendering engine.

"When it comes to Steam Deck, based on what we see, the game will work the same way, but look much much better. Because from one side we are bringing all these improvements, we are bringing new content, we are upgrading the assets, but [we also have] the new rendering features."

These features, Kutrzuba says, give the game more hardware budget for all those fancy spangled new assets and textures: "With the newer rendering engine, many of the systems just work faster. So we are just capable of showing a more beautiful image with the same cost, and this is also the case for the Nintendo Switch 2, which is coming together with the Remaster as well."

So, no, the Remaster isn't some monster that'll eat all of your Steam Deck's RAM. In general, CD Projekt seems to've learned its lesson after the horror show of Cyberpunk 2077, with its developers boasting solid performance out of The Witcher 4, as well. You'll be able to engage in some cosy, lo-fi monster slaying in the windswept, freshly-beautified White Orchard without fretting about frame drops.

Which is good, because given Wolens' stellar impression of the Remaster's graphical update, you'll want to.

Cyberpunk 2077 now is one of the best RPGs money can buy. But Cyberpunk 2077 then, which is to say when it was new, was not. It was pretty okay on PC, aside from a horde of bugs, but it was such a performance catastrophe on the PlayStation 4 that Sony literally booted it off the PlayStation Store. Even when it was allowed back in the building six months later, Sony slapped a notice on it warning people that it was still potentially dodgy.

Speaking to Game Developer, CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said that failure arose from the studio's ambitions for the game, which led it to develop on PC first. "We want[ed] to push the boundaries of what is doable in terms of cinematic feeling and whatnot [in Cyberpunk 2077], and PC was just the best suited rig for that," Nowakowski said. "There was this, as it turned out, false belief that toning it down to whatever was the current gen is not going to be that much of a challenge."

There was also a little bit of belief in a Polish take on the ol' Bioware magic: Nowakowski said the studio "got a bit lucky here and there" with The Witcher 3, leading it to believe that Cyberpunk would ultimately be fine too.

Of course, Cyberpunk 2077 was most definitely not fine, and with that humiliation firmly burned into its collective consciousness, CD Projekt Red is approaching The Witcher 4 with a little more care and consideration to ensure the new game runs properly on all platforms it's coming to. If development hits a snag on any single platform, for instance, the studio stops to fix it rather than simply pressing ahead and coming back to clean it up later.

"For example, technically, we should hit, let's say, 10 checkmarks," Nowakowski said. "Back in the past, if we missed one or two, we were like, 'we're gonna catch up with that later on.' Sometimes we did, but sometimes we didn't, and then two milestones or three milestones down the road, you have like four or five missing checkmarks and it's not that easy."

The net result is parity right from the get-go: "You come to the studio, you launch Witcher 4 right now. You can launch it on PC. You can launch it on PS5. You can launch it on Xbox Series X, and it's going to run," Nowakowski said.

'We're doing our best to ensure our game runs' is a low bar, sure, but given how poorly Cyberpunk 2077 went at launch it's not surprising that CD Projekt is making the point—and so, here's hoping it's able to pull it off. The Witcher 4 still doesn't have a release date (and probably won't for a good long time yet) but is currently "targeting" a 2028 release.

It's been a long road, but a mod we called The Witcher 3's best graphics overhaul will no longer be needed—and for once, I can talk about a mod becoming obsolete with a smile on my face, because the reasons involved here are all good ones.

The Witcher 3 HD Reworked is a cornerstone of the game's modding scene. We're talking over 325,000 unique downloads (725,000 in total), and that's just the version that was uploaded back in 2024. The "OldGen" version, uploaded in 2015, has an eye-melting 1.7 million unique downloads (5.8 million in total). It's a frankly astonishing upscaling and remodelling project that effects thousands of textures, models, and so on in CD Projekt Red's classic.

It's so impressive, in fact, that CDPR just snapped the guy up for The Witcher 3 Remastered. HalkHogan writes: "It's been a while since the last news and I would like to clarify any questions and confirm that I am cooperating with CDPR on The Witcher 3 Remaster, and my work will be officially available in the game on September 29 (on PC and consoles). HDRP will no longer be needed.

"Almost all in-game characters, monsters, animals, vegetation, armors and equipment for Geralt & Roach and a large part of the environment have been reworked, and I've put a lot of effort into ensuring the highest quality. Thanks and see you later!"

This means that you're not gonna need The Witcher 3 HD Reworked anymore because, well, the guy who made it worked on the remaster. Our own Joshua Wolens spoke to executive producer Jakub Kutrzuba about it earlier this month: "We are integrating the most popular mod on Nexus mod, the HDD Rework mod, with tons of upgraded textures, meshes. [It's] something which is bringing great visual improvement across the whole game."

As for how it turned out, he took a peek more recently during Gamescom 2026, where he wrote: "It's something else now. Letten is gorgeous from all angles, whether you're watching the sunrise crest the hills or stepping into the oppressive darkness of its sinister woods."

After 11 years, The Witcher 3 is getting a new story expansion and a remaster. CD Projekt Red has announced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered, which is coming in 2026 and will be a free upgrade for all current owners of the game, paving the way for the shiny new DLC coming next year. It isn't just a technical update, either: CDPR is making changes to The Witcher 3's combat, skill system, and hey, transmogs!

Witcher 3 Remastered release date

The Witcher 3 Remastered release date

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered launches on September 29, 2026. That's only a month away from the day it was announced, which is a treat! It was revealed just before the teaser trailer for the new expansion Songs of the Past, but that's not coming until 2027.

The remaster is a free update and the original DLCs are now free

The Witcher 3 Remastered will replace the current "Complete Edition" on storefronts when it launches in September. It will also be a free upgrade for anyone who already owns the base game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The original two story expansions Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine have also been made free for all base game owners in an update the same day as the remaster announcement.

There's a good chance you do already have those expansions either from the Game of the Year edition years back or the more recent Complete Edition that's been the default version for sale since 2022. If not though, they're yours now!

Witcher 3 Remastered features

Here's what CDPR told PC Gamer about the remaster

Our own Josh Wolens got to see The Witcher 3 Remastered (and the Songs of the Past expansion) played at Gamescom in August and talked with CDPR about the upgrades a bit.

CDPR's executive producer of external projects Jakub Kutrzuba told Josh that it wanted to think about what The Witcher 3 would play like if it were launching in 2026.

"We put a lot of our time into how the game actually plays," says Kutrzuba. "So, the animation system, the camera work, small quality of life improvements, accessibility changes, enemy behaviour in combat, maybe the pathfinding for the roads, etcetera—these are areas of the game which we know could cause some frustration here and there.

"We went through all of them and asked ourselves, 'What can we do about it, without rebuilding the game from scratch?' And we have changed a lot… the game just plays smoother, you know? There's no immersion-breakers anymore, I would say."

What's new in the remaster?

At the end of its announcement trailer, CDPR listed a ton of changes coming in the remaster. A lot of the inscrutable acronyms here are graphics tech to do with making the game prettier, which is great, but does pad out the list with relatively minor changes like "improved motion blur."

• Enhanced combat
• Improved traversal and movement
• New Witcher signs FX
• Revamped mount handling
• Enhanced monster behaviors
• Skill tree revamp
• Armor transmogrification
• New combat finishers
• Expanded photo mode
• Cross platform mod support
• Immersive meditation
• Refined animations
• New quest tracking
• UI improvements
• Looting rework
• Refreshed motion blur
• New accessibility features
• Updated textures
• Foliage shading rework
• Tutorial modernization
• HDR improvements
• GTAO
• Improved menu navigation
• Ray tracing improvements
• Global lighting rework
• New shading model
• Subsurface scattering
• New tone mapper
• PlayStation 5 Pro support
• Xbox Play Anywhere support
• Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive features
• Nvidia DLSS 4.5
• AMD FSR 4
• Intel XESS 2.0
• Path tracing on PC
• Ray reconstruction on PC
• Raytraced hair
• Native DX12
• Rendering parallelization

Surprise! Songs of the Past, The Witcher 3's third expansion, isn't kicked off by some Ciri-centric weft in the space-time continuum, nor another curt and urgent letter from Yennefer. As for Triss, well, I didn't spot a single red hair of her in the hands-off demo that CD Projekt Red and Fool's Theory gave us.

It's Dandelion. Geralt's lute-plucking biographer has gone missing, and who better to find him than his best pal in the whole wide world? So when Songs of the Past releases next year, he'll be back on the path in a region of The Witcher's world we've never seen before—Dandelion's family home of Letten, in the kingdom of Redania.

And he's got another surprise for you, too: a full Witcher 3 remaster that aims to make the 2015 classic feel like it released in the modern era, due for release on September 29.

Over a decade since The Witcher 3's last expansion, the boys are back in town.

There's No Place Like

Where better to get a glimpse of Dandelion's true face than his family home? Dandelion's real name is Julian Alfred Pankratz, Viscount de Lettenhove, and it's to Lettenhove he invites Geralt for Songs of the Past's opening—to the sumptuous manor that marks the seat of power for his blue-blood forebears.

To hear the devs tell it, this is a Dandelion-centric expansion all the way through: the focus is on Geralt and the bard's relationship—their "bromance," as multiple people I spoke to put it—and not so much on, oh I don't know, Ciri, for example.

"[Letten is] a completely new region in northern Redania, where Dandelion comes from," says Karolina Kuzia, Songs of the Past's vision director. "We visit because of personal matters that put a toll on him, so he needs his best friend at his side. Imagine you enter a lush green valley, hidden in a mountain range."

"This place was never touched by war, never ravaged like the rest of the continent," continues Kuzia. "People here are peaceful. They live their lives together with nature."

Not too peaceful, though. "Letten, albeit a land of plenty, has a dark underbelly," says game director Jakub Rokosz. "It wouldn't be a Witcher adventure if Geralt didn't have anything to do."

The morning after

That dark underbelly was there from the jump in my time with Songs of the Past. Geralt awakens, hungover and far from home, in the aftermath of the local Belleteyn celebrations—a kind of Easter-style celebration—but in the party's afterglow, Dandelion is nowhere to be found.

A pretty walk later and the witcher is sat at a long mahogany table in Lettenhove itself, playing mediator between two of his best friend's most fearsome relatives, his grandmama and his cousin Lilla, as they argue over whether Dandelion is truly missing at all and, if so, what to do about it.

Yes, we absolutely asked if you can romance grandmama, and I'm sorry to say it sounds like the answer is no.

Anyway, it's not long before Geralt's Belleteyn turns into a busman's holiday. He and the almost-definitely-romanceable Lilla venture out into Letten's gnarled, dark, and foreboding woods on the trail of a de Lettenhove family legend: the curse of Dandelion's ancestor, the mad Count Humbert de Lettenhove.

Given that it's been a while since The Witcher 3 last got an expansion, it might be worth saying something obvious: this is still The Witcher 3 at its core, with the loops and mechanics you remember.

Soon after starting, the dev playing the demo I saw was dropping into his witcher senses to find lost items and people, and the expansion's first contretemps—an argument between Geralt and a bearded Letten-ite who had snaffled Dandelion's lute—let the player choose between trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement or resorting to the diplomacy of fists. We picked the latter.

"I wouldn't say that [Songs of the Past] will feel different," says Rokosz, "simply because Witcher 3 aged really well, as a game. It's still very relevant—it became a staple for RPGs back in the day when it came out, and even now, when you replay it, you don't really feel it's an old game."

Chain reaction

But while it's still The Witcher 3, it quite literally has some new tricks up its sleeve. Geralt picks up a new weapon in the course of his time in Letten: a silver chain that wraps around his arm and can be used to handle crowds of enemies. You might recognise it. In The Witcher 1's intro cinematic (and in the first book), Geralt used exactly this weapon to fight off a monstrous striga.

And if you don't remember that, you might recall this: Ciri wields an identical weapon in cinematic trailers for The Witcher 4. Cue raised eyebrows.

How does it work? I saw Geralt make use of his new weapon against a couple of different enemies in my time with him. First up, swarmions, a new enemy type and example par excellence of nominative determinism. They're big on swarming, you see, which means having a long chain to handle them with—yanking individual foes from the pack to deal with mano a mano, or whipping it around to keep foes at bay—comes in useful.

The chain is selected much like a sign or bomb in combat, and can either be quickly deployed with a button press or, if you want to give someone special treatment, you can manually zoom in to target specific body parts on your enemies, an action which slows down time to give you time to aim, much like the base game's crossbow.

I also saw the chain used in my demo's concluding boss fight. Having hacked their way through centipedes, swarmions, and a few other nasties, Lilla and Geralt finally come to a mystical well that seems intricately tied to Dandelion's disappearance and the de Lettenhove curse. First things first, though, Geralt has to put down the Slumbering Knight guarding the place, which means plenty of familiar fancy footwork while, at the same time, using your new toy to break the boss's guard and get some licks in.

(Re)master Witcher

That familiar fancy footwork isn't too familiar, mind you. A new expansion isn't the only work being done on CDPR's masterpiece—the studio is preceding Songs of the Past with a full-on remaster too. It's not just a graphical gussy-up, the devs are reworking parts of the game to smooth out the little points of aggravation that might drive players away.

When it comes to gameplay changes, "We're mostly thinking about new players, you know?" says Jakub Kutrzuba, CDPR's executive producer of external projects. "We're looking at The Witcher from that perspective—so what would be the biggest pain points? What would a player expect to be changed in order to enjoy the game?" What would The Witcher 3 look like "if it was a game which released in 2026"?

In practice, that means working on The Witcher 3's combat, movement, and animations to make the whole thing feel more responsive and dynamic and less, well, janky.

"The remaster includes so many improvements, so many fixes, so many changes and gameplay improvements," says Badowski. "All the improvements make the combat much more smooth, much more natural. You can change target while playing the animation or performing strikes, and it gives the game a kind of freshness."

"We put a lot of our time into how the game actually plays," says Kutrzuba. "So, the animation system, the camera work, small quality of life improvements, accessibility changes, enemy behaviour in combat, maybe the pathfinding for the roads, etcetera—these are areas of the game which we know could cause some frustration here and there."

"We went through all of them and asked ourselves, 'What can we do about it, without rebuilding the game from scratch?' And we have changed a lot… the game just plays smoother, you know? There's no immersion-breakers anymore, I would say."

I can't verify that without playing myself, but I can verify that it looks killer. The Witcher 3 was never an ugly game, and it looks better than ever after its 2022 next-gen update, but it's something else now. Letten is gorgeous from all angles, whether you're watching the sunrise crest the hills or stepping into the oppressive darkness of its sinister woods.

But it's the more technical, nitty-gritty simulation stuff that really appeals to me. Geralt's stroll to Lettenhove at the beginning of my demo felt lively in a way that few places in the original Witcher 3 did. People were, simply, up to stuff. Shepherds guided sheep across roads, carts trundled around, a child played on a high railing to the chagrin of their parents, and all around life seemed, in general, to proceed.

"When you think about the remaster features that we apply in Letten," says Rokosz, it concerns in large part "how our community behaves, what you can do, what can they do. They can now use boats, they can drive carts, this is all to bolster the feeling of the area where you are, in Letten."

"We wanted to make it compare with any other game which is launching these days," says Kutrzuba. "We are touching aspects of the game which haven't been touched since we launched it." From what I've seen, it pays off.

CD Projekt Red showed up to close out Gamescom Opening Night Live with two big announcements: a first look at The Witcher 3's final expansion, Songs of the Past, and a surprise "Remastered" patch coming to the base game on September 29.

If you're just hearing about this now, yes, The Witcher 3 is getting a big expansion 12 years after its release, though we got no firm release date today. To hold us over, we caught a glimpse of the new region that Geralt will explore, Letten, and a weapon type new to the games: the chain whip.

I was wondering if CDPR would ever let the White Wolf wield his favorite weapon from the books. What a nice surprise.

It'd take a bigger Witcher nerd than I to glean much from the trailer story-wise, but I'm willing to bet Geralt has been contracted to kill a thorny, druidical monster. The YouTube description for the trailer says a bit more:

"This full-fledged third expansion takes the White Wolf on a new adventure to the peaceful realm of Letten, where dark secrets lurk beneath the surface."

Songs of the Past, sadly, has no imminent release date. It's out "next year," according to the trailer.

The Witcher 3 got a "Next-Gen Update" back in 2022, and CD Projekt Red is doing it again: The developer announced at Gamescom today that The Witcher 3 Remastered is coming September 29 as a free update for all owners of the RPG.

Aside from graphical updates (of which there are many), The Witcher 3 Remastered makes changes to combat, movement, Roach riding, monster behaviors, the skill tree, and the photo mode.

The kicker: Alongside the update, owners of The Witcher 3 will also get its two expansions, Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone, free if they don't already own them. For newcomers, the expansions will be bundled with The Witcher 3 Remastered.

The remaster arrives well in advance of the next expansion, Songs of the Past, which releases sometime next year.

"My favorite [new feature] is the visuals. That's new textures, updated rendering, advanced path tracing, foliage, you name it," said CD Projekt Red level design lead Miles Tost at Gamescom's Opening Night Live showcase. "Geralt has never looked this good, even after all those years of retirement.

"And then the other thing, definitely, is combat. It's more modern, smooth and precise. We updated the camera, the targeting system, added new animations, and what I like a lot, new finishers. And then, last one, The Witcher 3 is a full-fledged RPG, right? So we completely revamped the ability system to give players more options."

One thing I'm left curious about is how much can be toggled on and off—ie, can players accept the graphical changes but turn off the combat tweaks if they prefer the original combat?

We've still got more than a year to wait for The Witcher 4. In a video ahead of this year's Gamescom show, CD Projekt co-CEO Michał Nowakowski spoke a bit about the upcoming Witcher 3 expansion as well as the game's long-awaited sequel.

"We have more than 500 incredibly talented developers working to create something truly special for you," he said. "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."

But when? When when when? Well... not super soon, as you may not be shocked to hear.

"That's the question we're hearing from you all the time," Nowakowski said. "We're not ready to share an exact date, I can tell you this: The Witcher 4 is targeting a 2028 release window."

To our beloved fans, players, and community:As we near #gamescom in just a few days, CD PROJEKT RED Joint-CEO Michał Nowakowski would like to personally invite YOU to join us there, and hear about the future of The Witcher franchise!

— @thewitcher.com (@thewitcher.com.bsky.social) 2026-08-24T16:12:27.004Z

"Targeting" there certainly gives CD Projekt plenty of wiggle room for the eventual release date, a lesson no doubt learned from The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077's multiple delays.

"I know it's a bit of a wait, but let the team cook," Nowakowski said. "It will be worth the wait."

It might seem silly to ask in our post-Red Dead horse testicles world, but how much exacting detail is too much? How much is not enough? Gamedev can go on forever if you don't prioritize the things that players actually notice, but if you're making an immersive fantasy RPG, it's critical that the intended illusions—bustling towns, lively taverns, festering dungeons, and so on—not shatter.

This tightrope walk is something CDPR has gotten better at over the years, but it loomed over The Witcher 3's development, as CD Projekt Red's Philipp Weber told Edge Magazine (via Gamesradar). The reason why is simple: wherever possible, gamers love to try and peek behind the curtain.

"If a village only has eight houses, people will want to see if the people truly exist in the world or if it's just fakery," Weber told Edge. "Lots of people nowadays are interested in those kinds of details, and it really came to haunt us."

"Today, if you said 'give me a Witcher 3 village that has eight houses', I could give you that in two hours," he said. But there was a time that "when it came to actually reacting to the player, there wasn't that much detail."

An example case named in the article is that when the player starts using combat moves in the middle of town, NPCs were programmed to drop whatever they were holding and scram. This mostly worked, except for the fact that mothers swaddling their babies would do the same: "For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies, left and right."

A big component of believability is just giving the NPCs apropos things to do, and cycling between those unpredictably. "We don't give them specific paths," Weber said. "We give them spots of interest that are available and then they're the ones doing the pathfinding ... for the 50 sailors at Novigrad harbour, for example, we made 200 possible spots, so even if all 50 were active at the same time, they would have options."

It seems like the human touch goes a long way here. Cyberpunk 2077's stylish and detailed NPCs are a great case study showing the value of a hand-crafted moment here and there. And while systems-driven simulation is a big part of why these digital nobodies are believable in the first place, CD Projekt has said in the past that the quality gap between manually programmed NPCs and their controversial AI counterparts is "like a canyon."

CD Projekt has confirmed that nine employees working on The Witcher spinoff Project Sirius have been laid off, saying it has "adjusted the size of the Sirius team to reflect the project's needs at this stage of development."

"As a result, four people in Boston and five in Warsaw are leaving the company, while nine others have been invited to internal recruitment processes for potential roles on other CD Projekt Red projects," a rep said of the cuts, first reported by Kotaku.

It hasn't been a smooth ride for Project Sirius, which we first learned about in 2021 when CD Projekt acquired The Molasses Flood to work on an "ambitious project" based on one of CDPR's existing properties. The plan at the time was to keep The Molasses Flood operating as a distinct entity with its own "identity," but that fell to the wayside in 2025 when CD Projekt fully absorbed the studio into its own structure.

That move followed trouble with Sirius that ultimately led to a reboot and "updated direction" for the game. Five years after The Molasses Flood acquisition, we still know virtually nothing about the game—its proper title hasn't even been revealed yet.

And while the number of people being laid off is small compared to the massive cuts at companies like Xbox and Electronic Arts, 18 employees represents a significant chunk of the Sirius development team. CD Projekt said in its Q1 2026 financial report that 83 people were working on the game, meaning that more than 20% of the team has been cut.

CD Projekt Red sent us all scurrying for our calendars when it announced, last May, that 2015's The Witcher 3 would be getting a brand-new expansion in the year of our lord 2027. It's called Songs of the Past, it's set to be "a little bit closer to Blood and Wine" in terms of size, and it's being co-developed alongside Fool's Theory, the studio that's also remaking the first Witcher.

And that, for now, is pretty much all we know. But take heart, because 'knowing perhaps a small amount more' is just around the corner. In a post on X, CDPR announced that Songs of the Past would show its face as part of Gamescom's Opening Night Live event—the secret third Geoff Keighley annual thing which I forget about every year—on August 25.

I think I might be more intrigued by this than any other upcoming release, which is either a damning indictment of the release calendar, or a hearty testament to CDPR's games (it is both, I think). It is simply kind of cool to pull a 10+ year old game out of retirement, dust it off, and jam a whole bunch of new stuff into it, and I am very eager to see just what form that new stuff takes.

So far, the biggest indication as to what the expansion will look like has come from CDPR co-CEO Michał Nowakowksi. Speaking in May, Nowakowski told investors that "It really depends on how you're going to play, what's your playthrough. But we're definitely making a proper big expansion, is the message I would send out there."

He also hinted that it might not be the only Witcher 3 thing CDPR is brewing: "Our early plans assumed that Songs of the Past could be released this year. However, we decided that it will be launching in 2027. We obviously have some other content currently at an advanced production phase as well. And while it's obviously not on the same scale as the major expansion, we will plan to release it this year."

You heard it here first: 80 new beard styles for Geralt confirmed.

The original Witcher, released in 2007, was a fairly linear affair, with individual maps to explore but overall progression, from point to point to point, relatively tied down. The remake, in development at Fool's Theory, is taking a very different approach: It's a "modern reimagining" of that game as an "open-world RPG." Simple enough—just make it like Witcher 3, right?

It's really not that simple at all, as Witcher and Witcher 2 designer Artur Ganszyniec explained to Polish site Chip. Going open world means there's more space that has to be filled with things for players to do, and developers also have to figure out how to make all that new content work with the old content, while simultaneously figuring out how to make the old content work in ways it was never meant to.

"In The Witcher 1, many things worked because we knew exactly where the player would be at any given moment," Ganszyniec said (Google translated). "We could trigger a trigger, launch a scene, or insert Alvin between the fields and the village. In an open world, this would have to be handled completely differently."

("Alvin," for the record, is not a machine translation botch: He's an NPC who plays a significant role in both the game's major events and Geralt's ongoing problems with the ladies.)

In an open world, developers don't have that luxury: Players are able to approach locations, monsters, and puzzles in ways that don't follow the intended progression, and developers have to prepare for that or everything falls apart. It's a problem maybe most aptly illustrated by the classic "square hole" video:

Ganszyniec's words provide a little bit of insight into why, four years after The Witcher remake was announced, we still don't have any concrete information on it beyond the fact that it's happening: It's a do-over that's changing the fundamental nature of the game, and that kind of ambition is not easy to execute.

That's not just speculation on his part. Aside from the fact that he worked on the first two Witcher games, Ganszyniec's most recent credit on Moby is as a narrative and story consultant on The Thaumaturge, a very good RPG developed by Fool's Theory—The Witcher remake studio—that came out on 2024.

And despite his history with CD Projekt's groundbreaking RPG series, it does sound just a little bit like Ganszyniec is happy that he doesn't have to deal with this one.

"When everything falls into place on the map around Lake Vizima in the fifth act, one might ask a simple question: if this were an open world, would I have a boat?" Ganszyniec asked rhetorically about one of The Witcher's pivotal late-game moments. "What's stopping me from getting on a boat on the outskirts of Vizima and sailing straight to the old manor? As a player, I might be happy about that, but as a designer, I'm starting to get gray."

The Witcher 3 isn't exactly short of stuff to do, but I nonetheless lament that one of its most ambitious questlines never made it into the final game. Not only because it would have delved much more deeply into The Catriona Plague—a disease ravaging Velen that mostly serves as a background event in the final game—but also because it would have brought back The Witcher 2's best character, the elven rebel smokeshow Iorveth.

Details about this questline emerged back in 2024, courtesy of modders and dataminers Moonknight, Ferroxius, Crygreg, and Glassfish. Not content with simply discovering the details of this quest, however, that same team has set about recreating it in a hugely ambitious mod.

Named The WAR Project, the mod aims to recreate the Catriona Plague questline in the form of a 10-hour, 12 quest expansion based upon the datamined info discovered a couple of years back. Details were shared by YouTuber and The Witcher 3 specialist xLetalis, who is also assisting with the mod's production.

While the main attraction for me is Iorveth's return, the mod also reintroduces and/or expands upon several other characters in The Witcher 3. This includes a proper romance between Geralt and Ves, plus extra demonic shenanigans from Gaunter O' Dimm, the primary antagonist of Hearts of Stone who CD Projekt originally planned to introduce in this quest. O' Dimm's return also heralds the arrival of new demonic enemies for Geralt to chop up, alongside specialist Nilfgaardian soldiers with rad-looking vulture masks.

Now, ambitious mods like this crop up online all the time, but few actually make it to release. However, the team is composed of veteran Witcher 3 modders, with Moonknight and Glassfish having contributed to the Brothers in Arms mod that restores a darker ending to the Hearts of Stone expansion. They also say that the mod is 25% complete with things like Geralt's romance with Ves already implemented (a demo is available on Nexus Mods).

One major component the mod currently lacks is voice acting, as the original voice lines for these quests are sadly lost to time. Hence, the team is currently casting for numerous roles in both English and Polish languages, including ol' Geraldo Riviera himself. If you think you can match the gravelly tones of Doug Cockle (challenge level: impossible), you can sign up for auditions via the mod's Discord.

The War Project is due to release in February 2027. That seems a teensy bit optimistic to me, given the scope of the mod and the fact it's only a quarter done. Nonetheless, I am confident that this will see the light of day, and am excited to be reunited with my beautiful Iorveth whenever The War Project finally marches out of camp.

Here's a nice little bit of trivia to carry you into your weekend: Amidst all the hullabaloo about the surprise Witcher 3 expansion Songs of the Past that was announced earlier this week, CD Projekt also revealed that Geralt's big(gest) adventure has now surpassed 65 million copies sold.

"The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which recently celebrated its 11th anniversary, has just crossed another spectacular sales threshold: 65 million copies," CD Projekt chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz said in the studio's financial results commentary. "This cements its place among the best-selling videogames in history."

And indeed it does: Over on Wikipedia (which, for the record, notes that its ranking "may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness" but is nonetheless, in my opinion, representative of the big picture situation), The Witcher 3 is now cited as the eighth best-selling videogame of all time. behind Terraria's 70 million copies sold, and ahead of Super Mario Bros. at 58 million.

That's still a long way from the true kings of the castle—Tetris, Minecraft, and Grand Theft Auto 5—but it's still a hell of an accomplishment by any measure, and especially for a game that emerged from an unlikely partnership between an unknown game studio and an equally obscure fantasy author—both from the not-exactly-a-gaming-hotbed (at the time) country of Poland.

What makes the accomplishment even more notable is the relentlessness of its advance. The Witcher 3 hit 20 million copies sold in 2019, four years after its release—an average of five million copies per year. Four years after that, it achieved 50 million copies, running the average up to a little over six million per year since launch. In 2025 it hit 60 million copies sold—another five million per year out the door—and now, one year later, five million more copies are in the book.

It's extremely quick and dirty math (the only kind I'm good at) but the picture it paints is clear: The Witcher 3 has not just a very long tail, but also a remarkably steady one. The cynic in me can't help but think Songs of the Past is a sign that The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 are a lot further off than we like to think and CD Projekt needs something to bridge the gap, but at the same time there's no denying that year over year over year, The Witcher 3 continues to be a hit videogame. Given that persistent interest, why not make more?

I imagine we'll see another notable sales bump in 2027, assuming CD Projekt is able to get the Songs of the Past expansion out on that schedule. Also note, though, that the studio teased even more new content coming this year—there may be even more life left in Geralt than we expect.

It's been a big couple of days for Witcher fans as an expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was confirmed (after it was accidentally leaked on the RED Launcher, whoopsie). But thanks to a Q&A portion at the end of the financial call we also now know a bit more about CD Projekt Red's aspirational release timeline.

After CDPR joint CEO Michał Nowakowski answered some questions about the upcoming Songs of the Past, and stressed how it is an expansion, not a DLC, he went on to discuss other potential expansions for the series (via GamesRadar). But don't get your hopes up, because with CDPR's current timeline there likely won't be any space.

Someone asked Nowakowski, "Given the very ambitious project pipeline, does the company see room for developing expansions for the new Witcher saga?" To which he answered: "As you mentioned in the question, the plans are pretty ambitious. Specifically, it's to release three Witcher games within a six-year period. It would be difficult, to be very honest, for us to add an expansion to the upcoming trilogy. This is where we are here and now with this particular issue."

Yeah that's fair. If the schedule does go to plan that would mean fans of The Witcher would be getting a new game every couple of years, which is a pretty decent timeline. There's also nothing to say that CDPR won't go back to The Witcher 4 or subsequent games after the trilogy is complete and add expansions after the fact.

But at the same time it's probably a good idea to not get our hopes too high, as I'm rather doubtful that CDPR will actually be able to keep up with this schedule. Not because of any lack of faith, I'm just a natural pessimist and have seen a great deal of game delays in my medium to short life so far.

CD Projekt finally confirmed yesterday that a new expansion for The Witcher 3 is in the works, called Songs of the Past. The announcement brought months of rumors and speculation (and one cheeky non-denial) to a close—ironically, a day earlier than planned, because CD Projekt accidentally let the big surprise leak out on its own storefront. Nobody to blame for that one but yourselves, fellas.

Anyway, very little about Songs of the Past was revealed yesterday, but today we got a little more insight into what to expect courtesy of CD Projekt's Q1 2026 financial report, which is when the studio had originally planned to reveal it. In pre-recorded commentary, in fact, chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz did announce Songs of the Past, as though nothing untoward had happened yesterday. No sense redoing the whole thing just for that, I guess.

The more interesting tidbits, though, came during the Q&A portion of CD Projekt's financial call, during which co-CEO Michał Nowakowski emphasized pointedly that this is not a DLC.

"First of all, I cannot stop myself. It's not a DLC, it's an expansion," Nowakowski said in response to a question about how Songs of the Past will compare to previous Witcher 3 expansions Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine—which the questioner referred to as DLC. "DLCs are the smaller ones which we typically give for free. Expansions are the bigger and juicy ones."

As for the comparison of scope the caller was asking about, Songs of the Past is "actually a little bit closer to Blood and Wine, but this is super-subjective," Nowakowski said.

"It really depends on how you're going to play, what's your playthrough. But we're definitely making a proper big expansion, is the message I would send out there."

CD Projekt had initially assumed that it would launch Songs of the Past this year, but ultimately decided to push it into 2027. But the studio also hinted that there might be other upcoming Witcher 3 content, still unrevealed, that will be out before the end of '26.

"For several quarters we've been disclosing that our pipeline includes some unannounced projects being in an advanced production stage, and one of those is the expansion being co-developed with Fool's Theory," Nielubowicz (I think) said during the call. "Our early plans assumed that Songs of the Past could be released this year. However, we decided that it will be launching in 2027.

"We obviously have some other content currently at an advanced production phase as well. And while it's obviously not on the same scale as the major expansion, we will plan to release it this year."

For the most part, CD Projekt is still keeping things under wraps, which is no great surprise given how far out Songs of Past remains. But it is setting expectations high: The Witcher 3's Blood and Wine expansion is phenomenally good, almost an entire standalone RPG unto itself, that delivers one of the most satisfying conclusions to a videogame character arc ever. Even without saying anything else about it, invoking Blood and Wine in a direct comparison with Songs of the Past is a bold choice.

It won't be too much longer before we get a proper look at Songs of the Past: CD Projekt also said today that it will be showing off the expansion at Gamescom, which runs August 26-30. We'll be there.

Wind's howling... And it's taking us to gamescom in Cologne!Come join us in the entertainment area, where we will be showing Songs of the Past!See you on the Path ⚔️

— @thewitcher.com (@thewitcher.com.bsky.social) 2026-05-28T19:45:53.586Z

CD Projekt finally confirmed today that it's working on a new expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, called Songs of the Past, that's expected to be out sometime in 2027. As part of that announcement, the studio also said it's updating the game's system requirements "to ensure smooth performance and compatibility going forward."

It initially struck me as a bit odd that CD Projekt would need to update hardware requirements for a game that's more than 10 years old—after all, PCs now are more powerful than PCs then, right? So you'd think that if anything, The Witcher 3 would run better than ever these days.

It comes down to the "compatibility" part of the statement: An awful lot has happened in the past decade, including the release, and end, of Windows 10. And that's the issue: The Witcher 3 supported Windows 7 and 8 at launch, and support for those came to a halt in 2023; Windows 10 got the ka-chunk, with some exceptions, in 2025.

As a result, when the next Witcher 3 update goes live, this will be the new minimum system spec:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600, Intel Core i5-8400
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660, AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB
• VRAM: 6 GB
• RAM: 12 GB
• Storage: 70 GB SSD
• OS: 64-bit Windows 11

CD Projekt said the updated requirements "reflect how hardware capabilities and software usage have evolved," and noted in particular that Windows 11 is now the minimum required OS following the end of support for earlier versions of the OS: "Without ongoing security updates, official platform support, and continued GPU driver support, we will no longer test our games on Windows 10." And as a result of that, only CPUs and GPUs with official ongoing Windows 11 support will be supported by CD Projekt.

DirectX 11 support is being dropped because going with DX12 exclusively "allows us to support ongoing technical improvements and modern hardware more effectively." And last but not least, HDDs will no longer be supported because SSDs are just so damn much better. (I just hope you already have one.)

Just for fun, here's the original minimum spec, as still (for now) listed on Steam, slightly re-arranged for a better line-by-line matchup:

• CPU: Intel CPU Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz / AMD A10-5800K APU (3.8GHz)
• GPU: Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 660 / AMD GPU Radeon HD 7870
• VRAM: Whatever, man
• RAM: 6 GB RAM
• Storage: 50 GB available space
• OS: 64-bit Windows 7, 64-bit Windows 8 (8.1)

Now, none of this is to say that you won't be able to play The Witcher 3 on a PC that comes closer to the original hardware requirements than this updated spec: "Not supported" doesn't mean "won't run," after all, and the Steam Hardware and Software Survey indicates that a lot of you are still holding on to Windows 10—and there are even some true hardcores out there white-knuckling it with Windows 7. (Respect.)

It does mean, though, that you're going to need hipper hardware than you had 10 years ago if you want to be sure The Witcher 3 and its new expansion will run, and more to the point, if you want CD Projekt to help you if it does not.

There is one other avenue of recourse for those with aging rigs, however, at least for users on Steam or GOG. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Classic, "an earlier version of the game"—CD Projekt's support page doesn't detail it further—is available as a beta option, so you can always roll back to that. CD Projekt also didn't specify whether the older version of the game will support the upcoming expansion, so you might be hosed on that front—and you're definitely hosed if you play The Witcher 3 on the Epic Games Store, as it does not support access to older builds.

The prophecy has been fulfilled. After much speculation CD Projekt has finally confirmed that it is indeed working on a Witcher 3: Wild Hunt expansion, going even further to confirm its release window as well.

"Medallion's humming, which can only mean one thing," CD Projekt says in a blog post. "It's time to announce we're working on a brand new expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Get ready to return to the Path with Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt—Songs of the Past, coming in 2027."

I had to save myself from getting too sad that the release window is so far away, because a year in adult time isn't actually that long. Sure if this was 10 years ago it'd be like waiting decades for the expansion, but nowadays a year zips past in almost no time at all. I blame my laundry.

I'm just happy the DLC is finally confirmed, especially considering we weren't meant to find out about it today: "We originally planned to make this big reveal during our REDstreams tomorrow, but let's say we found something we didn't yet expect on RED Launcher." That unexpected find was actually leaked news of this very DLC. Some players woke up today to find the Songs of the Past announcement post appearing on their RED Launcher, obviously this then spread through the internet like wildfire.

It's a shame that this announcement couldn't make it just another day, but at least it didn't mess with CD's timeline too badly: "We’re currently co-developing the expansion with Fool’s Theory and we’ll share more in late summer, so stay tuned."

Alongside this new expansion CD also shared its plans to update its systems requirements "to ensure smooth performance and compatibility going forward" for Songs of the Past. "These requirements will become effective starting from the next update."

In the event you have not yet gotten around to 2015's best singleplayer game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, then beware—spoilers await you ahead.

If you have gotten around to it, then you'll be agonisingly aware of its most harrowing scene. After spending so long searching for Ciri, Geralt and the gang are (relatively) safely ensconced back at Kaer Morhen, enjoying a bit of a breather after the White Wolf's long schlep across Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige. You're squabbling with Yennefer, trading stories with Eskel, composing poetry with Lambert.

Then the Wild Hunt rocks up and puts a blade in Vesemir, the Wolf School's master and a father figure to Geralt and his fellow witchers. It's a gut-wrenching scene, and you can tell because it apparently wrenched the guts of the whole dang writing team. In a recollection of The Witcher 3's development on X, its lead quest designer (and current associate game director on Cyberpunk 2) Paweł Sasko wrote that, when he suggested to a room of devs that they off Vesemir, the reaction he got was "wide eyes and silence."

Alas, they overcame their sadness and acknowledged that "the weight of [Vesemir's death] is exactly what the act needs. Ciri's outburst, the moment she throws the Wild Hunt back, requires that the floor fall out from under her first." So CD Projekt got to work killing our witcher-grandad. Which wasn't easy, it turns out.

"I prototype meteors, rifts opening in the forest, Wild Hunt pouring out of them, the ride back to the keep on horseback. So much of it does not work. Technical issues. The quest flow is unclear. Review feedback I get is negative, so I rebuild." Gradually, tragically, the scene began to come together properly: "Pieces start to hold. I begin to see why something works and why the thing next to it does not. Through repetition I truly start understanding the craft."

If designing Vesemir's death is when things started really coming together for Sasko, in terms of the craft of making videogame narratives and setpieces, then I'm beginning to understand why Cyberpunk 2077 (on which he was lead quest designer) and Phantom Liberty (on which he was quest director) were so chock-full of tragic moments and Sophie's choices. I'll give Sasko this: he and his team are pretty good at them! Perhaps too good!

Oh, and just to rub it in, Sasko says he was "having the time of my life" while working on this stuff. "Designers are showing each other ideas in the team room. Someone solves a problem, someone else builds on top of it, someone else innovates and iterates. We are playing. We are putting cool things into a game we love." And killing my grandad, Sasko, don't forget that.

The Witcher 3 is a deep, textured game with incredible worldbuilding—worldbuilding that the Witcher Online mod on NexusMods delves deeply into. Finally, you can explore the Continent with your friends, doing setting-appropriate activities like (checks notes) er, riding about on each other's shoulders, and (frantically sweating, flipping through notes in a panic) turning into a little kitty cat.

The mod in question, which has been available since January of this year, is an impressive feat—turning the singleplayer game into a mini-MMO. But with that feat accomplished, it seems like mod author rejuvenate has been throwing in some madcap ideas just because.

The latest update really is a fascinating spread of sensible additions and utter nonsense—so I'll get the nonsense out of the way first. Players can now ride each other's heads, forming a kind of horrifying totem pole of Geralts to, I assume, scare the monsters of Skellige so thoroughly that they die of a heart attack.

You can also turn into a cat, if you want—or a fox, crow, or owl. Some of these morphs are genuinely pretty cool, mind. Being able to fly around Witcher 3's game world does sound neat, but still, I must've missed the bit where Geralt became half-doppler. Maybe it's in the books somewhere.

To take my tongue out of my cheek for a moment, there are some genuinely neat additions to the mod that are more in-line with what you'd expect, too: Player trading, shared horses and boats, a player menu, and 23 whole emotes to share with your friends. One of them is just called "baguette".

In all seriousness, it's neat to see this mod develop further from its fairly rudimentary origins. Making use of CD Projekt's open world to turn it into a little MMO is a wonderful example of the Witcher 3 mod community's ingenuity, and a perfect encapsulation of its balance between silliness and genuine improvements.

After about 200 hours in The Witcher 3 and its DLCs, I can't say I was left thinking "There should have been more", but as it turns out we did all play a somewhat slimmed down version of Geralt's adventures.

In addition to an enormous number of bug fixes, the Brothers in Arms mod by Nexus Mods user MerseyRockoff (as well as a long list of collaborators) aims to restore and rebuild as much cut or inaccessible content as humanly possible. For the most part, we're talking about relatively minor elements: books, journal entries, item descriptions, and especially lines of dialogue that could be found in the game files but were never properly implemented by CD Projekt Red (though they certainly add up!).

There are a few cases, however, of full cutscenes and even gameplay sequences that the mod slots back into the game—and YouTuber xLetalis has made a great video breaking down some pretty key omissions from the excellent Hearts of Stone expansion that players can now experience.

The big headliner here is a scene that was cut from the Von Everec Estate section of the DLC. As you might remember, during this part of the adventure Geralt is able to witness visions of the past that reveal villain Olgierd's descent into evil and the occult, and the deterioration of his relationship with his wife. As it turns out, there was originally an extra scene, now partly restored by the mod.

It depicts a memory of Olgierd being confronted by a mob of local villagers who've grown sick of all the debauchery and violence and other assorted naughtiness. Naturally, he doesn't react well, and the implication is that he slaughtered them.

With the vision over, Geralt is attacked by the risen spirits of the dead villagers. Or rather… he isn't. They are enemies, and they do run at him, but when they reach him, they simply kneel down at his feet. Very unsettling and seemingly how they were intended to work, rather than a lingering bug.

From there, however, things do get too spotty for the mod to be able to fully restore the rest of the scene. A sequence in Olgierd's dungeons was supposed to play out next, including a vision of him murdering his wife's father, but as it stands none of that is playable—there simply wasn't enough original content to restore.

Still, that one intact section is well worth seeing, adding an extra layer of texture to Olgierd's dark and tragic story—and, as xLetalis points out, perhaps seeing that extra bit of ugliness in his past may make the story's final decision of whether to save him or not even trickier.

Beyond that, the video also shows off some minor restored elements of Hearts of Stone: a scene of Olgierd puffing on a pipe while talking to Geralt, and some lines that play during the boss fight with him at the burning manor. Neither feels essential, but they do just give one of The Witcher 3's best characters that little bit more chance to show off his personality, with moments like insulting Geralt's swordwork and pointing out that immortals don't have to worry about the hazards of smoking.

The likelihood is all of this was cut for good reason—whether to rein in some of the game's incredible scope, to prevent game-breaking bugs, or simply to establish a better narrative flow. But it's still fascinating to see a little of what could have been, and it's a testament to the sheer ambition of The Witcher 3 that over a decade later, there are still new secrets in it to be uncovered.

Dandelion sure does spend a lot of time imagining colorful new ways for Geralt to die. He also seems to know a lot of details about Geralt's sex life? Let me back up and explain what's going on here.

The Reigns series started in 2016. It's a survivor from the era when paid mobile games could still compete with free mobile games, a golden time that turned out to be a mere blink of the gaming industry's leviathan eye. In Reigns you were a king presented with binary decisions about how to rule, which you'd choose by swiping left or right. The consequences eventually led to a colorful "off with your head" scene appropriate to those choices, and you'd begin again as the next king in line.

Sequels and spin-offs became more complicated, and found homes on other platforms. There's been a sci-fi one, a Chinese one, a Game of Thrones one, and now a Witcher one. Instead of being an heir to the throne trying to navigate coronation ceremonies and diplomatic affairs, you are the Geralts who exist in Dandelion's songs—trying to stay alive long enough to achieve the three random goals you're given each run, like winning a certain number of duels or making sweet love down by the fire, which is where Dandelion knowing way too much about what Geralt gets up to at night comes in.

Eventually the ballad ends, not always in death, and your score is tallied while the quest-completion sound from The Witcher 3 plays and confetti shoots up, with a final blast based on how long you lasted. Sometimes, when you've had a real short run, the pitiful spurt of confetti comes across kind of sarcastic.

Of dairy and darkness

One of those choices lets me steal cheese from a tyromancer (that's someone who divines the future from dairy, a deep-cut reference to a Witcher 3 sidequest), which I could give to a halfling chef, making the non-human community like me more at the cost of angering the magical community. To win back their hearts I might refuse a noble's request to knock down a mage's tower for being taller than his, but doing that will annoy the human community. The three bars measuring these reputations fluctuate constantly and unpredictably, and if any get too high or low the ballad ends. Most of mine end with Geralt being hanged for fraternizing with the Scoia'tael because I maxed out the non-human bar by accident.

I've also had my blood sucked out by multiple vampires and been shot by a dryad, as well as having ballads end where I re-skilled to become a baker or retired to the country to judge beer competitions. Avoiding those endings is a real balancing act. The fourth bar measures your commitment to the Path of the Witcher, and if you spend too much time on diversions it'll drop so low Geralt abandons the job altogether. Filling it up isn't a game over, though. Instead, it triggers combat.

Combat uses a system that's new to Reigns. Where the original had a clumsy duelling minigame and follow-ups have tried alternatives like the card game in Reigns: Three Kingdoms, here it's an arcade thing where Geralt hops left and right to dodge falling claws and fists while trying to land on swords and signs. Monsters might block columns with fiery breath or a sonic attack, while landing on an igni sign can burn away a few of their attacks or a quen shield you from the next blow.

The battles feel better on thumbsticks than they do with a mouse, so I mostly played Reigns: The Witcher on a laptop with controller in hand. It's Steam Deck Verified and an obvious fit for that platform too. Most runs are over quickly and after two or three I'm ready to do something else, which seems ideal for a handheld game.

Which is why it's odd that, like the other Reigns games, there are multiple endings—and even more secret endings—tucked away at the end of a long grind. From the first Reigns there's been deep lore stuff going on, whether a devil had cursed you to reincarnate as doomed kings forever, or whatever was going on with the goddess whose appearances were accompanied by odd glitches in Reigns: Your Majesty.

To uncover these secrets you have to jump through a huge amount of hoops, unlocking specific cards and performing niche actions, but the amount of repetition needed to do that is so offputting I've never bothered. It's an oddity of the Reigns games that they're well-suited to short snacky play, but devoted to hiding stuff behind hours of experimentation and boundary-pushing.

The mild hunt

Reigns: The Witcher does feel true to the source material. Geralt's always being hassled by people who want him to be an assassin or otherwise do random stuff that's not technically witchering, and he's always trying to maintain balanced neutrality in the face of political forces trying to use him, which never ends well.

When my careful plate-spinning makes for a decent run with plenty of new crises and characters, I think Reigns: The Witcher is a pretty good time. Sometimes I unlock a between-run song puzzle, where a demanding audience member makes Dandelion construct something poetic out of inspiration cards and specific deaths I've unlocked, which is a pleasant change of pace. But then I get runs where hardly anything is new and I die because a particularly ambiguous situation upends the apple cart I've only just started spinning plates on, and then I think Reigns: The Witcher is just sort of fine.

It must be incredibly weird to play a game and constantly hear your own voice popping off—especially when that game is as long as The Witcher 3. But that didn't stop the best version of Geralt of Rivia, Doug Cockle, from playing through the entirety of the game and netting himself the best ending.

Chatting to GoatedSynro on YouTube (cheers, GamesRadar), Cockle said he's played through the game once, "I don't have enough time in my life to find all the endings", but that he got the ending he wanted the first time around.

"I knew the ending that I wanted. I didn't know all the endings, I didn't know exactly what CD Projekt Red had in store for us depending on the choices we make, but I knew that one of the possibilities was that Geralt would end up with Triss and that Ciri would be a witcher and everybody lives happily ever after. And that is the one I got. I was working towards it, but I couldn't remember all the choices, I didn't know the choices that would lead me there. I just made the choices that I thought would be helpful in getting me toward that ending."

Ciri becoming a witcher is usually considered the most favourable ending, though there's more of a debate over what romantic partner Big Gerry should end up with. Though I'm with Cockle, here. Yen's a bit of a bully, and he has a lot more fun with Triss. They're besties. Also, there's the hair: "I'm partial to red heads," he said.

Surprisingly, though, Shani beats out both of them for Cockle's favourite romance. Triss comes in at number two, and Yen at three.

Cockle also ranked all the areas, and Skellige is his favourite: "I loved the whole Crach an Craite thing," he said. "I love the whole place; I just thought it was a brilliant area to explore." And he's got a soft spot for Kaer Morhen, which comes in at number two. "I liked exploring Geralt's home," he said, "and so many fun things happen in Kaer Morhen. Kaer Morhen is where they all get drunk and dress up in women's clothes, and stuff like that. So that's good fun."

While it features The Witcher 3's best quest, he placed Velen closer to the bottom, behind Toussaint and Novigrad. He liked the area, especially Crookback Bog, but the Bloody Baron quest drove him "bonkers".

"The Bloody Baron, that quest drove me bonkers in the beginning, because it was before I had access to, or before I discovered the ability to fast travel in the world. So I was just riding my fricking horse up and down that hill. And you have to leave Roach and some point, and then you're just running up the hill. And it was just up and down, up and down, it drove me crazy."

Unfortunately fast travel wouldn't have made a difference, as the fast travel point isn't quite close enough to the titular baron to let you avoid running up and down that hill.

I don't think I'll ever tire of listening to Cockle talk about The Witcher—and thankfully he doesn't seem sick of talking about it, either. And it's also a treat to listen to a performer enthuse about the game as a player, rather than just as someone who worked on it. It's well worth giving the video a watch to hear his full romance and location rankings.

Artur Ganszyniec, the lead story designer of the original Witcher RPG, recently completed a full playthrough of the game he helped create nearly 20 years ago, documented across 26 separate episodes on YouTube. And at the end of it all, he dropped an interesting little bit of trivia: The game's epic, out-of-nowhere ending wasn't originally what the story team wanted, and he thinks it was a "mistake."

First things first, the ending in question: Geralt collects his payment from King Foltest and heads for the door, but there's trouble afoot!

Cool fight, but it's the up-close look at the dead dude that really sets the table: The would-be assassin is a witcher! It's a very obvious setup for a sequel, which you might naturally think meant that CD Projekt had something specific in mind for subsequent games. And maybe CD Projekt management did, but the story team? Not really.

"That's where we wanted the game to end, like with an open question and open future," Ganszyniec says as the game's closing montage plays. "But while we were finishing the game, someone decided—like the board decided, or [CD Projekt co-founder Michał Kiciński] decided that we needed an animated outro of the game.

"And the script for this ... it was created not really involving the story team. So it was sort of, we weren't really paying attention. And that was a mistake I think."

The problem, in Ganszyniec's mind, is that the outro effectively locked The Witcher 2 onto a particular path: "It became evident that the next game will have to follow up on this and tell a story about witchers who are killing kings for some reason. And that's why the second Witcher is very political and there's not really much room for exploring who Geralt is, his family, his history, and stuff like this."

I can understand Ganszyniec's frustrations. Building to an open-ended conclusion that leaves Geralt's future adventures open to whatever, only to have it superseded by a surprise twist that really constrains the creative direction of the follow-up game, has to suck a little bit. On the other hand, it's hard to argue with success, and The Witcher 2 was very successful indeed: As of January 2026, it's sold more than 15 million copies, helping turn CD Projekt into one of the biggest game studios in Europe.

"That was a very satisfying half of the year," begin Artur Ganszyniec's closing comments as the credits roll on CD Projekt's original Witcher game from 2007. Five months prior, he took to YouTube to share a full let's play of the cult classic RPG in a series appropriately called "The Witcher with a designer's commentary." The last episode just went up yesterday.

If you're a fan of the original Witcher RPG or the blockbusters that followed it, it's a treasure trove of insights into the series' humble beginnings. Ganszyniec was lead story designer on the original game and also wrote some dialogue here and there, and his video descriptions note, are all about "adding context to some design choices, sharing anecdotes, and providing behind-the-scenes."

The whole thing is 26 episodes, each around an hour or two long, so it's easy enough to treat like a podcast you can throw up on a second monitor. As the first video in the series notes, it's Ganszyniec's first time playing the game in "almost 20 years."

The game has certainly aged—it was admittedly rough the day it dropped—but it was an ambitious game that's easier than ever to play now with the overhauled Enhanced Edition. It's overshadowed these days by the other two fantastic Witcher games, as well as the multiple TV shows and spinoffs the fantasy novel series has inspired, but it still stands as a big milestone in CD Projekt's history and stands tall as a worthwhile RPG. It may not be the best, but it'll always be the first.

I suppose that's why it's got a full remake on the way, which Ganszyniec says he hopes will be good toward the end of his let's play series. We've come a long way since 2007 in more ways than one, and maybe it's good enough to not even warrant remaking, but either way, the original is still there and worth remembering. If 19 years of fermented jank is too much to bear, this let's play might be a good way to get a sense for what you missed all those years ago.

Brothers in Arms is a mod for The Witcher 3 that combines bug fixes with restoration of cut content. It's a frequently updated mod—last time we checked it restored a bunch of dialogue, including a Yennefer romance scene—but the most recent update is particularly substantial. The lengthy list of additions in version 3.1.0 includes the note: "Restored a completely new plotline - Shani's fate during Hearts of Stone expansion. Features a new ending for the expansion (optional)."

As shown by YouTube's exhaustive Witcher 3 documenter xLetalis in the video above, this plotline helps explain why Shani returns in the Hearts of Stone expansion. At one point in development her life would have been at stake if you crossed the expansion's villain Gaunter O'Dimm.

The restored scenes use dialogue found in the game files, which suggests this plotline was cut quite late in development, but everything else has been made from scratch. It's incredible how well it fits, with everything from camera angles to character animations and lip-sync up to the standard of the rest of the game.

That said, I'm not particularly fussed this storyline was cut. The conclusion, in which your local version of Lucifer kills Shani with lightning, doesn't seem quite right. It's an unsubtle maneuver, and one that can be countered because the wording of his specific threat, "there will be no place under the sun where she will be safe," doesn't extend to the cellar. Though it does include the other indoor areas of her house? I prefer the way things play out in the version we've already got.

Fortunately, Brothers in Arms lets you choose what you add, with an extensive in-game menu letting you toggle its various additions. You can download it from Nexus Mods. If you're using other mods, you'll want to run Script Merger as well to detect conflicts and let you merge them to override any problems.

With nearly half a million words in its script and 950 speaking roles to voice them, one thing The Witcher 3 isn't short of is dialogue. Yet like any properly edited work of fiction, there were originally a lot more words in CD Projekt's brilliant RPG. Hundreds of cut voice lines lurk within The Witcher 3's game files, ranging from simple one-liners to dialogue choices and even entire cutscenes.

Under the forensic eye of PC gaming's modding community, however, nothing remains hidden for long. Over the last few years, The Witcher 3 mega-mod Brothers in Arms has restored hundreds of these cut lines (alongside other features like missing NPCs, restored books and journal entries). Brothers in Arms has been regularly updated since its release in 2021, with a new update reinstating even more missing dialogue from CD Projekt's cutting-room floor.

These newly restored lines and cutscenes were highlighted by YouTuber xLetalis. The most notable is a new romance scene between Geralt and Yennefer that occurs during the quest The Last Wish. It revolves around a dialogue choice for Geralt where he chooses whether to say "I love you" to Yennefer.

In the original version, if he chooses not to say it, it leads to a brief and cordial exchange between the lovers. In the restored version, however, choosing not to say "I love you" not only results in a longer exchange, but it's also more romantic, with Geralt and Yen sharing a kiss before parting ways. This isn't the only additional scene from The Last Wish that the updated mod restores, either. Another choice, made at the end of the quest, has been expanded with a scene where Geralt and Yen hold hands.

Elsewhere, other restored lines include a scene where Ciri talks to the warriors of the Wild Hunt, an additional conversation with fellow Witcher Eskel when Geralt returns to Kaer Morhen, and an expanded list of dialogue choices during the Witcher 3's Bloody Baron quest. Here, the player can more clearly vocalise whether they intend to kill or cure the Botchling while speaking to the Baron, although the choice doesn't force you to pursue either of those approaches—possibly why it was cut.

Indeed, for most of the cut lines, I can see a case both for CD Projekt removing them and the modders restoring them. A few are no-brainers, though. Primarily, the first restored line covered by XLetalis is uttered by the Noonwraith monster when Geralt first encounters it: The Noonwraith's ridiculous cackle undermines the tension of the moment, so it's obvious why it fell victim to the editor's scissors.

If you fancy packing The Witcher 3 with even more words, you can download Brothers in Arms over on NexusMods. There's also an outside chance that CD Projekt might officially expand The Witcher 3 this year. Rumours that the studio is working on new DLC for its fantasy RPG are currently swirling, with IGN Poland claiming that it heard about this expansion years ago. Given The Witcher 4 won't be out before 2027, CD Projekt wanting a stopgap isn't completely implausible, and it would certainly be nice to have one last adventure as Geralt before stepping into Ciri's shoes in CD Projekt's highly anticipated sequel.