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.
