The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is already one of the most revered RPGs ever made, but CD Projekt Red isn’t content with letting their classic rest in lieu of its long-awaited sequel. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered brings an extensive list of changes, from revamped combat and progression to improved traversal, accessibility, and visual overhauls. And the best thing? Remastered is free if you already own the base game. So, whether you’re returning for your tenth playthrough or experiencing Geralt’s adventure for the first time, here’s fifteen of the biggest changes coming to Wild Hunt Remastered.
Modernised Combat Makes Geralt More Responsive
One of The Witcher 3 Remastered’s most substantial overhauls centres on its combat, with CD Projekt Red refining Geralt’s animations, transitions, and responsiveness to be more in-line with modern expectations. Attacks will flow more seamlessly into one another, while switching targets becomes a breeze, with the goal being to make Wild Hunt feel like a game that could have been released for the first time in 2026 rather than reflecting its 11-year age.
Witcher Signs Get New Finishers
Adding some finesse to Geralt’s modernised combat are new finishing moves, with the remaster incorporating Signs into his executions, including an Aard-based finisher shown in the game’s reveal. The signs themselves are also receiving a visual refresh, with Aard, Igni, Quen, Axii, and Yrden getting a cosmetic refresh. As far as we know, the underlying mechanics haven’t been confirmed to change, but executing them should at least look more impressive.
Enemies React, Move, and Fight More Smartly
While CD Projekt Red has not detailed specific behavioural changes for The Witcher 3’s gauntlet of monsters, the studio has confirmed that enemies will react, move, and engage more smartly thanks to improved AI. Combined with refined combat animations – which apply here as well as to Geralt – then encounters will feel more dynamic and awestriking, particularly when the White Wolf takes on larger and more aggressive creatures.
Traversal Receives a Much-Needed Overhaul
Getting around The Witcher 3’s enormous continent should be notably less fiddly in the upcoming remaster. Climbing, vaulting, and mantling have all been reworked to make Geralt’s traversal more responsive and engaging, no matter the environmental obstacle. This is particularly significant as the original was often decried for its stuttering navigation, where frustration consistently reared its head as Geralt scrambled over rocks, ledges, and walls.
Roach Will Feel Better To Control
Improvements were made to Roach’s handling in The Witcher 3’s 2022 next-gen update, but Wild Hunt Remastered is set to build on this with another handling overhaul. This time, you should have greater control over where Geralt’s trusted steed roams, wrestling back control from the famously unpredictable horse. White CD Projekt Red hasn’t detailed every adjustment yet, we expect traversing with Roach should feel more deliberate than the original ever did.
Skill Trees Have Been Completely Redesigned
The Witcher 3 Remastered’s progression systems have been rebuilt from the ground-up, with them now mirroring the structure CD Projekt Red used in Cyberpunk 2077. Now, there are interlocking branches that govern how perks are unlocked, while existing skills are being reworked alongside new abilities that are set to be introduced. This, alongside combat and graphical overhauls – the latter we’ll get onto later – represents one of Remastered’s most substantial updates, potentially giving returning players an entirely new way to build Geralt.
Transmogrification Combines Stats Between Equipment
Wild Hunt Remastered finally lets you separate Geralt’s appearance from his equipment’s statistics, with transmogrification allowing you to use the stats of one weapon or armour piece while retaining the appearance of another. This welcome change means you’ll no longer have to choose between looking like the White Wolf you actually want to see or equipping whatever items happen to have the better numbers.
A Significant Visual Overhaul Does More Than Make Things Look Better
Yes, The Witcher 3 Remastered’s graphics package goes considerably further than boosting the 2022 next-gen’s resolution. CD Projekt Red has reworked textures, foliage shading, global illumination, environmental geometry, and the interactions between specific surfaces and light. Going deeper, there’s also improvements coming to subsurface scattering, ambient occlusion, tone mapping, and ray tracing. The key here is these improvements are coming to every individual element, from grass and plant texture, to how light passes through skin.
PC Gets Further Graphical Updates
Those graphical overhauls just-mentioned apply to every platform, but PC players will get several extra additions that won’t be available on console. The headline is full path tracing, creating more physically accurate lighting simulation beyond rasterised ray tracing. There’s also Nvidia Ray Reconstruction, DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4, and Intel XeSS 2.0, producing cleaner outputs, high image quality at lower resolutions, Nvidia-less upscaling, and machine learning upscaling respectively.
Meditation Is Much More Immersive
Not every change coming to Wild Hunt Remastered represents a substantial overhaul. Some are smaller, more atmospheric changes which point to CD Projekt Red considering how the game will feel to play in 2026 rather than simply how it performs. The newly immersive meditation system is one such change, where a screen fade out is being replaced with a time-lapse of the world around Geralt as he meditates on time passing. Again, it’s a minor addition, but it makes a system previously functional feel more in-tune with the game’s tone.
Menus and UI Updated To Match Modern Expectations
The Witcher 3’s menus are getting an overdue usability refresh too, with the interface and navigation being redesigned with clarity and ease of use in mind. Navigating the game’s huge inventory, map, quest log, and progression systems, then, should prove to be much quicker. It might not be as flashy as the new violent execution finishers, but given how much time you spend menu diving through lengthy playthroughs it will feel impactful.
Photo Mode Has Been Expanded
First introduced in the 2022 update, The Witcher 3’s photo mode is being expanded with additional tools and options. New poses, camera controls, frames, filters, and character models give you more ways to capture Geralt than ever before. Considering how spectacular the visually refreshed Continent is set to look, the expanded toolkit should give screenshot hunters plenty of reason to feel satisfied with their snaps.
The Tutorial Has Been Modernised
If you’re new, or, indeed, returning for the first time in a long while, you should have an easier time understanding The Witcher 3’s interconnected systems thanks to a thoroughly modernised tutorial. Going beyond the fundamentals of combat, Wild Hunt Remastered’s tutorial covers the gamut of Geralt’s capabilities, including Witcher Signs and alchemy. In truth, it’s likely a useful addition for every player, with The Witcher 3 being one of the densest RPGs in existence.
Console Players Get Cross-Platform Mod Support
Remastered is also set to bring cross-platform mod support to consoles for the first time, with the Xbox Series X|S specifically cited as a platform confirmed to support user-created modifications. Indeed, custom quests, weapons, equipment, and individualised balance is set to give console players an entirely new way to experience the game’s wealth of community-created content.
A Range of Accessibility Options Is Included
Finally, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered is set to add a substantial collection of accessibility options, letting you remove some of the game’s more cumbersome and repetitive mechanics. Now, you’ll be able to enable things such as infinite breath, while adjustable vitality duration, unlimited boat durability, and unlimited item durability should ease the sometimes unnecessary management of your equipment. Automatically looting corpses is another notable inclusion, but this alongside all other changes can be toggled individually to tailor the experience to your liking rather than settling for a broad-brush easy mode.
