Following the announcement that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered is a free update, CD Projekt RED co-CEO Michał Nowakowski has said that the studio never really considered charging people who already owned the game for the update. In an interview with The Game Business, Nowakowski spoke about how the company looks at Remastered as a gift to long-time fans of the game.
Interestingly, he also brought up the fact that Remastered ended up being an accident. While the team was working on the upcoming Songs of the Past DLC, he explained that many of the developers came up with the idea to modernize the decade-old RPG.
“It was never a question we asked ourselves. We were going deeper into the development of Songs of the Past with [developer] 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.
“But coming back to your original commercial question, we never thought about it this way. The commercial bit is the expansion, but with the game, 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.”
Further in the interview, Nowakowski also spoke about how the enhancements being made to The Witcher 3 with the remaster will serve as a precursor of sorts for Songs of the Past. He explained that work on the project started when Fool’s Theory was supposed to be working on the remake of The Witcher, but had to wait for “certain technology dependencies with The Witcher 4.”
While CD Projekt RED had decided that The Witcher 3 was a “closed book” that it wasn’t going to return to, conversations started up with Fool’s Theory about how interesting an expansion for such an old game would be.
“We felt that The Witcher 3 was a closed book and we’d never come back to it. But a couple of happy accidents happened. We started a collaboration with Fool’s Theory. They were supposed to work on The Witcher 1 [remake], but we realized that needed a bit more time because of certain technology dependencies with The Witcher 4.
“We actually had the idea for a third expansion a long time ago, but it was put in a drawer forever. We never thought we’d be taking it out. But one conversation led to another, which led to, ‘Why don’t we make an expansion?’ Does it even make sense after such a long time? Has anybody done that for a single-player game? That led us to, ‘It sounds crazy, but let’s give Geralt one more ride’.”
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered is coming to PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2 on September 29th. Those who don’t already own the title will have to deal with a $10 price hike across all platforms. For more details, check out our thoughts.
