The Witcher 3 Remastered Costs Nothing, and That's the News

Eleven years after Geralt first rode out of White Orchard, The Witcher 3 is getting a proper remaster - and if you already own the game, the price is zero.

That sounds like a small detail. It isn't. The default in this business for years has been that an old game you already paid for gets re-released and you pay for it again, either at full price or through an "upgrade fee" that is just a politer way of charging you twice.

CD Projekt Red confirmed at Gamescom that The Witcher 3 Remastered arrives on 29 September as a free upgrade for existing owners on GOG, Steam, Epic, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, while people who bought it on the original Switch get a free step up to Switch 2. It also shows up on Battle.net for the first time. And this isn't a resolution bump with a new logo: CDPR is listing rebuilt visuals, reworked combat with new finishers and animations, changes to traversal and mount handling, new sign effects, a revamped skill tree, transmogrification and an expanded photo mode, with a studio called Yigsoft co-developing. On top of that, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are now free for anyone who owns the base game, and a third expansion, Songs of the Past, is due in 2027 - twelve years after the original launch.

What it's actually worth to a player here

Almost everyone I know in this region already owns The Witcher 3. It has been in every sale for a decade, usually at a price that makes you click without thinking about it, and it's the one big-budget RPG that everybody here got around to eventually. So the practical effect of this announcement is that a very large number of local libraries just quietly got more valuable overnight, without anyone spending a cent.

GOG deserves a mention here too, because it's CD Projekt's own storefront and it sells the game DRM-free - meaning the copy you download stays yours in a way that a licence on a console account doesn't. After the last few weeks of arguments about what "buying" a digital game even means, that contrast lands harder than usual.

The one thing I'd still like spelled out is what happens to disc owners. Plenty of people around here bought The Witcher 3 second-hand on a disc, and the announcement talks in terms of accounts and storefronts. If you're planning your September around it, wait for that detail in writing rather than assuming.

None of this is charity, obviously. With the next Witcher still years away, keeping the old one alive and talked about is cheap marketing compared to what a new trailer costs, and every free upgrade is also a nudge toward CDPR's own platform. Fine. Self-interest that leaves players better off is still players being better off.

My only real worry is the rebuilt combat and the reworked skill tree. That's a lot of surgery on a game a lot of people have already finished three times, and it's the sort of change that tends to break long-running mod setups. I hope the old build stays reachable for the people who want it.

Free upgrades used to be the boring, normal way of doing this. Now one is a headline. That says more about the last ten years than it does about CD Projekt.

Image: Sergey Galyonkin / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladislav_as_Geralt_from_Witcher_3_at_Igromir_2013.jpg