Eleven years after leaving a lasting mark on the open-world RPG genre, *The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt* clearly has no intention of retiring.
It seems Geralt of Rivia isn’t done with monsters—or with our graphics cards—just yet. As The Witcher 3 prepares to celebrate its twelfth anniversary, CD Projekt RED has announced a particularly ambitious remaster of its cult-classic RPG. The studio promises a major upgrade to graphics, gameplay, and performance, notably including the introduction of path tracing on PC, as well as support for all image upscaling technologies: NVIDIA’s DLSS 4.5, AMD’s FSR 4, and Intel’s XeSS 2. And this isn’t just a PR stunt meant to make the spec sheet look good. CD Projekt RED intends to modernize the entire experience, working on both the visuals and the gameplay. The studio is taking this opportunity to share some welcome news: this remastered edition will include the original game and its first two expansions, *Hearts of Stone* and *Blood and Wine*. Best of all, this upgrade will be offered for free to players who already own the game—a move sure to please a great many players.
The timing is actually quite well-chosen. The remaster is set to arrive on September 29—yes, in just one month—2026, which is only a few months before the release of *Songs of the Past*, the new expansion announced for 2027. The latter is being developed jointly by CD Projekt RED and Fool’s Theory, with several former members of The Witcher 3’s development team at the helm. This time, Geralt will head to Letten, a seemingly idyllic region that hides some decidedly less bucolic secrets. And because a self-respecting witcher never goes anywhere empty-handed, this new adventure will allow him to wield a brand-new weapon: a chain. While some may call this a comeback, The Witcher 3 proves above all that it never truly disappeared from the gaming landscape. With over 65 million copies sold worldwide, CD Projekt RED can boast of having created one of the landmark titles of Western RPGs.
But between the spectacular evolution of rendering techniques and the upcoming release of a new expansion, the studio has an excellent excuse to bring Geralt back into the spotlight. Of course, one question remains: what will the actual system requirements be for this remaster and this third expansion, given that—as any gamer will tell you—path tracing is a particularly resource-intensive technology? In reality, the answer is right there in the first paragraph of this news article: technologies like DLSS 4.5, FSR 4, and XeSS 2 are precisely designed to allow our PCs to maintain sufficient frame rates despite the abundance of visual effects and high-definition textures. For CD Projekt RED, this remaster is therefore as much an update as it is a way to lay the groundwork for what’s to come—and, no doubt, to train its teams to make the most of all the technologies developed by NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. It’s worth noting that following this remaster on September 29, 2026, and the “Songs of the Past” expansion sometime in 2027, CD Projekt RED is planning to release The Witcher IV—this time not before 2028—which is described as “the studio’s most ambitious project to date.” Nothing less.
