Witcher 3 Remastered: What Changed, Skill Reset and PC Specs

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered, out on 29 September 2026 as a free upgrade on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2, resets every skill point, replaces the old skill slots with a ranked skill tree and adds transmog, a new combat camera and path tracing. Your saves, achievements and trophies carry over, and base-game owners now get Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine at no extra cost.

This guide is built on CD Projekt Red's official Remastered patch notes (published on 28 September), the official FAQ and the updated PC requirements page, plus reporting from IGN, Rock Paper Shotgun and Nintendo Life. Checked against the Remastered launch update on 29 September 2026. We have not played it: nothing below is a hands-on impression.

Who gets The Witcher 3 Remastered for free?

Anyone who bought any version of the game, physical or digital, can upgrade for free within the same platform ecosystem, according to CD Projekt Red. On PS5 and Xbox Series X|S the existing game updates itself. Switch 2 works differently: Nintendo Life reports that Switch owners have to find Remastered in the eShop and download it as a separate product at no cost, rather than waiting for an update.

The bigger change is what the base game includes. The official FAQ says Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are now part of the game for every base-game owner, the standalone expansions are delisted and the base game is replaced by the Complete Edition. On PS4 and Xbox One, which do not get Remastered, the two expansions become free downloads. On Steam the Complete Edition was $24.99 (50% off) when we checked on 29 September. Download sizes and unlock times by region are in our release time and download size explainer.

What happens to your save and your skill points?

Saves work. CD Projekt Red's FAQ says save files remain compatible, cross progression keeps working, and achievements and trophies are unaffected, including those from the expansions. You can still start Hearts of Stone or Blood and Wine on their own from the main menu.

Skills are a different story. According to the patch notes, skills now sit in a skill tree, each skill has three ranks, and unlocking a skill requires its prerequisite skills rather than a set number of points spent in a branch. As a result, your skill points have been reset. Bonus values, effects and synergies were rebalanced and some skills were renamed, so a build copied from an older guide will not map one-to-one.

What changed in combat, movement and the camera?

The combat changes are about feel rather than new systems. CD Projekt Red says it polished the behaviour of many non-boss monsters (attack patterns, counterattacks, movement, reactions, flight and how they apply effects), smoothed Geralt's gap-closing attacks and improved target-lock switching. There are new finisher and idle animations; the jump animation changed, but jump distance and height did not.

Two camera additions stand out: an exploration camera with a wider field of view, and a dynamic combat camera meant to keep enemies in view. Ledge climbing, ladders and vaulting are faster. There is also a new way out of fights: hold dodge to drop your target lock, then press sprint to run. On horseback you can now loot without dismounting Roach, and a Horse control input sensitivity slider sits in Settings → Controls.

Which new features should you switch on first?

Several of the most useful additions are optional or tucked away in menus:

• Grouped loot: nearby loot can be collected from a single window once you enable it in Settings → Gameplay. A loot feed on the left of the screen lists what you picked up and can be turned off in the same menu.
• Reforge: the master craftsmen Yoana and Hattori can change an item's appearance without touching its stats. Looks unlock when you add equipment and crafting diagrams to your inventory, and Blood and Wine dyes carry over.
• Cleaner minimap: herbs, boats and corpses can be hidden under Settings → Video → Interface.
• Map tracking: untracked quests get their own marker and can be tracked straight from the map, and the map now allows more markers.
• Meditation now plays a timelapse instead of opening a menu screen.
• Photo Mode adds placeable characters and props, poses and expressions, weather and time-of-day controls, and a first-person camera.

Mods get easier too. Cross Platform Mod Support is an in-game browser powered by mod.io, found under Mods in the main menu: you log in with a CD Projekt Red account and connect it to mod.io.

What's new on PC, and can your PC run it?

The PC version moves to native DirectX 12 with multithreaded rendering and adds path tracing, ray-traced local shadows and ray-traced HairWorks. Upscaling now means NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 with Ray Reconstruction, AMD FSR 4 with Frame Generation and Anti-Lag 2, or Intel XeSS 2.0 with Frame Generation. FSR 4 only runs on Radeon RX 7000 cards and newer; other GPUs fall back to FSR 2, and the notes list no FSR 3 option. DualSense haptics are also supported on PC.

The requirements rose sharply. CD Projekt Red now lists an SSD as required and no longer officially supports Windows 10, though it says the game will not simply stop running there. Its requirements page adds that a GTX 1660 can reach 60 fps or more at Minimum settings, that the ray-tracing presets were measured with upscaling on Auto, and that the path tracing target assumes Frame Generation.

Path tracing is the expensive part. IGN ran an RTX 5080 through Novigrad at 4K with DLSS on Performance: about 30 fps with path tracing and HairWorks on, 44 fps with HairWorks off, and 55 fps with path tracing disabled. Frame Generation roughly doubled the first two figures, with visible artefacts at the low base frame rate. IGN's advice is to drop path tracing first and HairWorks next. CD Projekt Red also asks PC players to install the latest graphics drivers before launching the update.

What changed on PS5, PS5 Pro, Xbox and Switch 2?

On Switch 2, Nintendo Life cites CD Projekt Red's Marcin Momot putting the download at 50GB, and notes that pre-installation opened a few days before launch. Physical Switch owners can claim the upgrade from launch day, according to CD Projekt Red's support team as quoted by Nintendo Life.

Can you go back to the old version?

On some platforms, yes. CD Projekt Red's requirements page says that, depending on your platform, you can revert to version 1.32 (listed as Classic), and that from the Remastered launch you can also revert to 4.04, the last version of the next-gen update, as Rock Paper Shotgun also noted. That is the fallback if your PC falls below the new minimum or you would rather keep the old skill system for an ongoing playthrough. CD Projekt Red has not said which platforms offer the rollback.

One quest fix is worth knowing about if you are mid-way through Blood and Wine: a bug in Wine is Sacred, where fast travelling out of Toussaint during the wine cellar objective could block progress, is fixed, but not retroactively. If it already hit you, you need to load a save from before it happened.

Is the Remastered update worth playing now?

Early critical reaction is positive but measured: Push Square's review in progress, quoted in Nintendo Life's roundup, says it "looks and plays better than ever" while warning not to expect game-changing additions. Interest is high: the r/witcher countdown thread for the launch reached 4,024 upvotes and 619 comments, and Steam showed 10,578 concurrent players at 08:05 UTC on launch morning, two hours before unlock (our report on its Metacritic score and Steam player numbers tracks what happened next). Steam's user score stood at 96.8% positive (861,288 of 890,085 reviews), though nearly all of those predate Remastered.

For first-time players the case is simple: both expansions now come with the base game. Returning players should budget time to rebuild their skills and check the requirements table before switching on path tracing. Everything else we publish on the game lives on our The Witcher 3 hub.