The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered Review – The Wild Hunt Rides Again

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered Review

If you’re a fan of action RPGs — hell, if you’re a gamer at all — there’s a good chance you’ve played The Witcher 3. After all, by mid 2026, the game had sold over 60 million copies (for the statistics inclined, RDR2 has sold 87 million and Elden Ring, 30 million). Geralt of Rivia is nearly a household name. Legions of pets and probably children named Ciri and Yennifer wander the world. The Witcher 3 was released in 2015, the Complete Edition in 2022 and now we have The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered. While the 2022 version bumped up the visuals for PC, the new version is meant to be a more thorough update. In the words of the developer, it’s meant to feel like a game released in 2026.

And yes, it does. But it’s complicated, as these things tend to be. CD Projekt Red lists changes and improvements in the dozens. Some are cosmetic, some address mechanics and a few focus on the user experience. What hasn’t changed is that The Witcher 3 remains an unassailably great RPG.

Visual Upgrades

I am reviewing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered on a base PS5. That’s important, because a great many visual improvements will be most obvious on a PS5 Pro or PC. Base PS5 owners get locked out of a few premium visual upgrades like path tracing. In fact, there are very few options. You can choose between a 60 fps performance mode and a 30fps ray tracing mode. Nothing more granular than that.

Whether in Performance or Ray Tracing mode, the game looks undeniably, objectively better than the 2015 original or the 2022 update. Textures are more complex and colors are richer. In fact, in the Ray Tracing mode, colors can be a little too unrealistically vibrant. The sun bathing the scene in a warm glow sometimes tips into radioactive orange, and no changes to HDR settings toned it down. Likewise, in Ray Tracing mode, there were cutscenes where faces looked plastic and unnatural. Dialing the system back to Performance mode was a tradeoff, resulting in less complex textures but less unnaturally exaggerated color.

Both The Witcher 3 and the base PS5 are feeling the effects of time. No amount of tweaking can totally disguise character models that are ten years old, and the base PS5 simply doesn’t have the capability to access all the really significant graphical upgrades. My suggestion is to play the game in Performance mode, and enjoy that it still looks markedly better than it used to.

Much, Much More

The mechanical updates and quality of life changes are maybe more important to making The Witcher 3 feel fresh again. Some of these are fairly subtle, others more obvious. Improvements have been made to character animations in and out of combat. In large part, this has to do with how the camera tracks the action more dynamically. Monster behavior and enemy AI have been improved. Roach’s handling has been vastly updated, and now the horse is much less apt to be stymied by objects.

Lots of changes have been made to the upgrade tree. Skills are now organized into a skill tree and each skill has three ranks. Unlocking new skills now requires having the necessary prerequisite skills rather than spending a set number of skill points. Additionally, some skills have been rebalanced and renamed. Players returning to the game will find their skill points reset.

On the UI/UX front, lots of mechanics and visuals have been modified. The map screen has been updated to make switching between tracked quests easier. Meditation now features a timelapse instead of a UI screen. Just so this doesn’t devolve into an endless list, I’d say that nearly all the mechanical and quality-of-life features are good ones. Nothing seemed to break the game, but players returning after an absence should prepare for a bit of re-learning the interface.

Finally, there’s an officially supported Mod store. At launch, the mods were for minor cosmetic changes, new outfits and a few minor game play tweaks.

While We Wait

It’s probably no secret that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered helps players — and their PCs and consoles — prepare and get excited for 2027’s Songs of the Past DLC. That this new edition is free to all owners of the game and includes the two massive expansions is generous in a time when the industry is somewhat in turmoil, and publishers are getting a bad rap. The base PS5 version can’t access all the bells and whistles of its PC and PS5 Pro cousins. Still, it definitely helps bring The Witcher 3 closer to modern standards. As if anyone needed it, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered reminds us that the game is more than worth revisiting.

***PS5 code provided by the publisher for review***