The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered is really just polishing perfection

With The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered, CD Projekt Red is setting up a grand adventure for Geralt in the upcoming DLC.

The Witcher 3, eleven years after its release, is still a prime example of just how wonderful an experience gaming can be. With a beautifully told story, tremendous world-building, fantastic voice acting, wonderful art, and engaging characters, it will forever stand as the moment CD Projekt Red graduated from a producer of highly entertaining eurojank to a AAA powerhouse.

The developer has consistently supported and improved the game since launch, with killer expansions in Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone, and multiple versions like using the Game of the Year edition to package all the content together, the Next-Gen edition to bring it all up to snuff with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S hardware, and now, the Remastered Edition. 

It’s always very interesting to watch an older game get a new coat of paint. Eleven years isn't long enough for the game to feel stilted and out of touch with modern design, but it’s old enough that some rough edges might benefit from sanding.

The Witcher 3 Remastered takes a pretty broad interpretation of the word remaster and falls somewhere between a remaster and a remake. A remaster usually means a visual upgrade and not much else, but The Witcher 3 Remastered goes much deeper. Yes, we get improved visuals through the HD Reworked Project, reworked global lighting and foliage shading, and, of course, improved ray tracing.

But we also get tweaked combat systems, changes to the skill tree, changes to the user interface, an expanded photo mode, modernized tutorials, a transmogrification system, new finishers, altered enemy AI, and so much more. 

This feels like a dev team taking one last run at the game that truly earned them their place among the greats, leaving it in the best possible state as a testament to their love for The Witcher.

It’s a beautiful day

One of the first things I did was load up an old save file in Toussaint. The remaster lets you jump right back into saves from previous adventures on The Continent, so I took full advantage by jumping into one of my favorite locations in the game. 

For the most part, the game is stunning in its current incarnation. There is a lot to be said for the impact of art direction in The Witcher 3, with obvious efforts to make parts of Toussaint evoke classic, oil-painted landscapes, and it all hits that little bit harder now. No single change is so telling that it carries the day; they all stack up well enough to create a beautifully realized world that carries the soft warmth of sunset from the vineyards around Corvo Bianco as convincingly as it does the uninviting coldness of the mud and blood of No Man’s Land.

A lot of what I look for in modern gaming visuals isn't how realistic it is, but how much it makes me believe. Does the bite of cold or sting of rain come through the screen to really put me in the character's shoes? In this case, yes, it certainly does, which is all I can ask for.

Now, it’s not all peaches and cream; as with a game like this, I am sure some folks will be set in their ways or happily reliant on their own mod stack to make The Witcher 3 look exactly how they want it to. It won’t be possible to please everyone with how the game looks, but CD Projekt Red has done a great job here.

The main issue I found was an odd ghosting around Geralt when I first started playing, but that was purely because my motion blur had been activated at some point in the update. After turning off that most-hated feature, things were crisp again, with no issues with how my character was rendering. Still, I don’t think that is an issue you want to have either, so keep an eye out for it if you do start playing.

One bigger issue, and one I still haven't figured out a solution for, is inconsistent dialogue volume. Some characters spoke just fine, some too quietly, and others almost silently. It’s a little annoying and seems to have no clear cause or solution, but dialogue volume could also be a little sketchy in previous iterations of the game, it has to be said.

Steel and Silver

Combat is the second largest change that folks are likely to be interested in. This is by no means a complete rework of the combat system, but the edges have definitely been smoothed out. I wouldn’t say that the combat now rivals the obvious genre leaders, but some things that really used to annoy me are now obvious from their absence, such as the feeling that you were fighting the camera as much as your enemies.

Camera behavior is vastly improved, staying with the action far better when I’m rolling and doing a great job of keeping multiple enemies on screen at once. The skill tree rework manages to be deep without completely gutting older builds, but it will certainly take some time to come to grips with the changes made. 

Improved enemy behavior felt a little more hit-or-miss to me, with most enemies I ran into certainly behaving smarter than I remembered, but that didn’t always mean fighting them was more fun. Pack and swarm enemies had a habit of running a bit too far away, and while the intention is clearly to let one fall back while the other gets around you, the reality is that they fall back so far that the suspected attack from the rear never actually comes. This seemed especially true when fighting spiders.

Some older skills have been dropped, others consolidated, but the heart of the system remains the same: active skills form the basis of your build, with mutagens enhancing their effects. I've had enough time with the game to form some impressions, but not enough for deep build crafting, so I cannot speak to how this will affect different build types; that might be an article for another day once I've fully explored each skill tree.

One thing that felt very different, and certainly interesting, was how Geralt moves. The ponderous, almost flat-footed Geralt is gone, and efforts to smooth out his animations and the general fiddliness of moving him through the world now mean he definitely feels agile. Climbing things is quicker and more responsive, as is dodging enemies, and even running feels better. The downside is that combat takes a bit of a hit, feeling lighter and a little more arcadey compared to the chunky smacks of the past. Your mileage may vary on how much you enjoy that change.

It would take forever to run through every change, but I suspect this will be a very interesting moment for The Witcher 3. There are almost certainly people out there who will prefer The Witcher 3 as it was before this drops, because that is the nature of the beast.

Personally, my main problem is that after spending a couple of days back in Geralt’s boots, I once again feel the call of a witcher's life, and the urge to replay the game is strong. It seems that while the old phrase “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” is true, even perfection can benefit from a little polish.

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