The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered is real, and it is a free upgrade for everyone who already owns the game. CD Projekt Red closed a long feature trailer at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2026 with the “free upgrade for all Witcher 3 owners” card, a key art of Geralt, Ciri, Yennefer, and Triss, and a tease that reads simply “and next year”, which led straight into a second trailer.
The trailer opens on Geralt walking through a fog-bound ruin while a voice-over says “I never chose to be a Witcher, fate chose for me”, then runs through its upgrades as title cards: upgraded visuals (a sun-drenched Skellige valley and a Novigrad street rebuilt), enhanced combat (a swamp fight against drowners), improved traversal and movement, new Witcher sign effects, revamped mount handling, a skill tree revamp with a new interface, transmogrification, and new finishers.
An “and so much more” card scrolled a much longer list, and the lines that were legible on the stream included cross-platform mod support, refined animations, new quest tracking, UI improvements, new accessibility features, updated textures, a foliage shading rework, tutorial modernisation, improved menu navigation, ray tracing improvements, a global lighting rework, a new shading model and tone mapper, PlayStation 5 Pro support, Xbox Play Anywhere support, Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive features, and, on PC, DLSS 4.5, FSR 4, and path tracing.
The package includes both expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine.
The date came a minute later, when CD Projekt Red level design lead Miles Tost joined host Geoff Keighley on stage: the remaster launches on September 29, “to PC and consoles, including Switch 2 and even Battle.net”, in Keighley’s words. Tost said the team “poured their hearts into this one” and singled out the visuals, “new textures, updated rendering, advanced path tracing, foliage, you name it”, adding that “Geralt has never looked as good, even after all those years of retirement”. The “and next year” card that closed the trailer was for a new expansion, Songs of the Past, covered separately.