As the fantasy RPG GOAT, it really doesn’t take a whole lot for me to replay The Witcher 3. I’ve happily done so the numerous other times developer CD Projekt Red has revamped this masterpiece, but The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered seems to be the biggest overhaul to the beloved tale yet. A free update for anyone who owns the original, so many different parts of this already excellent game have been improved – from combat to movement to skill progression (not to mention the modernized graphics). After about 10 hours working my way through White Orchard and beyond, it’s already extremely clear that this is the best The Witcher 3 has ever been.
Combat is less floaty and enemies are (slightly) less stupid
It’s probably not controversial to say that one of the worst parts of this otherwise amazing adventure was the combat. Even after at least a few updates to it over the years, it still mostly felt floaty, a bit on the sloppy side, and enemies were a huge fan of just standing there and waiting for their turn to get decapitated. The modernizations made to combat in this remaster are its biggest step forward, as a whole bevy of tweaks have been made to address various sticking points. Geralt attacks faster and enemies are quicker to match your pace, which makes the process of chopping through your ninth pack of wolves much less irritating.
The camera and lock-on functionality have been the highlight so far, as you can now toggle between large groups of enemies with ease, and without the camera losing its mind. I didn’t even use the lock-on system in the original specifically because it was so unreliable, so being able to do so now has taken some serious getting used to. In general, the camera feels much better – less tightly locked to your back so you can handle groups of enemies more reliably (though those darn Neckers still like to sneak up on ya), and so far I’ve encountered far fewer situations where I felt like I was fighting my view as much as I was the monsters.
I’ve also noticed some new enemy behaviors that make swordplay more interesting, specifically how they’ll now retreat instead of letting you trounce them with steel, launch less telegraphed counterattacks, and disappear and reappear behind you (in the case of ghost monsters). All that did a much better job of making me feel like I was fighting intelligent creatures. Of course, compared to some of the stuff we see in action games today, I still do feel like the enemy behavior shows its age, and it was never all that great to begin with. Still, this is enough of an improvement to make combat feel much more engaging than it once did, significantly upgrading one of this adventure’s weakest points.
Geralt moves so much faster and Roach is less of a cretin
Movement is one of those small details that can grate the heck out of you in a massive RPG like The Witcher 3, slowly filling you with rage over the course of hundreds of hours. In the original, Geralt was often slow and had a lot of trouble getting over things. His rigid animations sometimes made me avoid ladders altogether because I just didn’t have the patience for it. In the remaster, Geralt absolutely flies over fences and navigates vertical obstacles with relative ease, to the point where it actually felt weird to see him be so nimble. I recall losing over an hour of progress in the 1.0 version when Geralt fell off a ledge no taller than a barstool and managed to break every bone in his body. This was reduced already in the next-gen update from 2022, but combined with the other speed and mobility improvements here, it almost feels like a completely different game – to the point where I’ve begun to wonder if it’ll make the map feel smaller than before as I get deeper in.
Similarly, Roach is no longer the annoying idiot she once was, now sporting much more intuitive controls that make her less likely to get caught on trees (which she now passes through if she’s just brushing against them while galloping), or end up on top of a barn. Most importantly, you can now loot herbs and whatnot without getting off your horse, which is maybe the single best improvement this remaster offers (dismounting every 10 seconds to pick a flower drove me to the brink of madness in 2015).
Skill trees are less restrictive
A pet peeve of mine in RPGs is when skill trees prevent you from playing around with different builds until you get deep into the progression. This is something The Witcher 3 suffered from quite a bit in the early hours, as so many of the impactful abilities were locked behind walls you couldn’t remove until late in the journey. The revised trees in the remaster take a page out of Cyberpunk 2077’s book by making perks more readily available earlier on, so you can customize how you’d like Geralt to get his Witchering done. I’m still early in my journey on this run, but I’m already happy to see that I won’t have to wait until I’ve invested a whole 12 points in a branch before I can unlock any good skills – so long as I’ve purchased a skill along the route I’m focusing on, I can now progress down a certain skill path with fewer obstructions.
Oh, yeah, this remaster looks pretty great too
Maybe this goes without saying for a remaster, but this is a pretty massive graphical upgrade, even over the one The Witcher 3 got for the current generation of consoles just four years ago. The lighting is much more dramatic, environmental textures are way more detailed, shadows and reflections are much more consistent across the board (especially on PC), and Geralt’s hair looks way less like a blurry mess than it once did. Again, this is all stuff that you’d hope would be the bare minimum when remastering a 12-year-old game, but it still warrants a shoutout. There’s even a new photo mode for those of you who want to take glamor shots of Geralt in all his new, high definition glory.
The one thing caveat here is that performance is still not perfect, and I still ran into a dropped frame or two on both console and PC. It’s a small price to pay for how much better things look, though, especially with the incredibly short load times I saw. And considering that the original had some framerate issues of its own, it’s not like anything has gotten worse here.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered’s greatest asset isn’t that it adds anything the original sorely lacked, but rather that it removes some of the biggest roadblocks to fun the 1.0 version was saddled with. Combat is more challenging but also easier to enjoy, movement is quicker and less irritating, and revised skill trees allow for more freedom. Even if it doesn’t manage to fix some of the technical issues (plus I’m sure there are some bugs waiting for me to encounter them that haven’t reared their ugly heads yet), it manages to make this classic RPG more enjoyable in 2026, and that’s worth yet another ride down its well-trodded roads.