CD Projekt RED announced an updated version of The Witcher 3 at Gamescom. The game was already optimized for current-gen consoles a few years ago, but now the developers will improve it significantly, not only in terms of graphics, but also in terms of gameplay. They also promised to use new features from each platform, and in particular they confirmed support for Play Anywhere in the Xbox ecosystem.
Here are the major changes CD Projekt RED has confirmed for The Witcher 3 Remastered.
Graphics and performance
- Update texture – More detailed textures for environments, NPCs and enemies.
- Improve vegetation — High-quality models and visualizations of grass, shrubs, and trees.
- Redesigned vegetation shadows – Leaves and grass will react more realistically to light.
- Redesigned global lighting – Guaranteed more natural light throughout the game world.
- Improved lighting, shadows, reflections and ray tracing – Better lighting and shadow performance and anti-aliasing.
- New shading model – An updated method for calculating how light interacts with surfaces.
- subsurface light scattering – A technique that allows light to partially pass through a translucent surface. For example, a character’s skin will look more natural because light is able to visually penetrate beneath the skin’s surface.
- New tone mapper — Improved processing of bright and dark areas of images to make pictures look more natural.
- Improved HDR – Wider brightness range and more natural light display.
- Ground truth ambient occlusion – Realistic contact shadows where surfaces touch each other.
- Updated motion blur – Image blur when the camera or object moves quickly has been redesigned.
- Path tracing on PC Is a more advanced version of ray tracing that can consider multiple types of light interactions simultaneously to calculate lighting.
- Ray Reconstruction – PC – NVIDIA technology improves image quality when using ray tracing for better detail recovery.
- hair ray tracing – Made their lighting and light reflections more realistic.
- NVIDIA DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4, Intel XeSS 2.0 — AI-powered image scaling improves performance and image quality.
- Rendering parallelism – Distribute work across multiple processor threads for more efficient image processing and potentially better performance.
Game play
- Improved combat system – Geralt’s movements are smoother and more responsive.
- new animation – Character movements have been redesigned, including during combat.
- New finishing move – Added new brutal finishing moves.
- Adaptive camera in combat — The camera will automatically change position based on the number of opponents.
- Improved Geralt’s movements – Smoother walking, running and movement during combat.
- New wizard logo effect — Ability visuals have been updated.
- Improve horse control — Cockroach behavior and controls have been redesigned.
- Improved monster behavior – Opponent behavior should be more natural and diverse.
- Redesigned skill tree – The character development system has been changed to provide more options for building builds.
- Transfiguration — You can change the appearance of your gear while maintaining its characteristics.
- New task tracking system – Improved navigation through active tasks.
- Redesigned loot system — Receiving and managing items has been changed and the interface should become clearer and more convenient.
- meditation – The mode has been updated and they promise it will become “more immersive”, but there are no details yet.
- modern teaching model – The start of the game and the training of basic mechanics have been redesigned.
Interface and additional features
- Update interface — Various UI elements have been redesigned.
- Improved menu navigation — Menus will become more convenient to use, including through the game controller.
- New accessibility features – Additional settings for players with different needs, but their list has not yet been specified.
- Advanced photo mode — More options for setting up the camera and taking screenshots.
- Cross-platform mod support — Cross-platform modification system. Let’s remember that the mod was available on PC last year, with promises to be added to consoles before the end of this year.
- Xbox Play Anywhere — In the Xbox ecosystem, purchasing a game once is enough to access it on console and PC.
- Playstation 5 Pro support – Separate improvements have been made for the more powerful Sony console version, but details are not available yet.
- Accessibility on Nintendo Switch 2 – The developers have yet to share details.
Let us remind you that The Witcher 3 Remastered will be distributed free of charge to all owners of the base game, whether on console or PC. In addition, they will also give away two major DLCs for the game – “Hearts of Stone” and “Blood and Wine”.
