The Witcher 3 Remastered is coming to all players as a free update on September 29, and new footage from developer CD Projekt Red suggests you'll want to take a close look at what settings you have enabled, because I fear some details and atmosphere may be lost in translation.
CDPR posted a new side-by-side comparison for The Witcher 3 and its upcoming remaster on its channels, and boy has it stoked some conversation. The clip sees Geralt torching a group of Drowners in a swamp with a flame spell, both pre- and post-remaster.
I hate to say it, and I'm surprised to say it given how good the remaster has appeared in footage until now, but the new version looks worse to me. With zero hyperbole, I had the "before" and "after" clips mixed up for several seconds, to the point that I checked CDPR's YouTube and Twitter to make sure the studio hadn't made a mistake in the labels.
The caveat here is that we don't know the exact graphics settings or hardware environment that were used for these side-by-side clips. Maybe some elements were disabled to emphasize others. The video also comes with a disclaimer: "Work in progress. Does not represent the final look of the game." But we are just days away from the remaster's launch, so I don't know how much work is left.
A few changes stand out. The skin and muscle of the Drowners feels less detailed, not necessarily because it is – you can see the same creases and patterns if you look close, though they do seem scalier in the original – but perhaps because of the bizarrely glossy, metallic shine they have in the remastered clip. Either these are rare Chrome Drowners or GPUs have gone too far.
The fire effect lingering on the Drowners arguably looks more realistic in the new version, but it feels less powerful to me – artificial, less like an inferno and more like a torch. In the new version, it looks like there is fire on them; in the OG, they look to be on fire. The remastered clip also doesn't have the same fiery, scarlet reflections in the water, which is strange given how gorgeous the updated water is otherwise. The lighting on the plants, which are certainly lush, also seems less affected by the fire itself in the remaster.
Maybe this is a function of when during the in-game day these clips were recorded, but the original Witcher 3 has more noticeable fog and a rich, dusky atmosphere with a warm redness to it, while the remaster feels almost sterile in its path traced brightness. Combined with the missing fire reflections, the new version feels a bit washed out, and this is worryingly close to the color shortage and vibrancy famine that we've seen in some other remasters as well as modern AAA games.
I look at this clip and I feel a clash of contrast. A lot of individual components might look better up close in the remaster, but when you pull back and see the whole canvas, the original game looks more cohesive to me, not to mention more saturated. Maybe that will change when I'm actually in, and accustomed to, the remastered game world, but a lot of these differences feel pretty empirical. I have a pretty beefy PC, so I would definitely throw this remaster under the microscope when we get it in our hands.
Many other people seem to feel the same. "Why removing the colours and the fog?" replies one Twitter user. "Hope you add those sparkles and reflection you did a great job," says a YouTube viewer. "Lighting and Clarity in the latest looks great , but I really liked the red glow/filter (idk) in the before," agrees another.
CD Projekt Red has now moved on from its in-house REDengine and adopted Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4, but co-CEO Michał Nowakowski says that wasn't due to the technical issues that Cyberpunk 2077 ran into.
What's new in The Witcher 3 Remastered?
