Yesterday brought us Gamescom Opening Night Live 2026, which saw the reveal of various new games – and, perhaps most excitingly of all, a first look at The Witcher 3 Remastered as well as CD Projekt Red's new DLC for the RPG, Songs of the Past.
In case you missed it, the showcase outlined some of what we can expect to see in the new revamped take on The Witcher 3 come its release on September 29, from "improved combat" to overhauled visuals – and much, much more.
GamesRadar+ got to hear more about it all from Miles Tost, level design lead on The Witcher 4, starting with how the combat system is indeed going "to be much more smooth and precise."
Tost shows it in action, too, and boy, is it smooth – and there's quite a lot at play that makes it so. "We updated the camera system, character animations, sign visuals, a lot of things to make it feel more modern," as the lead puts it.
There's "cleaner foliage, improved rendering and lighting, advanced ray tracing" as well – "it really, really tries to stand up to today's games," basically, and as much is obvious from what we witness of the remaster.
As per PC Gamer, CD Projekt Red had quite a lot in mind while tweaking The Witcher 3 Remastered's improvements – including new players.
Executive producer of external projects Jakub Kutrzuba states as much: "We're mostly thinking about new players, you know? We're looking at The Witcher from that perspective – so what would be the biggest pain points? What would a player expect to be changed in order to enjoy the game?"
And, echoing Tost's own words, what would The Witcher 3 feel like "if it was a game which released in 2026?" Well, there's the smoother combat – but there's also more player freedom.
"You can change target while playing the animation or performing strikes, and it gives the game a kind of freshness," for instance, as studio head Adam Badowski explains. And CD Projekt Red put a lot of work into this whole "freshness" thing.
"We put a lot of our time into how the game actually plays…" Kutrzuba confirms. "We went through all of them and asked ourselves, 'What can we do about it, without rebuilding the game from scratch?' And we have changed a lot… the game just plays smoother, you know? There's no immersion-breakers anymore."
I, for one, am thrilled to hear that. I mean, who wants their immersion to be broken in an RPG, right?
The Witcher 3 is already admittedly pretty good at handling that as it is now, so we're thrilled to experience how much better it might be come the remaster next month. Something tells me it'll be a massive leap, considering everything CD Projekt Red says.
Blizzard and CD Projekt Red team up for Diablo 4 Geralt skin and The Witcher 3 on Battle.net
