Somewhere in Kaer Morhen, a grizzled old monster hunter is checking his calendar and wondering why everyone is suddenly so pleased to see him again. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered arrived on 29 September, eleven years after Geralt first rode out across the Continent, and the result is the sort of welcome normally reserved for a returning king, or at the very least a returning horse that has finally learned not to stand on rooftops.
The headline numbers are a little absurd. Within hours of launch, Steam counted more than 120,000 people playing at once, comfortably beating the game’s previous all-time peak of around 103,000, set in January 2020 when Netflix’s Henry Cavill-led series sent viewers scurrying back to the source. The day before the remaster went live, the daily peak was a modest 21,752. That is a fivefold leap for a game most of its players have presumably finished at least once. And that figure only covers Steam, not GOG, the Epic Games Store, consoles or the brand new Battle.net release.
The critics are just as smitten. The remaster opened with a Metacritic score of 94, which, for now at least, makes it the highest-rated game of 2026. Spare a thought for every studio that spent the past five years building something brand new this year, only to be pipped by a 2015 release in a fresh coat of paint. Steam’s recent user reviews are running at roughly 92 per cent positive, a figure that rather drowns out the pre-launch grumbling when a before-and-after clip of Geralt torching some Drowners drew a chorus of “looks worse” from the internet’s resident pixel inspectors.
It is also more than a texture pack. CD Projekt Red, working with co-development studio Yigsoft, has reworked the combat and added an adaptive camera, overhauled the skill tree, improved traversal and monster behaviour, and introduced new finishers, new effects for the witcher Signs and an expanded photo mode. Transmogrification has arrived as well, so Geralt can finally keep the stats of his best armour without looking like he got dressed in the dark in a Velen bandit camp. PC players get path tracing, ray-traced hair and the full alphabet soup of DLSS, FSR and XeSS upscaling, plus cross-platform mod support. Roach has also been “revamped”, which we choose to believe means therapy.
Best of all, it is free. Existing owners on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S get the upgrade at no cost, Switch owners can claim the new native Switch 2 version, and everyone who owns the base game now gets both of the superb expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, thrown in as well. Battle.net users who pick it up also unlock a Geralt cosmetic in Diablo IV, which sets up a crossover nobody asked for but everybody will secretly enjoy. Even CD Projekt Red sounds slightly startled, noting that more witchers are now walking the Path “than ever before”.
There is method in the generosity, of course. A new paid expansion, Songs of the Past, is due in 2027. It is set in a new region called Letten and co-developed with Fool’s Theory, a Polish studio with Witcher 3 veterans among its leadership. The Witcher 4, with Ciri in the lead, is still targeting 2028. The remaster gives the studio a vast crowd of freshly reminded fans to sell that expansion to, and keeps the lights on in Kaer Morhen until the next generation takes over.
Still, if the cost of a little corporate cunning is a free, better-looking version of one of the finest RPGs ever made, plus two expansions for anyone who skipped them, the Continent can live with that. Geralt has been retired more times than a Bond actor, and he keeps coming back. This time, at least, nobody had to pay a witcher to make it happen.
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