The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered Is Free Starting September 29, and CD Projekt Red Is Teaming Up With Blizzard

CD Projekt Red saved the biggest surprise of the night for the very end of its Gamescom Opening Night Live segment. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered is coming to every current owner of the game on September 29 as a free upgrade, with a fully rebuilt rendering pipeline, cross-platform mod support, and a native Switch 2 version. On top of that comes the first look at a new story expansion, Songs of the Past, and a partnership with Blizzard nobody saw coming.

What's actually changing

The changelog is long and touches nearly every part of the game, not just the visuals. On PC, the remaster brings full path tracing, ray reconstruction, ray-traced hair, and native DX12, with support for DLSS 4.5 and FSR 4.0. On consoles, including PlayStation 5 Pro, it adds improved global illumination, a new shading model, and subsurface scattering. Beyond graphics, CD Projekt Red reworked combat, movement, Roach's handling, monster behavior, Witcher Sign effects, the skill tree, photo mode, quest tracking, looting, menus, animations, and accessibility, a list long enough that "visual touch-up" undersells it.

A few specific changes stand out from the rest of the list. Transmogrification will let players wear any armor appearance regardless of its stats, a feature already standard in plenty of other RPGs but never present in The Witcher 3 before now. New combat finishers and an expanded photo mode are joining a reworked skill tree.

The remaster is free for anyone who owns the game on GOG, Steam, Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, or Xbox Series X|S, save files stay compatible, and both story expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, become free too, even for players who only own the base game. Buying them separately used to cost roughly $30 combined. Switch owners get the native Switch 2 version for free, provided they move to the new console. On top of that, mod support now works across every platform at once, something the game never had outside PC before.

The catch that does exist

Community reaction has been largely enthusiastic, but a layer of learned suspicion kept surfacing underneath it. One Reddit comment summed it up bluntly: "My mind has normalised the endless corporate nickel and diming so much that I find myself looking for some catch." A catch does exist, just not a financial one: the full remaster requires an SSD and Windows 11, so players still on Windows 10 or older HDDs stay on the legacy build unless they upgrade their system or drive. It's a reasonable technical trade-off given the scale of the engine changes, but for part of the older player base it effectively means no access to the remaster without spending on hardware first.

Blizzard, Diablo 4, and a Geralt skin

The most unexpected part of the announcement is CD Projekt Red's partnership with Blizzard Entertainment, the first time in the company's history that one of its games is being distributed anywhere outside its own GOG, Steam, and console storefronts, in this case Battle.net. Both companies described it as "a collaboration three decades in the making," pointing to the parallel history of the two studios going back to the 1990s. Part of the deal runs the other way too: buying Songs of the Past on Battle.net unlocks a special Geralt-inspired skin in Diablo 4. CD Projekt Red has already said the Battle.net launch is "just the beginning" of its partnership with Blizzard, with more details expected at BlizzCon 2026, which suggests something more lasting than a one-off promotion tied to a single release.

Songs of the Past itself is the first new story expansion for The Witcher 3 since Blood and Wine in 2016. It takes players to a new region called Letten, described as an idyllic, traditional settlement hiding a dark secret. The release window is just "2027" for now, no specific month, and it's available to wishlist rather than buy.

Why this is more than a routine remaster

The scale of this announcement makes more sense against what CD Projekt Red is building next. The studio has spent months working on The Witcher 4, the series' first entry built from scratch on Unreal Engine 5, and some fans have openly said they're bracing for a repeat of Cyberpunk 2077's launch, a game that shipped technically unfinished on older consoles despite years of hype. The Witcher 3 remaster, timed to Gamescom, doubles as a show of capability: proof the studio can ship a large, technically demanding project on schedule and without a launch-day disaster, before it's shown anything from the actual Witcher 4.