The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered was released on September 29, 2026, and somehow a free remaster of one of the best RPGs ever made has already created a new wave of complaints. I have been playing it myself and honestly, I don’t really understand the amount of negativity around it.
Yes, there are performance issues. Yes, there are bugs. I have noticed a few small problems myself. But when I look at the complete package, and especially at the fact that existing owners got it for free, I think we have reached a point where the gaming community expects too much from everything.
This is not a $70 remake. It is not a new edition trying to sell you the same game again. If you already owned The Witcher 3 on a supported platform, you got the Remastered version as a free upgrade, and both Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are included as part of the package. That alone deserves some credit.
This is much more than a texture pack
The word “remaster” is used very loosely these days. Sometimes it means higher resolution, a few updated textures and a new price tag. That is not what happened here.
The Witcher 3 Remastered includes improved environment, character and monster textures, changes to foliage, reworked lighting and rendering and better ray tracing. PC players also get path tracing, while PS5 Pro has dedicated support. Some of the updated assets are based on the well-known HD Reworked Project created by the modding community.
The changes are not limited to graphics either. Combat has been improved, animations have been reworked, monster behaviour has been updated and the skill system has been redesigned. There are also quality-of-life improvements throughout the game, including better looting, quest tracking and minimap options. CDPR did not simply make the grass sharper and call it a day.
And again, you pay nothing for the upgrade if you already own the game. I think that part gets ignored far too easily.
The problems are real
I don’t want to pretend the Remaster launched perfectly, because it didn’t. PC players have reported performance problems, and some graphical options can cause a huge FPS hit. HairWorks is one example. There are also reports of stuttering, graphics problems on some AMD cards, mods that no longer work properly and other small issues.
The higher PC requirements are also worth mentioning. A player who ran the original version on an older machine may not be able to run the Remaster comfortably anymore. Skill points have also been reset, which understandably annoyed some people.
These are valid complaints and I have noticed some minor performance bugs during my own playthrough too. They are there, but none of them have stopped me from enjoying the game. That is where I think the reaction becomes exaggerated.
We are talking about problems that can be patched in a free remaster, not a completely broken game sold at full price.
We have seen CDPR fix this before
The Witcher 3 has already gone through this cycle. The original game was released in 2015 and received 16 free DLCs afterwards. The Next-Gen update in 2022 was also free, and the PC version had performance problems at launch. CDPR continued patching it afterwards.
That does not mean we should accept broken releases. Developers should absolutely be criticised when a game does not work properly. But there is a difference between saying “this setting is broken and needs to be fixed” and acting as if the whole Remaster is a disaster.
Especially when the main game is there, the improvements are substantial and the upgrade costs existing owners exactly zero.
Compare it with other remasters
This is probably where the situation becomes most obvious. We have seen plenty of older games return with full price tags attached to them. Sometimes the improvements are significant, sometimes they are not, and in a few cases the remastered version even replaced the original version completely.
CDPR went in the opposite direction. The Witcher 3 Remastered is free for existing owners on supported platforms. The old game has not simply disappeared, and on PC there are options for players who prefer to stay on an earlier version.
ou can disagree with some of the changes or prefer the original graphics. You can also wait until the remaining performance bugs are fixed. But it is difficult for me to look at this and say players have been treated badly.
We are talking about The Witcher 3
There is another reason why I think this Remaster deserves more appreciation. The game underneath it is The Witcher 3.
It is more than 11 years old now and I still struggle to name many RPGs that match it in storytelling, characters, side quests and world building. Small quests can turn into stories you remember years later. Characters have actual personality. Decisions can have consequences you don’t immediately understand, and you can spend hours exploring without feeling like you are just clearing icons from a map.
I started playing it again because of the Remaster and I am having a great time with it. I still get distracted by contracts, I still stop the main story because I found another quest and I still spend too much time playing Gwent. At this point, I am pretty sure I will finish The Witcher 3 one more time in this Remastered version while waiting for the official launch of World of Warcraft Forever. The combat shows its age in some places, but that is something I can forgive in older games. I had a similar feeling when replaying Blade of Darkness, another game where the combat is a huge part of its identity.
And now it looks better, has gameplay improvements and comes with both expansions. For free.
Maybe we have become a little spoiled
Gaming has changed a lot during the last decade. Players are used to constant updates, 60 or 120 FPS modes, perfect frame pacing, huge graphical improvements and patches arriving almost immediately when something goes wrong.
Those expectations are not necessarily bad. The problem starts when a few technical issues become enough to dismiss everything else.
The Witcher 3 Remastered is not perfect. CDPR has things to fix, and players should report the problems they find. But I also think we should be able to look at the other side.
A company returned to an 11-year-old game, updated its graphics, changed gameplay systems, improved animations, added modern rendering features, included two major expansions and gave the upgrade to existing owners without charging them again.
That is not something I want to complain about. I want more developers to do exactly this.
Fix the remaining bugs, improve the performance and keep supporting the game. But at the same time, I think CD Projekt Red deserves credit for how they handled this Remaster. The backlash is understandable in places, but the scale of it isn’t.
And if this is what a free remaster looks like in 2026, I will gladly take more of them.