Shortly before the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered, the CD Projekt RED team presented the full patch notes for the upcoming update on the franchise's official website. The developers prepared not only graphical changes, but also refined gameplay mechanics and the skill system.
Skills are now organized into a skill tree, and each has three levels. To unlock new skills, you must learn preceding ones, not just spend a certain number of points. In addition, the authors rebalanced the skill tree: bonus values, effects, and skill synergy have been adjusted.
Cross-platform mod support will be introduced — an in-game tool based on mod.io that allows players to browse and install player-created modifications.
Below are some of the changes being implemented in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered:
Graphics and Visualization
- The game now uses a DirectX 12-based rendering system with multi-threading, which has improved graphics and performance.
- An improved shading model has been introduced.
- Many textures and models have been updated based on assets from The Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project.
- For Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO), support for the GTAO (Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion) shading method has been added.
- Ray tracing for HairWorks has been added — for improved lighting and shading of hair.
- Ray-traced local shadows have been added.
- Screen space reflections have been updated.
- Screen space shadows have been updated.
- The motion blur effect has been improved, providing a higher quality and more cinematic image.
Gameplay
- Players can now transmogrify gear to change its appearance without affecting its stats. This service is only provided by master craftsmen (Yoanna and Hattori). Appearance options can be unlocked by adding new gear and schematics to the inventory. Dyes from the Blood and Wine expansion applied to gear will be retained on the transmogrified item.
- The combat behavior of many common enemies (non-bosses) has been refined — including attack patterns, counter-attacks, movement, reactions, fleeing, and effect application.
- A new slider 'Horse Control Sensitivity' has been added to 'Settings' → 'Controls'.
- Added the ability to quickly disengage from combat. Hold the dodge button (Alt/〇/B) to deselect the target, then press the sprint button (L Shift/X/A) to run away.
Improvements related to Roach:
- You can now collect loot without dismounting Roach.
- Geralt's jump animation has been refined to look more natural. Note: changes did not affect jump distance or height.
- New finishing move animations for Geralt have been added.
- New idle animations for Geralt have been added.
- Geralt's animations for climbing ledges, ascending ladders, and jumping over obstacles, as well as his speed, have been improved, providing more responsive and fluid movement.
- Geralt's animations for closing distances in combat have been improved for smoother gameplay.
- A new world exploration camera with increased distance has been added.
- A new dynamic combat camera has been added, improving visibility during battles with enemies.
- Improved switching between targets when moving the camera in combat.
- The collision prevention system when riding Roach has been updated.
- Animations for mounting and dismounting, as well as for cantering and galloping, have been refined.
Interface
- Now, during meditation, accelerated time flow is displayed instead of the interface screen — for better immersion in the game.
- The skill screen has been redesigned and now presents an intuitive skill tree.
- The map screen has been updated to make switching between tracked quests easier. Untracked quests are now indicated by separate markers, and they can be added to tracked quests by selecting these markers.
- The maximum number of map markers has been increased.
- New map markers have been added.
Changes for PC
- Added path tracing support.
- Added support for NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 with Ray Reconstruction.
- Added support for AMD FSR 4 with Frame Generation and Anti-Lag 2 technologies. FSR 4 is supported on AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards and newer. If the graphics card does not support FSR 4, FSR 2 will be used instead.
- Added support for Intel XeSS 2.0 with Frame Generation and Low Latency technologies.
- Added ray tracing for HairWorks — for improved lighting and shading of hair.
- Added haptic feedback support for DualSense controllers.
The full list of changes is available at the following link.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered is scheduled for release on PC and consoles on September 29, 13:00 Moscow time.