The Witcher 3 Fans Just Got Some Exciting News

The Witcher franchise has been having a pretty great couple of years. The Netflix adaptation was a huge success for the people involved. Elon Musk wants gamers to be able to play The Witcher games in his company's cars. And now, CD Projekt Red has revealed some great news involving a next-gen release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

According to a tweet from CD Projekt Red's Marcin Momot, a free upgrade for the game will be offered to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X gamers who have purchased earlier versions of the game. 

Marmot wrote, "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is coming to PC, Xbox Series X, and PS5 with a range of visual and technical improvements, including ray tracing and faster loading times. Will be FREE to all current owners of the game on PC, PS4 and [Xbox One]. Stay tuned for more info!" This announcement was backed up by a tweet from the official account for The Witcher video games.

However, that's apparently not all. Marmot also told fans that PC owners would be getting even more of a sweet deal out of the upgrade. Marmot announced that the PC update will also at long last bring HDR to the game. In other words, The Witcher 3 on PC will look better than ever before when this new update rolls out. As Momot pointed out, HDR support was previously rolled out in a patch for consoles, so it made sense to finally make that happen for PC copies.

The upgrades aren't just limited to a specific version of the game, either. According to Marmot, the upgraded version of the game "will be available for both, vanilla and GOTY/Complete, versions of the game." So anyone who has the base version of the game wont miss out on the brand new facelift, just because they didn't snag the Game of the Year Edition.

Momot also clarified that the upgrades being made to the game were strictly for the look and performance of The Witcher 3. After receiving a few questions about the scale of the update, he clarified, "We're talking upagrades [sic]. We are not remaking the entire game."

Fans who are hoping that this news means that other updated versions of Witcher games are on the way may want to lower their expectations. It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility, but Momot did tell fans that The Witcher 3 is the main priority at the moment. When asked if the first two games in the series would be receiving similar treatment, he tweeted, "Personally, I think it would be amazing but we have no plans for that at the moment."

While there aren't any specific details on how the upgrade path will work with The Witcher 3 for console gamers, this is some great news for fans of the series. One of the biggest concerns for gamers has been whether or not they'll still be able to play their older games on newer consoles. While Microsoft is urging publishers to make cross-gen upgrades available for free for existing customers, Sony has apparently left that decision up to individual publishers. There's also the question of what kind of backwards compatibility will be supported by these new consoles, which is still unclear in many ways. 

Luckily, it sounds like Marmot is pretty sure it'll be a straight shot for folks to upgrade from one platform to the next, so hopefully that is the case. Gamers have already seen in recent weeks how confusing some next-gen upgrades may turn out to be.

For instance, the upcoming Call of Duty: Blacks Ops – Cold War is offering upgrades to gamers who own the game on current-gen consoles, but there are a ton of caveats. In fact, Black Ops – Cold War's upgrade path is genuinely confusing. Depending on whether you purchase the digital or the physical edition of that game, you may or may not be entitled to a next-gen upgrade. That's already confusing enough, but then there are also multiple bundle deals of the game that will help bridge the gap between console generations.

Hopefully the upgrade path for The Witcher 3 is as simple as Momot seems to think it will be. The series is receiving more attention than ever before, so it's the perfect time to update this game to be better than ever. The Witcher 3 is a beloved game that many players will likely be thrilled to carry with them into the next console generation.