Updated on August 26, 2026, by Josh Cotts: We’ve updated this article to reflect The Witcher 3’s continued evolution in 2026, including its upcoming remaster and new expansion.
It has somehow been more than 11 years since CD Projekt Red released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and yet calling it an “old” RPG still feels a little strange. Plenty of games released years after Geralt’s final mainline adventure have already come and gone, while The Witcher 3 has continued finding new players, receiving substantial updates, and giving longtime fans reasons to return to the Continent. More than 65 million copies later, that apparently isn’t going to stop anytime soon.
CD Projekt Red has now announced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, another major overhaul of the acclaimed RPG launching September 29, 2026. Better yet, it isn’t merely polishing up the visuals and calling it a day. Combat, movement, Roach, monster behavior, the skill tree, Witcher Signs, and plenty more are being reworked, while the brand-new Songs of the Past expansion is coming in 2027. The Witcher 3 already had a strong argument for being one of those rare games that seems to age slower than everything around it, but 2026 is about to make that argument even stronger.
The Witcher 3’s Story Has Barely Aged
There are plenty of reasons why The Witcher 3 remains relevant in 2026, but its story and overall plot are still among the primary elements that lure new players into the game and keep veteran players returning over and over. Visuals, combat systems, and open-world design can show their age as technology moves forward, but great characters and memorable storytelling tend to have a much longer shelf life, and that is one area where The Witcher 3 has lost very little of its appeal.
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The story itself is relatively simple. Geralt of Rivia, a Witcher who hunts monsters for a living, is on a quest to find his adoptive daughter Ciri, who is being pursued by the Wild Hunt. For those unfamiliar, the Wild Hunt is a group of spectral riders searching for Ciri because of her Elder Blood and the extraordinary power it gives her. Ciri also happens to be the biological daughter of Emperor Emhyr var Emreis and the sole princess of Cintra, complicating Geralt’s search even further.
There are plenty of reasons why The Witcher 3 remains relevant in 2026, but its story and overall plot are still among the primary elements that lure new players into the game and keep veteran players returning over and over.
However, The Witcher 3 quickly branches out from that central quest, and it isn’t long before players find themselves wrapped up in the lives and problems of people scattered all over its massive world. Some of those stories involve kings and political conspiracies, while others begin with something as simple as a monster contract pinned to a notice board. More importantly, many of them aren’t neatly divided into good and evil, meaning Geralt is regularly forced to make decisions without knowing whether he is actually doing the right thing. That approach to storytelling is a big part of why The Witcher 3 has aged as well as it has. Its visuals can be remastered, and its combat can be reworked, but quests like the Bloody Baron’s storyline don’t need modern technology to remain memorable.
The Witcher 3’s Best Quests Are Still Hard to Beat
Apart from an immersive story and well-developed characters, The Witcher 3 also offers a massive number of quests that give players a better understanding of the game’s history, world, and lore. Many quests also offer Witcher 3 players a tough decision at the end, and those choices can sometimes have consequences that don’t become clear until much later.
A single playthrough of The Witcher 3 can easily take dozens of hours due to its extensive main story and enormous collection of side missions, contracts, treasure hunts, and other activities. That becomes an even bigger undertaking once its expansions are included, and as of August 2026, CD Projekt Red has made both Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine available at no additional cost to existing owners of the base game. While every player will have their own favorite quests, there are several that continue to stand out more than a decade after the game was first released.
Some of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s Best Quests
- Scenes From a Marriage is a side quest that players can access through the Hearts of Stone expansion. Probably one of the saddest quests in The Witcher 3, it sees Geralt journey to the von Everec Estate and eventually the Painted World in search of the violet rose Olgierd von Everec gave his wife, Iris. This leads to a decision at the end regarding whether Geralt should take the rose, with consequences attached to either choice.
- Where the Cat and Wolf Play begins when Geralt discovers that one of the contracts he has taken was already completed, only for an entire village to have been slaughtered. Geralt’s investigation eventually leads him to another Witcher and forces him to decide what should happen next, making the quest another example of how The Witcher 3 rarely gives players an easy answer.
- Of Dairy and Darkness is one of the more unusual quests in the game, with Geralt investigating the home of Aeramas, a mage with a particularly strong obsession with cheese. Players eventually have to navigate a bizarre maze filled with deadly cheese fumes before obtaining a sword appropriately named The Emmentaler.
The Witcher 3’s Villains Are Hard to Forget
Another aspect of The Witcher 3 that continues to make it memorable is its impressive cast of characters, including its villains. Not every villain in The Witcher 3 can be engaged in combat, but that doesn’t make them any less menacing. In many cases, their personalities, motivations, and the consequences of their actions make them far more memorable than another powerful enemy waiting at the end of a dungeon. Again, every player will have their favorite baddie, but some of The Witcher 3’s villains have left an especially long-lasting impression on fans.
Some of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s Best Villains
- Gaunter O’Dimm, sometimes called Master Mirror or the Man of Glass, is a mysterious character Geralt encounters surprisingly early in the game before he becomes one of the central figures in Hearts of Stone. O’Dimm has an unsettling aura surrounding him from the beginning, but it is his gradual transition from a strange man speaking in riddles to something far more disturbing that makes him one of the game’s most memorable characters.
- The Crones, also known as the Ladies of the Wood, are three witches whose terrifying appearances are only part of what makes them so memorable. The Crones have an eerie presence throughout Geralt’s time in Velen, and their relationship with the people living there helps establish the moral ambiguity that runs through so much of The Witcher 3.
- Radovid V is the type of villain who is terrifying because of the amount of power he holds while becoming increasingly unstable. The witch hunts carried out under his rule result in some of the game’s most brutal scenes and give the conflict surrounding Novigrad a much more human kind of horror.
More than a decade later, characters like Gaunter O’Dimm and the Crones are still regularly brought up when discussing The Witcher 3, and that says plenty about how well CD Projekt Red’s character writing has held up. A remaster can make them look better, but their original stories are a large part of why players remember them in the first place.
The Witcher 3 Hasn’t Been Left Behind Since 2020
One major difference between playing The Witcher 3 in 2020 and playing it in 2026 is that CD Projekt Red hasn’t simply allowed the original 2015 release to sit untouched. The game’s free current-gen update arrived in December 2022, bringing graphical improvements and new features to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. It also incorporated community-made mods, introduced gameplay tweaks, added Photo Mode, and generally helped push the game forward for newer hardware.
One major difference between playing The Witcher 3 in 2020 and playing it in 2026 is that CD Projekt Red hasn’t simply allowed the original 2015 release to sit untouched.
That alone gave returning players another reason to make the trip back to the Continent, but CD Projekt Red went even further in 2024 with the release of The Witcher 3 REDkit. The free PC tool gives modders access to many of the same tools CD Projekt Red used to develop the game, allowing the community to create everything from new characters and items to quests, animations, storylines, and entire territories. Needless to say, there’s a reason The Witcher 3 has stubbornly stuck around as long as it has.
The Witcher 3 Remastered Is Fixing the Parts That Have Aged
Of course, saying The Witcher 3 still holds up in 2026 doesn’t mean every part of it feels as modern as it did in 2015. Geralt’s movement has long been an acquired taste, Roach has developed a reputation of his own for occasionally being difficult to control, and the game’s combat is rarely the first thing even its biggest fans point to when explaining why they love it. But that’s what makes The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered particularly interesting. Rather than simply increasing the resolution and improving some textures, CD Projekt Red is revisiting many of the areas where the original game has begun to show its age.
The free Witcher 3 upgrade is set to include enhanced combat, improved traversal and character movement, revamped Roach handling, enhanced monster behavior, a reworked skill tree, new Witcher Sign effects, transmogrification, new finishers, an expanded Photo Mode, and plenty of visual improvements. It’s also coming to Nintendo Switch 2 natively, giving The Witcher 3 yet another new platform more than a decade after its original debut.
A Game That Was Made To Last
When The Witcher 3 was only five years old, it was already evident that a good number of players would return to it over and over. The primary reason for that lies in the game’s excellent development, which is a culmination of various elements that work well both individually and together. Its massive open world gives players countless reasons to wander away from the main story, while its quests, characters, and difficult choices make much of that time feel worthwhile rather than simply giving players another collection of icons to clear from a map.
It’s also coming to Nintendo Switch 2 natively, giving The Witcher 3 yet another new platform more than a decade after its original debut.
Apart from its gameplay and world, The Witcher 3’s characters and overall story are immersive enough that plenty of fans have felt a sense of dread after completing the game, not because it wasn’t good, but because it was finally over. Although there are plenty of great games that are fun to play, the mark of something special is often whether it leaves a lasting impression long after the credits roll, and The Witcher 3 has certainly done that.
The difference is that there is now plenty of evidence to support what was once merely an argument about the game’s longevity. The Witcher 3 has sold more than 65 million copies, received a major current-gen overhaul, been handed over to its modding community through REDkit, and is about to receive another massive update through The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered. Even players who thought they had seen everything Geralt’s final mainline adventure had to offer now have another reason to return.
Better yet, it isn’t actually over. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt‘s Songs of the Past DLC is set to bring Geralt back for an entirely new adventure in 2027, taking him to the previously unseen region of Letten to face new enemies and another mystery built around choices and consequences. More than 11 years after The Witcher 3 first arrived, CD Projekt Red is still finding ways to add to it. Calling The Witcher 3 a game that was made to last probably sounded like praise in 2020, but in 2026, it feels much closer to fact.
- Released
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May 19, 2015
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Use of Alcohol, Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content
