Witcher 3 Remastered Reviews: Critics Love It, Path Tracing Divides Players

The first reviews of The Witcher 3 Remastered are in, and critics are mostly happy. A week after launch, the free update for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt holds a Metascore in the low 90s, while hardware testers and players have been more mixed about some of the new graphics features. Here is a summary of what reviewers and benchmarks found.

What the critics say

At the time of writing, the PC version has a Metascore of 93 on Metacritic, based on 11 critic reviews, which counts as “universal acclaim”. Early reports after launch put it at 94, and the number may still move a little as more reviews arrive.

Some of the highest scores came from Eurogamer Germany and the Spanish site Vandal, both with 100. Eurogamer Germany asked which comparable game of the last ten years can stand next to it. GameStar gave it 94 and called it “The Witcher 3 at its visual best”. Not everyone was as warm. The Games Machine (90) mentioned “a few minor hiccups”, and Noisy Pixel (90) wrote that the combat and movement “show their age”, even if the writing and exploration still hold up.

That last point is interesting, since the Remastered update reworked both combat and movement. For most reviewers, the story and the world are still the main reasons to play, from the swamps of Velen to the vineyards of Toussaint.

How it runs on PC

TechSpot’s GPU benchmark gives a fairly positive picture of the regular settings. At Medium, the Remastered version often runs as well as the original or better. At 4K Medium, an RTX 5070 Ti was 23% faster in Remastered than in the old version, according to their tests.

Path tracing is a different story. CD Projekt Red’s own system requirements list an RTX 5080 with DLSS and frame generation for 4K at 60 fps in that mode, as PC Gamer reported. TechSpot found that even top-end cards hit a ceiling of around 60 fps in Novigrad with path tracing on, and that the feature often looked worse than ordinary ray tracing, with overexposed characters and odd colour tints. Their verdict: a strong visual upgrade without ray tracing, but a disappointing path tracing mode.

The bloom debate

Among players, the most common complaint has been the lighting. Kotaku reports that many people turned the new bloom setting off because the game looked less washed out without it. CD Projekt Red has already changed bloom and lighting in Velen with Hotfix 5.00c and says a wider bloom fix is planned for the next update. Our article on Witcher 3 Remastered Hotfix 5.00c covers every fix so far.

Our take

The reviews match what the player numbers already suggested. The update is free, it includes both expansions, and a lot of people want to play it: more than 120,000 at once on Steam, as we wrote in our Steam record article. If your PC is not high-end, skip path tracing for now and use ray tracing or the regular presets. New to the game? Read the Beginner’s Guide before leaving White Orchard, and save the endings guide for when the big choices about Ciri come up.