CD Projekt RED has announced that Xbox players who already own a copy of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will also get a free copy for Windows thanks to the company enabling Xbox Play Anywhere with the Remastered update coming on September 29th. In a social media post, the company also revealed that this marks an interesting milestone, since it will be the first of its games to get a CERO Z rating on PC.
It is worth noting that this isn’t really going to affect any other versions available on PC through platforms like Steam.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s Remastered update is going to bring in more than just Xbox Play Anywhere support, however. The company unveiled the update – coming to all platforms for free – just last month, and has confirmed that there will be plenty of visual and gameplay upgrades.
Interestingly, CD Projekt RED co-CEO Michał Nowakowski revealed that the company never really considered charging for the update. Rather, the decision to make it free felt like a natural one since it essentially got created as part of the natural process of development for the upcoming Songs of the Past expansion.
“It was never a question we asked ourselves. We were going deeper into the development of Songs of the Past with [developer] Fool’s Theory, and we started chatting: ‘Why don’t we make the game more modern? Everything felt like it was developed 10 years ago’. Because it was developed more than 10 years ago.
“We started chatting about what we could do to improve it. It started with small things, and then it turned into this larger project, and we suddenly realized we had a remaster on our hands.
“But coming back to your original commercial question, we never thought about it this way. The commercial bit is the expansion, but with the game, we really felt this is the CDPR way to gift it to the players who already own it. It was just never a question we asked ourselves.”
On the subject of Songs of the Past, Nowakowski also spoke about the conversations CD Projekt RED had with developer Fool’s Theory, and how the technological needs of The Witcher 4 and The Witcher 1’s remake ultimately led to the development of Songs of the Past and Remastered.
“We felt that The Witcher 3 was a closed book and we’d never come back to it. But a couple of happy accidents happened. We started a collaboration with Fool’s Theory. They were supposed to work on The Witcher 1 [remake], but we realized that needed a bit more time because of certain technology dependencies with The Witcher 4.
“We actually had the idea for a third expansion a long time ago, but it was put in a drawer forever. We never thought we’d be taking it out. But one conversation led to another, which led to, ‘Why don’t we make an expansion?’ Does it even make sense after such a long time? Has anybody done that for a single-player game? That led us to, ‘It sounds crazy, but let’s give Geralt one more ride’.”
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered is coming to PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2.
