CD Projekt Red has announced that it has a "visually and technically enhanced version" of The Witcher 3 in the pipeline. The next gen version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition will make the best of new CPU, GPU and storage technologies available and will be a free update for owners of the game on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
The new version of the game is being designed with the latest and greatest PC and console hardware in mind. Yes, it will include real-time raytracing support, across the base game and all the expansions in the Complete Edition bundle. Additionally, the game will be optimised for faster loading times available on PC, where SSDs and PCIe SSDs are much more prevalent nowadays. Similarly when the game comes to Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 it will take advantage of the much faster storage sub-systems in those consoles.
The Witcher 3; Wild Hunt was released in the summer of 2015 and was considered quite a demanding game at the time. A lot of the early performance issues noticed by gamers were apparently rooted in Nvidia's proprietary HairWorks tech, so AMD GPU owners had to turn off such features or fiddle with Tessellation settings to improve performance.
The next generation edition of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be released as a standalone purchase for PC, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, as well as a free update for everyone who already owns the game on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. CDPR's development team are said to be working hard on this revamp project but we don't have any estimated timescale for the release.
There are some questions from folk who only own the base version of the game, or even a physical disc version, but I'm sure the upgrade policy will be clarified shortly. Hopefully we will get some nice next-gen The Witcher 3 teaser screens to show off the upgrades while we wait for the next-gen game to become available to play.
