Some players, however, have encountered technical issues after the remastered version launched.
The Continent recently got a surge in concurrent players once again after The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered launched on Tuesday (29 September). More than 120,000 players jumped back into the game, following the release of the remaster.
CD Projekt RED celebrated the surge on The Witcher’s official X account, sharing a screenshot showing 119,852 players online at the same time. The number continued climbing afterwards, with SteamDB recording a new all-time peak of 120,975 concurrent players.
The Witcher 3 Remastered concurrent players hit a new Steam record
The Witcher 3 was hardly quiet when it originally launched in May 2015, peaking at 92,268 concurrent Steam players during its release month. Its previous record came almost five years later. Following the arrival of Netflix’s live-action The Witcher series in December 2019, players piled back into the game, eventually sending its Steam peak to 103,329 in January 2020. Another large jump followed the free next-gen update, which brought improved visuals, ray tracing, new content, and other upgrades to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
That release pushed the Steam player count close to 90,000 once again. This means that the new concurrent player count has beaten all of these past records, making the remaster responsible for the highest concurrent player count The Witcher 3 has ever recorded on Steam, more than 11 years after the RPG first launched.
CD Projekt RED announced The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt — Remastered at Gamescom Opening Night Live, confirming that it would be available as a free upgrade for existing owners on supported platforms. The studio also made the game’s two expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, available at no additional cost to owners of the base game. The remaster updates far more than Geralt’s wrinkles alone, with changes to lighting, foliage, textures, combat, monster behaviour, Roach handling, the skill tree, animations, photo mode, and other parts of the game.
GosuGamers had the chance to play The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt — Remastered ahead of launch, finding the visual upgrades noticeable but not nearly as dramatic as the jump brought by the previous next-gen update.
The new combat camera was one of the more useful changes, dynamically pulling in during smaller encounters and moving out when Geralt is surrounded by enemies. The redesigned skill tree also forces returning players to reconsider some older builds, while the expanded photo mode lets players place characters such as Ciri and Yennefer into shots.
There was a performance cost during our preview, however. With ray tracing set to Ultra and DLSS on Performance mode, the RTX 5080 system used for testing averaged around 60 FPS, down from roughly 90 FPS before the update, with more frequent stutters also appearing.
What issues are affecting The Witcher 3 Remastered on PC and Switch 2?
The remaster’s launch did not go smoothly for everyone. On PC, the game is considerably more demanding than before, while Nintendo Switch 2 players have also been reporting visual issues in handheld mode.
CD Projekt RED’s updated PC requirements now span separate targets for standard rasterisation, ray tracing, and path tracing, with the highest preset targeting 4K at 60 FPS with path tracing using an RTX 5080, upscaling, and Frame Generation.
An SSD is also now required, while storage requirements differ between storefronts, with 60GB listed for most PC versions and 95GB through the Epic Games Store.
Nintendo Switch 2 players have been raising a separate visual complaint. Players on Reddit have reported that the remaster looks unusually blurry in handheld mode, even with blur-related settings disabled. Some have also noticed that the image becomes noticeably sharper when the game is paused, leading to speculation that the problem may be related to anti-aliasing or upscaling.
The more serious PC complaints, however, appear to be concentrated among players using AMD Radeon graphics cards.
Why is The Witcher 3 Remastered having problems on AMD GPUs?
IGN reported that Radeon users were encountering severe graphical problems after the update, including missing trees, black artefacts across the image, inverted-looking foliage colours, and water surfaces flashing like strobe lights.
The outlet traced examples back to posts from affected Radeon users on Reddit and X, while noting that Nvidia cards did not appear to be suffering from the same widespread visual corruption.
The timing of AMD’s driver support appears to have complicated matters. CD Projekt RED Support recommended that Radeon users install Adrenalin 26.9.2 for the remaster, even though the driver had not yet been publicly released when the game initially went live.
AMD released Adrenalin 26.9.2 later on 29 September, with its release notes adding support for The Witcher 3 Remastered.
CD Projekt RED has not publicly confirmed the cause of the Switch 2 issue at the time of writing, so it remains a player-reported problem rather than an acknowledged bug. Still, the technical problems do not appear to have stopped players from returning to the Path.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt originally launched in May 2015 and went on to become one of CD Projekt RED’s most acclaimed games. It won Game of the Year and Best Role Playing Game at The Game Awards 2015, while CD Projekt RED also took Developer of the Year.
The game later racked up more than 250 Game of the Year awards and over 800 awards overall during its original run. And Geralt is not quite ready to retire yet. The game will receive its third full expansion, Songs of the Past, in 2027. The expansion will once again star Geralt and take him to Letten, Dandelion’s homeland, for a new adventure being co-developed by CD Projekt RED and Fool’s Theory.
Beyond that, CD Projekt RED is already working on The Witcher 4, which will pass the role of protagonist from Geralt to Ciri as a new Witcher saga begins.
