The Witcher has become a pretty huge universe in gaming, with the massive success of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt creating oceans of goodwill and anticipation for more games in the series.
CD Projekt Red announced a while back that it's working on the next big Witcher game, but a more recent bit of news is that it's also overseeing a remake of the original Witcher game. Here are all the details you need to know about The Witcher Remake.
The Witcher Remake announcement
CD Projekt Red announces its project in a variety of ways, from traditional flashy trailers to simple mentions in earnings calls, and it brought The Witcher Remake to light in a pretty lowkey manner.
A simple blog post confirming that the game is being remade was uploaded in late October 2022, which is linked to by the Tweet below.
We're thrilled to reveal that, together with @Fools_Theory, we're working on remaking The Witcher using Unreal Engine 5 (codename: Canis Majoris)!
â€" The Witcher (@witchergame) October 26, 2022
We want to do this right, so please be patient â€" it's gonna be a while until we can share more details.
 https://t.co/6VCAokPgXs pic.twitter.com/ERFOXQrUEP
It confirms that the game is being made from the ground up by Polish development studio Fool's Theory, and not a huge amount more besides that.
The Witcher Remake release date
As you can see in the announcement Tweet, CD Projekt Red is already asking for patience on The Witcher Remake, as it's still only very early in its development process, and will therefore be years away from release.
Given the far-off status of The Witcher 4, patience is something that the series' fans are already used to, so that should come as a given. Still, it would seem likely that we can't really hope to see The Witcher Remake come out any time before 2025 at this stage.
As soon as any concrete information on this front comes to light, we'll update this section to reflect it.
The Witcher Remake platforms
The announcement of The Witcher Remake didn't contain any information about what platforms it's planned for at this stage, but it does confirm that the game is being built on Unreal Engine 5, just like The Witcher 4.
This should make for some hugely impressive graphical features that are only really applicable to current-generation consoles and PCs, so we'd be gob-smacked if it came out on PS4 or Xbox One. By the time it appears, those consoles will be truly geriatric, so we think you can bank on the remake being a new-gen experience.
By that point, Nintendo might have a new console on the market and mid-generation updates might have come out for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, so who really knows what we'll be looking at?
The Witcher Remake story
Given that the game is being totally rebuilt, the scope for its story to change is obviously pretty significant, but we can still make some pretty clear assumptions based on the way things played out in the first Witcher game.
We won't go into too much detail since we know that far fewer people have played it than the mega-hit Witcher 3, though - don't worry!
The Witcher stars gruff-voiced Geralt, set in the period after Andrzej Sapkowski's books, to give Fool's Theory, a little narrative freedom.
It tells a slightly simpler story than The Witcher 2 or 3, set in and around the city of Vizima. Geralt is struck down by amnesia, something that Triss Merigold and other allies are trying to help him fix, while a conflict rages between religious fanatics and elven freedom fighters in the area.
Things are predictably gritty and there are plenty of morally murky quests to follow, in a world that's much tighter and smaller than the ones that followed it in terms of scope.
The game leads directly into the events of The Witcher 2, unsurprisingly, which flows into The Witcher 3, so it's a pretty natural fit for those who want to see an earlier slice of Geralt's story.
The Witcher Remake gameplay
The original Witcher game is a pretty clunky affair by comparison to the games that followed it - it controls awkwardly and the production values are wildly lower than its sequels.
That said, there are still some obvious shared elements that make it a diamond in the rough. You still control Geralt as he moves around the world in third-person (an isometric camera mode was available but we'd expect that to be dropped), talking to people and collecting quests and information.
This exploration is interspersed with sword-and-magic combat that sees you sweeping around your enemies dicing them up and using Witcher signs to trap or damage them as you like.
The combat was a weak point in the original but was hugely improved by the time The Witcher 3's major patches were all applied, and we'd imagine things will only be better when the remake is ready.
One question we're interested in is whether it'll have the same gameplay systems as The Witcher 4, which is also in the works, or whether it'll be distinct and its own beast - there are merits in either consistency or diversity on this front, we'd imagine.
There are loads of ways the game could do with being modernised, too, from widening out its world and making things bigger to decreasing the need for load times and barriers. Its hugely outdated approach to romances and women will hopefully get ditched, too.
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