The Witcher 3 Remastered launches later this month as a free update for all existing owners of the RPG. It’s a meaty update with a load of improvements, including freshly revamped combat. CD Projekt Red might even have been forgiven for treating it as an all-new game and charging existing Witcher 3 owners for the privilege of paying for it. But joint CEO Michał Nowakowski says that possibility was never even on the table.
“I don’t think it was ever a thought we even had,” Nowakowski tells The Game Business. “It was never a question we asked ourselves. The way we thought about it is like ‘it’s an improvement.'” CD Projekt has made a habit of offering massive, free updates for its previous games, notably including The Witcher 1 and Cyberpunk 2077.
Of course, the remaster is being subsidized in other ways: partly through a price hike for new buyers, and partly through sales of the upcoming Songs of the Past DLC. Nowakowski doesn’t address the price increase, but he does say the expansion was always part of the calculation.
“We never thought about this way,” Nowakowski says of charging for the remaster. “The commercial bit of it is the expansion, obviously. We really felt this is the CDPR way, to gift it to the players who already own it. Of course, if you haven’t, then you will have to purchase the game from scratch. But then we tried to sweeten the deal for you by adding two expansions into the whole package. It was just never a question we asked ourselves, to be honest.”
The remaster itself exists because of the work CD Projekt Red was doing with Fool’s Theory on Songs of the Past, according to Nowakowski. “We started chatting, like ‘why don’t we make the game more modern? Everything feels like it was developed like 10 years ago.’ That was really the beginning of the conversation,” he explains.
“‘What could we do to improve it?’ It started with small things like ‘maybe let’s fix this,’ ‘maybe let’s fix that,’ and then it turned into this larger project,” he says. “We suddenly realized we actually have a remaster on our hands.”
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