The Witcher remake will give it the open world it deserves

The recently announced remake of The Witcher gets more than just a visual upgrade, confirmed CD Projekt Red in a new investor presentation. Instead, the first game will get the full-blown open-world treatment in its critically acclaimed adaptation of the fantasy series. That’s good news for anyone who’s been wanting just that ever since The witcher 3 blew fans away with its free roaming card in 2015.

Already teased in October, the Canis Majoris project was revealed later than a remake of CDPR’s 2007 debut with Unreal Engine 5. However, unlike the level-based original, the company confirmed on Monday that the new version will be a “story-driven open-world single-player role-playing game” and a “modern reinterpretation”. Buzzwords aside, it seems heavily implied that the fundamental remake will drop many of the archaic systems that have held the original back.

While there is a lot The witcher 1 to celebrateincluding its characters and story, it remains a highly acquired taste when it comes to actually playing. The original was built in BioWare’s Aurora Engine, an updated version of what was used to make the Baldur’s Gate games and while certainly making the original witcher a classic among die-hard CRPG fans, it’s nowhere near as immersive or cinematic as what players have come to expect from the later games.

It was also fairly linear and didn’t have that sense of exploration that made players feel like they happened to stumble upon a mysterious but meaty side quest, that sort of thing The witcher 3 excellent. So there was no lack of ambition Fan mods aimed at rebuilding the game Inside The witcher 3‘s engine. With CDPR working with Epic Games to add deeper open-world development functionality for UE5the results for the remake will no doubt be even better.

The production of the remake will be taken over by a new Polish studio called the fool theory which features some former CDPR developers who previously worked on the series. The good news is that it doesn’t appear to be too distracting from CDPR’s own work on an all-new open-world witcher game. The bad news is that the remake is only in early production and is likely many years away.

That is my very personal dream The witcher 2 will also be remastered in some way and that the entire trilogy can live on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in some way, allowing players to carry over their save date and narrative choices between all three games. That seems extremely unlikely and if it does happen, it probably won’t be until the next time the PS6 comes out.