The Witcher 3 Remastered is free for owners, and Game Pass loses it

Two dates decide what you should do about The Witcher 3 right now, and they pull in opposite directions. On 31 August it leaves Xbox Game Pass. On 29 September it comes back as a remaster that CD Projekt is handing to existing owners for nothing.

If you have been treating Game Pass as your Witcher 3 subscription, that arrangement ends tomorrow. If you own the game outright on almost any platform, you are about to be given a substantial upgrade for free. The distance between those two positions is the entire story, and it is unusually easy to end up on the wrong side of it.

What CD Projekt actually announced

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered was revealed on 25 August during gamescom Opening Night Live, and it launches on 29 September. It is coming to PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with a native Nintendo Switch 2 version and — the genuinely unexpected part — a Battle.net release, through a new partnership between CD Projekt Red and Blizzard Entertainment.

The line that matters most to anyone reading a price-comparison site is CD Projekt's own: Remastered is "a free upgrade for existing The Witcher 3 owners on qualifying platforms", those being PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. You do not buy the game a second time.

The announcement trailer, uploaded by CD Projekt's own The Witcher channel on 25 August.

This is more than a resolution bump

The change list is longer than the word "remaster" usually earns. CD Projekt lists upgraded visuals, enhanced combat, improved traversal and movement, new witcher signs effects, revamped mount handling, enhanced monster behaviours, a skill tree revamp, transmogrification, an expanded photo mode and new finishers.

Pay attention to the middle of that list rather than the ends. Combat and the skill tree are the two things people actually cite when they bounce off Witcher 3 in its eleventh year — the swordplay has always been the weakest part of an otherwise extraordinary game, and the skill tree has always asked you to spread points thinly across systems that never quite pay off. Traversal and mount handling are the third complaint. Roach is a running joke for a reason.

None of that touches the writing, which is why the game endures in the first place. But it does mean the September version is plausibly the one to recommend to a newcomer, rather than the one you tell them to push through.

Mount handling is on the list of reworks. Anyone who has watched Roach climb a roof will understand why. (Official Steam screenshot)

The expansions are now free, and that changes the maths

Announced alongside the remaster, and easy to miss: all Witcher 3 owners now get Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine at no cost.

This is the single most useful fact in the whole announcement for anyone deciding what to buy. Witcher 3 has historically been sold in a confusing spread of editions — base game, Game of the Year, Complete Edition, base plus Expansion Pass — and the standard advice was always to work out which bundle actually included Blood and Wine before you clicked buy, because Blood and Wine is not a side dish. It is a thirty-hour expansion widely regarded as better than most full-price RPGs.

That whole calculation is now moot. If the expansions come free with ownership, the cheapest edition that gets you the game is the correct edition. Check the current spread on the Witcher 3 game page rather than assuming the deluxe bundle is the better value — that assumption just stopped being true.

Blood and Wine alone runs to roughly thirty hours. It now comes attached to ownership rather than to an edition. (Official Steam screenshot)

Songs of the Past arrives in 2027

The same broadcast gave the first proper look at Songs of the Past, a paid expansion due in 2027 for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2. It takes Geralt to Letten, described by CD Projekt as "an idyllic land of rural tradition that hides a dark secret just below the surface", and adds new abilities plus a chain weapon. It is being co-developed with Fool's Theory, a studio whose leadership includes Witcher 3 veterans.

Songs of the Past, the third Witcher 3 expansion, arriving in 2027. Also from the official The Witcher channel.

A decade after Blood and Wine, a third expansion is a strange and welcome thing. It also explains the timing: a free remaster in September and a paid expansion in 2027 is a deliberate runway, designed to have as many people as possible owning the game before there is something new to sell them.

Five games leave Game Pass on 31 August

Meanwhile, Microsoft is removing five titles at the end of the month. The Witcher 3 goes on console and cloud, having only rejoined the service in February. The other four leave across console, PC and cloud:

• Another Crab's Treasure — Aggro Crab's 2024 soulslike about a hermit crab wearing rubbish as armour. Far better than that description suggests.
• I Am Your Beast — Strange Scaffold's razor-fast revenge shooter, built out of small sandbox levels you are meant to replay for seconds.
• Neon Abyss — a run-and-gun roguelite platformer with an item-synergy system that gets gleefully out of hand.
• One Lonely Outpost — a farming and colony sim that swaps the pastoral village for terraforming a dead planet.

Microsoft applies a members' discount to titles in the window before they leave the service, so if one of these has been sitting in your library half-played, this week is the cheapest it is likely to be for a while. Check each game page for the live figure across the stores we track — a Game Pass member discount is not automatically the best price available.

Another Crab's Treasure hides a properly weighty soulslike under the cartoon shell — and ships assist options for anyone who wants the story without the wall. (Official Steam screenshot)

Which of the four is actually worth buying

Another Crab's Treasure is the clear pick. It is a real soulslike with real bosses, but it is also the most welcoming one on the market, because it hands you genuine assist options instead of pretending difficulty is a moral test. If you have wanted to try the genre and never got past the first boss of anything, start here.

I Am Your Beast is the value outlier. It is short — deliberately, aggressively short — and built for replaying levels against your own times. If you measure games in hours per pound it will look like a poor deal; if you measure them in how often you say "one more go", it is the best of the four.

Neon Abyss and One Lonely Outpost are more conditional. Neon Abyss is a good roguelite in a genre stuffed with great ones, and we would look at the wider discount lists before committing. One Lonely Outpost is for people who already know they want a farming sim and have exhausted the obvious ones.

I Am Your Beast is built around replaying compact levels rather than finishing them once. (Official Steam screenshot)

Neon Abyss stacks item effects until runs stop making sense. Good, but competing against a very deep genre. (Official Steam screenshot)

The bottom line

If you already own The Witcher 3 in any form, do nothing. You are getting the remaster and both expansions for free, and buying anything now would be spending money on something that is about to arrive in your library anyway.

If you do not own it, buy the cheapest edition you can find rather than the most complete one, because completeness is no longer something you pay for. Waiting until 29 September buys you nothing except a month without the game — the upgrade attaches to ownership, not to purchase date.

And if you have been playing it on Game Pass on console, tomorrow is your deadline. Finish the main quest or accept that you are buying it. Given that the remaster and both expansions now come attached, buying it is not the worst outcome you have ever faced.

More on the game itself in is The Witcher 3 worth it in 2026, how it stacks up against its studio-mate in Cyberpunk 2077 vs The Witcher 3, and where to go afterwards in games like The Witcher 3. For the rest of the release calendar, see every big PC game still coming in 2026, and for the subscription side of the ledger, the best games on PC Game Pass right now.