CDPR's Own Change List Corrects the Remastered Coverage. FSR 4 Is Gated and One Fix Will Not Help You

By Indie Kings | September 28, 2026

Updated September 28, 2026: CD Projekt Red has posted the official change list for The Witcher 3 Remastered on its own forum, and it is worth reading against the announcement coverage rather than alongside it, because several widely repeated details are now wrong. The appearance-changing feature is called Reforge, not Transmog, and it is available from two specific master craftsmen rather than any barber or armorer. Skills have three ranks and prerequisite requirements, not the branching interlock system described at Gamescom. Mod support is an in-game browser powered by mod.io, not a separate mod manager. FSR 4 is gated to RX 7000 series and newer, silently falling back to FSR 2 on anything older. And one quest-progression bug fix is explicitly marked not retroactive, which matters if you have already triggered it.

Image: Remastered key art from the official post. Credit: CD Projekt Red.

Reforge, not Transmog, and only two craftsmen

The headline comfort feature has a different name and a narrower availability than the announcement coverage described.

The official line reads: "You can now Reforge your equipment to change its appearance without affecting your stats. Only master craftsmen (Yoana and Hattori) offer this service. Unlock appearances by adding new equipment to your collection."

Three things follow, and the second is the one that changes behaviour. The feature is called Reforge, which is what you will be looking for in the menu. It is cosmetic only, with stats remaining tied to the equipment actually equipped, so a Reforged set is for looks and nothing else. And it is available from two master craftsmen, Yoana and Hattori, and not from every barber or armorer in the game, which is a materially different service map from the one that was described around the announcement.

Appearances are unlocked by adding the equipment to your collection rather than by owning it in a slot, so a set you wore once and sold remains unlockable. The practical consequence is that a Reforge wardrobe is a collection inventory, and players who skip content or sell gear aggressively will have fewer appearances available than players who keep everything.

Three ranks and prerequisites, not interlocking branches

The skill system was the most heavily described part of the announcement and the official list describes it differently.

What CD Projekt Red actually published: "Improved the skill system. Skills are now organized into a skill tree and each skill has three ranks. Unlocking new skills now requires having the necessary prerequisite skills rather than simply having available skill points." Plus a rebalance of skill bonus values, effects and synergies, and the renaming of some skills to better reflect their effects.

The three-rank figure is the confirmed detail and it is a real change from the original, where most skills topped out at rank five. The consequence is a different shape of build rather than a bigger one: you can fully upgrade more individual skills, but you cannot have everything, because the prerequisite requirement means the tree has to be walked in order rather than filled in any sequence.

The description of branching hybrid trees with interlocked passives that circulated after Gamescom does not appear anywhere in the official list. What appears instead is prerequisite gating, a rebalance of bonus values, effects and synergies, and skill renames. Those are three different systems, and a player planning a build around hybrid passives unlocking from another tree should wait for the actual skill screen rather than designing around the preview. This site covered the announcement on September 7 and described interlock branches at the time; the official list is the authoritative version and it does not use that description.

Mods get an in-game browser, and that answers the real question

The modding line is one sentence and it is the most consequential sentence in the whole list, because it settles a question an eleven-year-old RPG always raises on a new engine.

Under Modding, CD Projekt Red published two items. The first: "Added Cross Platform Mod Support, an in-game tool powered by mod.io that allows you to easily browse and install player-created mods to customize your game. You can find it in the game's main menu." The second: "Various engine, UI and other improvements for REDkit, making it easier for modders to create, manage and customize their content."

The significance is the word in-game. The perennial question about a remastered open-world RPG is not whether mods exist but whether the modding route survives the engine change, and an in-game browser changes the answer in a way a downloadable mod manager does not. Nothing has to be installed outside the game, no external loader has to keep pace with a new engine version, and the discovery surface is inside the launcher rather than on a separate site. For a free update that replaces the renderer with native DirectX 12, shipping a first-party mod browser in the same release is a considerably stronger answer than the standard one.

The caveat is that the list describes the feature's existence and not its contents. No mod count, no named titles, and no statement about whether the eleven-year backlog of existing mods is compatible are provided. Anyone with a large mod list should treat the browse-and-install path as the intended route and verify their specific setup once the game is running, because compatibility is a per-mod question that a feature announcement cannot settle.

The upscaler matrix, including the part nobody reported

The PC-specific section is short, and one entry in it is a hardware gate rather than a feature.

The AMD line is the one that got lost. FSR 4 is not available on the whole RX range. CDPR has gated it to the Radeon RX 7000 series and newer, and anything below that falls back to FSR 2. That is a meaningful difference for anyone holding an RX 6000-series card, and it is a difference between the version numbers in the marketing and what actually runs on their hardware. FSR 2 is a perfectly good upscaler and Frame Generation still works; it is not the same feature set, and the frame generation implementation in particular differs between generations.

That gate lines up exactly with the official requirements table published the same day, which lists an RX 6600 XT as the Recommended-tier and RT Minimum AMD GPU. So the card CDPR recommends is a card that cannot run FSR 4. The requirement table and the driver note are consistent with each other, and both are pointing at the same practical ceiling.

Intel's entry has no hardware qualifier attached, which is consistent with XeSS 2.0 being a broadly deployable upscaler rather than a hardware feature, and with the Arc B580 appearing at three tiers in the requirements table including Ultra and RT Minimum. The absence of a gate is a real difference from AMD's, and it is the reason the Arc B580 is listed at Recommended with an official ray tracing tier while AMD's recommended card is not listed at RT Recommended.

One fix is explicitly not retroactive

There is a single line in the Fixes section that matters more than the other three combined, and it is easy to skim because it is buried among patch notes.

The entry, for the quest "Wine is Sacred": "Fixed an issue where fast traveling out of Toussaint during the 'Search the wine cellar with Anna Henrietta' objective could block quest progression. This fix is not retroactive."

What that means is concrete. If your save has already triggered the bug, applying the update will not clear it. The quest is stuck, and the only route out is manual rather than a reinstall or a reload. For a hundred-hour RPG where a single blocked objective can end a playthrough, CDPR flagging this as non-retroactive is an unusually honest disclosure, and it is the kind of thing vendors routinely leave unmentioned because mentioning it invites a complaint queue.

Two other fixes in the same section are worth knowing about because they describe symptoms players will search for rather than mechanics. Right Stick Sensitivity could not be changed if the settings were accessed directly from the main menu, which is fixed. And HDR settings would sometimes not appear on consoles, also fixed. Both are the kind of bug that generates forum threads titled "is this just me" because there is no other explanation available to the person hitting it.

There is also one fix that is oddly specific in a way that hints at a history. It is now possible to set Stick Sensitivity to the value 0.69. A sensitivity value that specifically could not be set before, and can now, implies a slider range that previously excluded it, and a number precise enough to be named suggests players had found and reported the exact boundary.

Bard's Ballad, and what a cognitive accessibility preset actually does

The accessibility section contains one feature that is more than a checkbox, and it is genuinely interesting.

A new Accessibility section was added to Settings with existing accessibility options moved into it, plus Ukrainian text localisation and the Bard's Ballad preset. The Bard's Ballad can be enabled when starting a new game on the Just the Story difficulty, or during the game from the Accessibility section, and it is described as designed to reduce cognitive load with seven specific effects.

What makes this more than a difficulty setting is that seven of the effects are individually tunable. Vitality Regeneration Boost exposes both an activation threshold and a regeneration intensity, so it is a pair of sliders rather than a switch, and a player who only wants the health pressure reduced can leave the rest of the combat intact. That is a meaningfully different design from a blanket "story mode" and it is the part worth pointing out, because most accessibility presets in this genre are all-or-nothing.

Two supporting details are easy to miss. The preset can be turned on mid-game, so it is not restricted to a fresh start, and the difficulty it is tied to is called Just the Story, which appears to be a combat-light mode distinct from the preset itself.

A community mod's assets are now official

One line in the Visual and Rendering section is easy to read past and connects to something this site has covered twice.

The entry reads: "Updated multiple textures and models based on assets from The Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project."

The HD Reworked Project is a long-running community effort that this site covered in May 2020 with version 12.0 and again in January 2023 with its NextGen Edition. Its work is now contributing assets to a first-party CD Projekt Red release, which is a notable outcome for a mod that spent years filling the gap left by a developer that had moved on. The honest framing is that CDPR has credited it and reused assets rather than shipping it, and the credit is in the changelog rather than in a licensing statement, so the scope of what was taken is not documented.

The rest of the rendering list is long and specific, and one entry connects to a review published this week. CDPR added Ray-Traced HairWorks for improved lighting and shading on hair, alongside an improved shading model, updated tone mapping, GTAO as a new Screen Space Ambient Occlusion option, an expanded HDR calibration panel, improved motion blur, updated subsurface scattering for skin, new image-based lighting, and reworked bloom. A reviewer who tested this week's build reported enabling the new path traced hair option and finding that it did not do much to bring the hair up to 2026 standards. The feature exists and is listed; whether it is worth enabling is a separate question, and it is the kind of item that gets toggled on, judged, and left off.

The changes veterans will feel in the first ten minutes

A short section, because the list is long and a few items will determine whether a returning player notices the update at all.

Several are deliberate changes to control schemes that will be felt immediately. Cantering and galloping now requires pressing the button instead of holding it, which is a small thing that anyone who spent a hundred hours holding a button will notice within a minute. A new "Horse control input sensitivity" slider has been added in Settings, then Controls, which reads as a direct response to the same complaint. Nearby loot can be collected without dismounting Roach, and there is a new option to quickly disengage from combat by holding the dodge button to unlock from a target and pressing the sprint button to run.

There is a small cluster of quality of life changes that reduce friction rather than add features. Quest notifications are combined into a single HUD notification. Nearby loot is grouped into one window instead of many, with the option in Settings then Gameplay. A loot feed on the left side of the screen shows recently collected items and can be disabled. Item tooltips in the loot window let you preview details before picking up. Herbs, boats and corpses can be hidden from the minimap in Settings, then Video, then Interface, and untracked quests now have a distinct marker you can select to begin tracking.

Two presentational changes are worth noting because they alter the game's texture. Meditation now uses a timelapse rather than a UI screen, which the official list frames as more immersive, and the settings section formerly called HUD Configuration has been renamed to Interface. If you have a guide or a muscle memory pointing at a menu path, that rename is the one to look for.

The remaining platform items are specific rather than surprising. PlayStation 5 Pro support, Xbox Play Anywhere, and multithreaded rendering on PS5. On Switch 2 there are four playstyles, Handheld, Pro Controller, Dual Grip with Motion Controls and Mouse Sensor, with motion control patterns in two modes, the mouse sensor in two modes across three control schemes, gyroscope aiming supported in three playstyles with two modes, touch input in menus, dialogue, the world map, Gwent and Photo Mode, Joy-Con 2 HD Rumble, VRR and HDR support, and a dedicated motion controls tutorial replayable from the Main Menu and Pause Menu.

FAQ

What is Reforge and where do I get it?

Reforge is the feature that changes your equipment's appearance without affecting its stats, and it is not available from every merchant. Per CD Projekt Red's official list, only the master craftsmen Yoana and Hattori offer the service. Appearances are unlocked by adding new equipment to your collection, so a set you wore once and sold stays unlockable. Stats remain tied to the equipment actually equipped, which makes it a cosmetic system rather than a way to carry a different loadout.

Do the skills have three ranks or five?

Three. The official list states that skills are now organized into a skill tree and that each skill has three ranks, down from most topping out at five in the original. It also adds a requirement not present before: unlocking new skills requires having the necessary prerequisite skills rather than simply having available skill points. The list also records a rebalance of skill bonus values, effects and synergies, and that some skills were renamed. The branching interlock description that circulated after the announcement does not appear in the official list.

How do mods work in the Remastered version?

Through Cross Platform Mod Support, an in-game tool powered by mod.io that lets you browse and install player-created mods from the game's main menu. There is also a set of engine, UI and other improvements for REDkit. The in-game part is what matters for a free update that replaces the renderer with native DirectX 12, since it avoids depending on an external loader keeping pace with a new engine. The list does not state a mod count, name any titles, or say whether the existing eleven-year backlog of mods is compatible, so per-mod verification is still on the individual player.

Can I run FSR 4 on my AMD card?

Only on an RX 7000 series card or newer. CD Projekt Red's note states that FSR 4, including Frame Generation and Anti-Lag 2, is supported on AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series and newer graphics cards, and that on unsupported GPUs the game will use FSR 2. That is worth checking against the official requirements table published the same day, which lists the RX 6600 XT as the Recommended-tier and RT Minimum AMD GPU, meaning the card CDPR recommends is below the FSR 4 cutoff. Intel's XeSS 2.0 entry carries no hardware qualifier.

What does the Bard's Ballad preset actually do?

It applies seven effects aimed at reducing cognitive load: Vitality Regeneration Boost with separately adjustable activation threshold and regeneration intensity, Infinite Breath, Unlimited Item Durability, Unlimited Boat Durability, Ignore Item Weight, Faster Boats, and a toggle for Witcher Sense that does not require holding the button. It can be enabled when starting a new game on the Just the Story difficulty or turned on mid-game from the Accessibility section. Because the vitality effect is tunable on two axes rather than being a single switch, a player who wants less health pressure can have it without taking the rest of the preset.

My quest is stuck after fast travelling in Toussaint. Will the update fix it?

Probably not, and this is the one case where CD Projekt Red says so directly. The fix for the "Wine is Sacred" issue, where fast travelling out of Toussaint during the "Search the wine cellar with Anna Henrietta" objective could block quest progression, is explicitly marked not retroactive. If your save has already triggered the bug, updating will not clear it. That disclosure is unusual and worth crediting, because the alternative is a player discovering after a 40 hour save that the update did nothing for them.

Bottom Line

The value of CD Projekt Red's official change list is not that it is long. It is that reading it against the announcement coverage corrects several details that were confidently reported and are now wrong, and the corrections mostly make the feature set less generous and more specific than advertised. The appearance system is called Reforge rather than Transmog, it is cosmetic only, and it is available from two named master craftsmen rather than any barber or armorer in the game, which is a much smaller service map than the version that circulated. Appearances unlock by adding equipment to your collection rather than by owning it, so a Reforge wardrobe is a record of what you have found rather than what you kept. That is a better system in most respects and a smaller one, and the two facts are worth separating.

The skill system is the other correction, and it is the more consequential because players are about to build around it. Three ranks per skill, down from most reaching five, plus a genuine prerequisite requirement where unlocking a skill now demands having the necessary prerequisite skills rather than just available skill points. That is a tree to be walked in order rather than filled in any sequence, which is a real design constraint. The branching interlock system with hybrid passives described at Gamescom appears nowhere in the official list, and what appears instead is prerequisite gating, a rebalance of bonus values and synergies, and skill renames. This site reported the interlock description on September 7 and the official list is the authoritative version. Anyone planning a build should wait for the actual screen.

The modding line is the most strategically significant sentence in the whole list and it is easy to skim because it is one line long. Cross Platform Mod Support is an in-game tool powered by mod.io, with mod discovery inside the main menu, and REDkit has engine and UI improvements. For a free update that swaps the renderer for native DirectX 12, shipping a first-party mod browser in the same release answers the question every remastered open-world RPG raises, which is whether the modding route survives the engine change at all. Nothing has to be installed outside the game, which means no external loader has to keep pace with a new engine version. The list does not say how many mods, does not name a single one, and does not address whether the eleven-year backlog still works, so that remains a per-mod question the announcement cannot settle.

The AMD upscaler line contains a hardware gate that was reported everywhere as a flat feature. FSR 4 with Frame Generation and Anti-Lag 2 is limited to the Radeon RX 7000 series and newer, and anything below silently drops to FSR 2. Set that against the official requirements table published the same day, which names the RX 6600 XT as both the Recommended-tier and RT Minimum AMD GPU, and the position becomes clear: the card CDPR recommends cannot run the FSR 4 CDPR is marketing. Those two documents are consistent with each other and both point at the same ceiling. Intel's XeSS 2.0 entry carries no such qualifier, which is the practical reason the Arc B580 appears at three tiers of the requirements table including a ray traced one while AMD's recommended card does not reach RT Recommended.

One fix is worth more attention than the other three in the list combined, and it is the one a vendor would normally leave out. The "Wine is Sacred" fast travel bug, which could block quest progression leaving Toussaint during the Anna Henrietta objective, is fixed but explicitly marked not retroactive. If your save has already hit it, the update will not clear it and the only way out is manual. For a hundred-hour RPG where one blocked objective can end a run, disclosing that is genuinely to the player's benefit, and the two companion fixes, one for Right Stick Sensitivity being unreachable from the main menu and one for HDR settings intermittently not appearing on consoles, are the kind of symptoms that generate "is this just me" forum threads because the affected player has no other explanation. The third fix is the curious one: Stick Sensitivity can now be set to 0.69, a number precise enough to imply players found and reported the exact boundary of a slider range.

The accessibility addition is the most interesting design decision in the release and it is easy to dismiss as a difficulty preset. Bard's Ballad applies seven effects, and the detail worth carrying is that two of them are separately tunable rather than being a single switch. Vitality Regeneration Boost exposes both an activation threshold expressed as a percentage of vitality and a regeneration intensity, so a player who only wants the health pressure reduced can have exactly that and leave combat otherwise intact. The rest, Infinite Breath, Unlimited Item Durability, Unlimited Boat Durability, Ignore Item Weight, Faster Boats, and a Witcher Sense toggle that does not require holding the button, are broad, and one of the entries observes that faster boats mean the seas around Skellige just got a little smaller. It can be enabled on the Just the Story difficulty at a new game start or switched on mid-game from the new Accessibility section, so it is not a fresh-save-only concession.

The provenance detail that connects to something this site has covered twice is in the rendering list, where CD Projekt Red states that multiple textures and models are updated based on assets from The Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project. That is a long-running community project first covered here in May 2020 and again in January 2023, and its work is now contributing to a first-party release. The accurate framing is that CDPR has credited it and reused assets rather than shipping the mod, and the credit sits in a changelog rather than a licensing statement, so the scope of what was taken is undocumented. The same list adds Ray-Traced HairWorks, which a reviewer who tested this week's build enabled and reported as doing little to bring hair up to 2026 standards. The feature is real and listed, and it is the kind of item that gets switched on, judged, and left off.

What a returning player feels in the first ten minutes is not in any of the above. It is that cantering and galloping now require pressing rather than holding, a change small enough to be unremarkable in a list and certain to be noticed by anyone who spent a hundred hours holding a button, and that a Horse control input sensitivity slider has appeared in Settings then Controls, which reads as a direct response to the same complaint. Alongside it, collecting loot without dismounting Roach, grouped loot windows, a loot feed, item tooltips, hideable herbs and boats and corpses on the minimap, combined quest notifications, meditation as a timelapse instead of a menu, and one rename that will break any guide pointing at the old path, since HUD Configuration is now called Interface. None of that is transformative. All of it is the difference between a remaster that announces itself and one you notice on foot. The honest summary is that the headline systems are narrower than the preview suggested, the mod support is stronger than the preview suggested, one of the two is a trap for anyone already affected, and the rest is a long list of things that will make an eleven-year-old game feel slightly less like it.

Source: CD Projekt Red, See what's new in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered, posted on the official forums on September 28, 2026, is the primary and sole source for every item in this article. That includes: the Reforge service and its restriction to Yoana and Hattori and its collection-based unlock; the three skill ranks and the prerequisite requirement and the rebalance and renames; Cross Platform Mod Support powered by mod.io and the REDkit improvements; the path tracing support, DLSS 4.5 with Ray Reconstruction, FSR 4 with Frame Generation and Anti-Lag 2 and its RX 7000 series and newer restriction with FSR 2 fallback, XeSS 2.0 with Frame Generation and Low Latency, and the DualSense haptic support; the Wine is Sacred fast travel fix and its explicit non-retroactive designation, the Right Stick Sensitivity fix, the HDR settings fix and the 0.69 stick sensitivity value; the Accessibility section, the Ukrainian localisation, the Bard's Ballad preset and its seven named effects and their tunability, and the Just the Story difficulty; the HD Reworked Project asset credit; the Ray-Traced HairWorks addition and the full rendering list; the cantering and galloping press-instead-of-hold change, the horse control sensitivity slider, the loot changes, the minimap filter, the meditation timelapse and the HUD Configuration to Interface rename; the PlayStation 5 Pro, Xbox Play Anywhere and PS5 multithreaded rendering items; and the full Nintendo Switch 2 feature list including four playstyles, the motion control patterns and modes, the mouse sensor modes and control schemes, the gyroscope modes, the touch input coverage including Gwent and Photo Mode, the Joy-Con 2 HD Rumble, VRR and HDR, and the replayable motion controls tutorial. The requirement figures referenced in relation to the FSR 4 gate are from CD Projekt Red's support article on updated PC requirements published the same day. The observation that Ray-Traced HairWorks is underwhelming in practice is attributed to a review of this week's pre-release build and is presented as that reviewer's finding rather than as a measurement. The HD Reworked Project background is from this site's own coverage of the project in May 2020 and January 2023. This site's September 7 announcement coverage is the source for the interlock branch description that the official list does not contain, and that discrepancy is stated rather than silently dropped. No feature, effect or setting is described that is not in the published list, and no mod count, mod title or compatibility claim is asserted because none is given

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