The Witcher 3 recently launched for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC this past spring. The game has been selling great and brought in a lot of new players into the Witcher's lore and universe. Some gamers are now asking if CD Projekt RED will attempt to port remastered renditions of The Witcher and The Witcher 2 to the PS4 and Xbox One.
According to VG 24/7, they caught wind of tweets from CD Projekt RED's community manager Marcin Momot, who explained where the company stands on the whole remastered front for older Witcher games.
Coming off The Witcher 3 it doesn't really make sense to go back and remaster the older games when the Xbox One will be able to play them anyways. Yes, according to the master list of backwards compatible games for the Xbox One listed on Finder.au, we can see that The Witcher 2 will be available this holiday season as a backwards compatible title.
This means if you own the Xbox 360 copies of the game you will be able to play those titles on the Xbox One. That's likely as close to a remaster as console gamers will get.
That's not to mention that it would take a lot of work to bring the older games up to par by either redoing all the assets in the latest version of the RED Engine or by attempting to dump all of the game's older assets into the newer engine. Either way, that's a heck of a lot of work to bring The Witcher and The Witcher 2 up to par.
On the upside at least Xbox One owners will be able to play The Witcher 2 if they own a copy of the game for the Xbox 360, either physically or digitally, but PlayStation 4 owners are up the creek. Unfortunately previous Witcher games weren't made for the PS3... at all.
The PlayStation 3 had powerful but complex architecture (and a CPU that can still hang with the PS4's APU in some of the benchmarks) and due to these complexities games had to be made in very specific ways in order to make proper use of the hardware and get decent frame-rate and performance out of the title. At the time CD Projekt RED just didn't have the resources to make it doable in a reasonable amount of time.
If you have a decent PC and Windows 10 along with an Xbox One, once they make PC to Xbox One streaming possible then some Xbox One owners might be able to stream The Witcher 1 from PC to Xbox. That will probably be as close as console gamers get to a remastered version of the first game.
Sadly, PlayStation owners just don't have any options for playing the first two games in the Witcher series. It's just the price you have to pay for being loyal to one brand over the other.
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