The Witcher 3 Remastered Rebuilds Its Skill Tree, and the Songs of the Past Lead Writer Once Wrote a Thesis on Hearts of Stone

The Witcher 3 Remastered is rebuilding its skill tree so players can experiment with builds far earlier, and the lead writer on its Songs of the Past expansion once wrote her bachelor's thesis on Hearts of Stone. CD Projekt Red has opened the floodgates on interviews, and the amount of information from the last week alone is a lot to take in. I am ecstatic.

Beyond the skill system and the expansion's writing team, the developers have explained what they were trying to accomplish with the whole project, the story director has laid out how he approaches a Witcher quest, and CDPR has finally explained the real reason it walked away from the Red Engine. Every time we hear news about this game it gets bigger and better, and it is out now.

The Witcher 3 Remastered's skill tree mixes old, modified and brand new skills

The biggest gameplay change in this remaster is the skill tree, and the developers have given their clearest explanation yet of what they did to it. They describe three kinds of skills in the new system. There are old skills carrying over from the original game, modified skills that existed before but have been changed, and brand new skills that have never been in The Witcher 3 at all.

So this is not a reshuffle of the same list with a new coat of paint on the menu. It is a rebuilt progression system with genuinely new content inside it. The part that matters most, though, is how fast you get access to everything. According to the team, players will unlock a lot of these skills much faster than in the previous system, and the stated goal is to give players the opportunity to experiment with builds much earlier in the game. Their framing was that you do not have to reach level 30 or 40 to access multiple new, exciting abilities and try combinations with them. That is a pretty big deal.

Faster unlocks fix the slow early progression of the original Witcher 3

I want to dig into this, because it addresses something a lot of people were frustrated with in the original game. Think about how the original Witcher 3 actually played. You start with a handful of points, and the skills you can reach early are mostly small percentage bumps. Sign builds do not really come alive until you are deep into the sign tree. Alchemy builds are borderline unusable for the first chunk of the game, because you have not unlocked the mutagens or decoction slots that make them work. The genuinely wild builds really sit in the back half of the level curve.

For a lot of casual players, people who do not dive deep into RPGs, that meant picking a lane early and committing to it. They probably did not look up how to respec, or did not have the crowns for a Potion of Clearance. I cannot remember its exact price; I think it was either 800 or 1,000, and I am pretty sure it was 1,000. Either way, it was not something you would use early. It was really a mid game option. Unless you went looking for guides, you probably rode the same build for a 60 hour playthrough, and I am willing to bet a huge number of players never touched alchemy at all. Not because it was bad, but because the game never really held their hand or gave them a cheaper window to try it.

This is one of the reasons I always tell people to play on Death March. That difficulty requires you to prepare for almost every fight, which essentially forces you to interact with the game's other systems just to get through tasks that are simple on the base difficulty. Opening up the whole system early flips that mentality. You will be able to reach into signs, swordplay and even alchemy within the first several hours, and actually find out what you enjoy instead of guessing at level five and living with it. That should make the opening act feel a lot more rewarding.

It is one of the reasons I am doing a replay, and I strongly recommend one, especially if you played back in the day, did not mesh with the first ten hours and quit. The remaster is free, and it should be better paced.

Some of the original game's overpowered builds have been changed

The developers were pretty direct about balance. They said some of the old builds have been changed specifically because the original game had some very overpowered builds, and they pointed out that the list is long, which is so true. I would expect some of your favourite builds to hit differently.

I think that is the right call, and I say that as somebody who absolutely abused some of the best builds in the game. A combat overhaul with new finishers, reworked animations and better targeting means very little if the intended answer to every encounter is still an overpowered build.

The remaster touches what the next gen update never did

The remaster's executive producer spoke about the philosophy behind the entire project in a new interview with PC Gamer. He drew a line between this and the next gen update from a few years ago, which he described as a quite substantial update, but one driven by the new generation of consoles and very much technically oriented. The remaster, he said, is entirely different. It is even bigger and quite heavy, maybe even heavier on the technical level, but what matters more is that the team was touching aspects of the game that had not been touched since launch: the animation, the gameplay, and the quality of life of how you actually play.

That is the key difference. The next gen update was about making the game run on new hardware; this one is about the parts nobody has touched since 2015. CDPR apparently realised that another technical pass on its own would probably not be enough. The studio wanted the game to shine again, and wanted both veterans and new players to come away without bad surprises or anything that made The Witcher 3 feel aged. The producer summed up the target as wanting to make it comparable with any other game launching these days. To get there, the team needed to change the animation system, the camera work, enemy behaviour in combat and pathfinding, then layer quality of life fixes anywhere it identified a source of frustration. No stone was left unturned.

The part that stuck with me most came when he was asked how the team knows it worked. He pointed at his own team and said: "It's so easy to get used to these new improvements that it's hard to go back." This might be marketing fluff, or the team hyping itself up, but it feels like they are so confident in this remaster that they cannot go back to the original game.

The Songs of the Past lead writer wrote her thesis on Hearts of Stone

We also got a look at who is writing the expansion. Songs of the Past is being developed together with Fools Theory, and back in 2017, roughly a decade before she worked on the game, the expansion's lead writer wrote her bachelor's thesis on Hearts of Stone. According to the article, she studied comparative literature and chose Hearts of Stone specifically because of how dense it is with literary references. She talked about how The Witcher channels classic Polish literature, calling out The Wedding, and about the construction of Gaunter O'Dimm as a devilish figure built out of many different pieces of culture.

Her reason for writing it is the best part. In her words: "I wanted to analyze it, and I did this to probably prove to some of my professors that games are worthy, and they're also texts of culture."

I have been cautiously optimistic about an outside studio handling a Witcher 3 expansion, but the lead writer academically dissected Hearts of Stone before she was ever hired to work on this. I was already really excited to see where the story is headed, and this gets me even more excited to see the work they have done.

Big choices should make players put the controller down

The story director also broke down his philosophy on quest design in a recent interview, and I think it explains why The Witcher 3's quests hit differently from almost anything else in the genre. His first requirement is that a choice has to make you think and cannot be obvious; as he put it, "You can't simply go after one of those choices by simply pressing A all the time." Beyond that balance, a choice needs its own gravitas. It has to be serious and make you think about your life, about people, or about the specific problem the characters face.

He said he always repeats that a really big choice in The Witcher 3 must be constructed so that the player puts the controller away, stands up, walks around thinking about it, then comes back and picks. He named the Bloody Baron and the Ladies of the Wood sequence as examples. He described the goal as immersing players in the characters' problems while saying something about who we are, how the world works and how hard life can be.

Asked directly whether Songs of the Past will have hard choices, he answered: "Obviously, I mean, we are not going to avoid difficult choices and we are not avoiding making players uncomfortable." He promised players will get both in the expansion, and that they will sometimes regret a decision and need to load a save to make it again.

CDPR left the Red Engine over identity, not Cyberpunk 2077

Finally, CDPR co-CEO Nowakowski addressed the assumption everyone has been making about the move to Unreal Engine 5. On the Deconstructor of Fun podcast, he was asked whether the Cyberpunk 2077 launch pushed the studio to Unreal 5, and his answer was yes and no. He called it "a bit of a false assumption", because the issue with Cyberpunk was not really the Red Engine itself.

The real reason is about identity. The company's dream was never to make technology; it was to create visually and technically advanced games, but most importantly to tell stories in the most convincing and immersive way. The moment that flipped the switch, Nowakowski said, was not the Cyberpunk launch but an early look at The Matrix Awakens demo Epic made. The studio asked whether Unreal Engine 5 could ship a game at its scale. The initial answer was no, not at that moment and not out of the box, but if CDPR built a real relationship with Epic and they worked on specific things together, it could get there.

Everything about this remaster is pointing in the right direction: rebuilt skills, earlier build experimentation, a team that apparently cannot go back to the old version, and an expansion written by someone who studied the franchise academically before she was hired. Will you miss the old overpowered builds, or is rebalancing them the right call?