The Witcher 3 Remastered has changed how Geralt grows, and plenty of players are finding out by loading an old save. Since the free update on 29 September, skills sit in a proper tree, each with three ranks, and your points have been reset. CD Projekt Red spells this out in its patch notes. This guide covers what has changed, what it means for your playthrough and the other combat tweaks worth knowing about. It sticks to the studio’s official information and doesn’t try to hand you a build.
At a glance
In The Witcher 3 Remastered, every skill now has three ranks within a tree.
Unlocking a skill requires the ones before it, instead of a set number of points spent.
Your skill points have been reset, so you’ll need to spend them again when you resume a save.
What’s new in The Witcher 3 skill tree
In the original The Witcher 3, unlocking a more advanced skill depended on how many points you’d already put into a branch. The Remastered version works differently. According to the patch notes CD Projekt Red published on the official Witcher website, skills are now organised into a tree, and each one has three ranks. To unlock a new skill, you need the skills that come before it in the tree, which replaces the old rule of spending a fixed number of points.
The studio has also rebalanced the whole system. The patch notes mention refined bonus values, effects and synergies between skills, and some skills have been renamed to better reflect what they do. The skill screen itself has been rearranged into a tree layout that CD Projekt Red describes as more intuitive.
All of which means your old habits may no longer apply. A skill you used to grab early might now sit further down the tree, or go by another name. Since the studio doesn’t list every new value in its notes, the simplest approach is to open the skill screen and read each description before spending your points.
What the reset means for your save
This is the part that catches people out when they return to an old playthrough. The patch notes say it plainly: as a result of these changes, your skill points have been reset. You’ll have to rebuild Geralt’s skills from scratch in the new tree.
Before heading back out across Velen, take a moment to reassign those points. A sensible approach is to pick out the skills that suit how you play, whether that’s swordplay, Signs or alchemy, then work back up the tree to see what they require. The three ranks on each skill also force a choice between deepening one skill and unlocking another.
If you’d rather play The Witcher 3 with the old system, there’s a way. Hotfix 5.00c, released on 1 October, fixed an issue that stopped the Classic (1.32) version of the game from launching, so that version remains available. For the full list of machines covered by the upgrade, see our piece on The Witcher 3 Remastered landing free on four machines.
The other combat changes worth knowing
The skill tree is only one part of the gameplay changes. According to The Witcher 3 Remastered patch notes, CD Projekt Red has reworked the behaviour of every non-boss monster, from attack patterns and counterattacks to movement, reactions and fleeing. Geralt’s gap-closing animations have been improved, as has switching your locked target when you move the camera.
A handy new option has been added too. You can now get out of a fight quickly by holding the dodge button to drop your target lock, then pressing sprint to run away. On PC that’s Alt followed by Left Shift, Circle then Cross on PlayStation, and B then A on Xbox.
Finally, The Witcher 3 Remastered adds an accessibility preset called Bard’s Ballad, designed for players who tire quickly or find it hard to concentrate. It streamlines certain mechanics, such as item and boat durability, which become unlimited. The update has clearly struck a chord, with the game breaking its own record on Steam, as we covered in our piece on The Witcher 3 Remastered’s new Steam peak.
Upcoming release dates and major updates are tracked in our games calendar, which you can filter by platform.