The Witcher 3 Will Officially Leave Millions Of Players Behind in 2027

Published Sep 28, 2026, 7:30 AM EDT

James is a gaming writer from London who has spent thousands of hours exploring titles from every genre. Though he has a particular affinity for multiplayer titles like World of Warcraft, Destiny 2 and League of Legends, he has also put thousands of hours into single-player experiences, from deep RPGs to epic PC strategies. When he's not playing or writing, he can usually be found supporting his beloved Brentford FC.

CD Projekt Red really have put themselves in fairly uncharted territory with the way they are currently handling The Witcher 3, and the franchise as a whole moving forward. It is now one of very few games that has confirmed a full story DLC, over ten years since the original game first debuted to players, and

All of this has been put in place to give players a cogent runway into the release of The Witcher 4, which will see Ciri take on the role of the playable protagonist for the first time. That's totally understandable, given how long it has been since the last game came out, and I certainly won't be the one to moan about more content for one of the best RPGs of all time.

That said, there are some knock-on effects that players might want to be aware of moving forward, even if we don't know exactly how they're going to play out at the time of writing.

The Witcher 3 Has A Big Windows Change

As first reported by GameRant, the announcement of the Songs of the Past DLC for The Witcher 3 came with a bunch of technical caveats. Amongst those was the revelation that Windows 11 would become the minimum operating system for those who wanted to play after the launch of the DLC.

This is particularly interesting because that new standard was actually already in play, and CDPR confirmed in a statement to GameRant that the end of Windows 10 support for both Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 is already in effect. Crucially, that doesn't mean those games don't work any more if you do fancy playing them, more than the developer will no longer be ensuring that they do moving forward.

At the time of writing, testing shows that both games above are still running on Windows 10 on their current versions, though there is no guarantee of that once patches drop for either of those games, or the host operating system. In any case, it might be time to upgrade if you have been putting it off, just to save yourself the trouble of any potential headaches in the future.

Even More Witcher 3 Is About To Arrive

Tomorrow (September 29) also marks the long-awaited release day for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, which "modernizes the generation-defining open-world role-playing game with a range of upgrades and enhancements to visuals, performance, gameplay, and more".

In fairness to CD Projekt Red, this new version of the game actually seems like it advances things quite significantly. The combat changes are the most significant, and it should feel quite different to play on a moment-to-moment basis as a result. The skill system has also been reimagined, and this could quickly become the definitive way to play The Witcher 3 moving forward, as long as your hardware can keep up.

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