The best RPG ever released absolutely shines on Switch 2 – and you might get it for free
The Witcher 3 still reigns supreme
If you're building a list of the best RPGs ever made, there's no doubt a lot of personal opinion that'll inform your choice for the top spot, but some games just have to be in the upper echelons. No matter your persuasion, most people would agree, for one, that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt belongs in that conversation.
It's one of the finest open-world games of all time, but also one of the most intriguing, expansive and immersive RPGs ever, and it's been attracting accolades for donkey's years now. In 2026, though, CD Projekt Red has seen fit to bring it up to date once more by releasing a remastered version for modern consoles and the PC.
That means a new version of the game running natively on the Nintendo Switch 2, which previously just had the near-miraculous but very blurry original Switch version to turn to. This new port is available as a new purchase, but crucially is also a free upgrade for those who already have the Switch 1 version – so you might already own the newest version without realising it.
This generosity is a great start to the experience of testing out The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered, but it doesn't end there. This past weekend I've put in around five hours in the game, refreshing my memory of its brilliant campaign and sizeable expansions, and I'm basically in awe of how it runs on Nintendo's machine.
Before we get to performance, though, it might be worth underscoring that this is a third-person, action-focused RPG with long, winding questlines. Geralt of Rivia, the series' hero, is on the search for his adoptive daughter Ciri, but she's not easy to track down, and he'll also circle around the sorceress Yennefer while he hunts. The story is peak fantasy, the action is relatively simple but very satisfying, and the setting is dark and gritty in a hugely satisfying way.
The fact that this game ever ran on the first Switch was a superb feat, but the performance on offer meant that I never really got into it – playing the game on any other platform felt like a better pick for me. Now, though, I think the portable experience on the Switch 2 is genuinely at the point where the compromises are no longer really there.
The developers have embraced Nintendo's hardware, including that variable refresh-rate screen, to give the game a 40fps mode as default, which means that it feels impressively smooth without the same demands as a 60fps version. There are areas where this performance dips a little into the mid-30s, but I haven't found that distracting, and the benefits to perceived smoothness are huge.
It's also drastically less blurry than the previous port, as you'd hope, and while there are still clear fuzzy edges to things when you're playing in handheld mode (these really clear up when you dock the console), it's extremely legible and clear. This means that I really do think you could play the game's entire saga from start to finish without feeling like you should have done so on other hardware.
If that feels like damning the port with faint praise, think again – I love this game to death, and to be able to play it on the go, on a machine with just a faint whirr of fan noise rather than a cacophony, is quite special. My girlfriend also only really games on the Switch 2, so this means that she's now lined up to play one of the best stories in gaming, something I've been saving for her for ages.
All of this is also doubly reassuring given that the game is getting a new expansion next year – Songs of the Past. The gap between the original game's release and this DLC is staggeringly long, but it promises to set the scene for The Witcher 4, which sounds like a real treat, and it'll come to this Switch 2 version from the start.
This all means that you can get the game on Switch 2 and be confident that even if you manage to hoover up all of its content by the end of the year (which would be quite a feat, given its scale), you'll still have more to enjoy next year, at presumably the same level of performance. That, in turn, means this is a great investment, and the smartest way to buy it is probably to find a used copy of the Switch 1 port, buy that and then score the free upgrade that way. That's a hot tip in case it hadn't occurred to you!
