Best Witcher 3 mod: HD Reworked – The One Mod to have

The HD Reworked mod for The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt is a must-have! It improves the game’s visuals, but preserves the original CD Projekt Red style. The best!

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is now four and a half years old. The game is still far above any other single player game in my personal list, but its graphics have aged and this shows when you compare the game to a newer title from the more recent releases.

With this post I would like to show you arguably the best and most important mod for The Witcher 3 that will allow you not only to enjoy the game’s story, but also its stunning visuals!

I think there is no point discussing The Witcher 3’s narrative and story elements. This Role-Playing game is a true masterpiece and beats any competition from years past and future in my own eyes.

Back in the Summer of 2015 when I first started playing The Witcher 3 I thought it looked stunningly amazing. And it did.

Now, after Netflix has released the first season of The Witcher TV Show, the video games get a fresh boost of interest from both returning veterans and new players looking to try out this so highly prized title.

If you have been playing lately some of the more beautifully-looking titles in the past couple of years, you might think The Witcher 3 did not age well. And it really didn’t.

Since I consider everything else to be 99% perfect with the game, the only correction I personally needed for my next playthrough(s) in 2020 after a year away from it – a graphics boost. And I found a way!

The world of The Witcher is described in great details in the books and the TV show does it justice by showing it exactly as it should – dirty and ugly, but at the same time stunningly gorgeous.

The MOD that I installed and want to talk about is called “HD Reworked”. It only adjusts the visuals of the game. It does not modify CD Projekt Red’s gameplay style, design or any other feature of the game.

The author of the mod, Halk_Hogan PL, has been working on this project for years. I personally started using it around its version 4. Right now the current number is 10.00. It’s available on nexusmods.

As the description of the mod on Nexusmods says: “This project aims to improve the graphics by reworking models and textures to better quality preserving the original style“.

I am pleased to confirm that this has remained true for all versions, including the latest one. The game looks much prettier and on par with the 2019 and 2020’s standards for a “good looking game”, but it retains all of the charm from CD Projekt Red’s game developers and designers.

The mod’s features include:

• Very high quality detailed textures with great sharpness and performance, without any unnecessary VRAM losses (no unnecessary big textures for small stuff)
• Very high quality accurate normal maps, a lot of them is baked from high poly meshes, these normals combined with detail normalmaps giving amazing look with almost any performance hit!
• High quality meshes with a lot of details, a lot of them are created from scratch, good optimization is preserved
• Better objects LODs ( Level of Detail), rendering distance of some objects are slightly increased
• Specially customized materials for all reworked stuff
• Everything consistent with the original CDPR artistic vision

Using this mod may result in a slight performance hit. It does use high resolution textures after all. Unless you are using a very outdated graphics card in your PC configuration, I think you will not suffer from any FPS drops. ” It mainly depends on your video card, but generally modification doesn’t hit performance too much” – the author explains.

The official requirements and recommendations for HD Project Reworked Mod are:

• You need the base The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt game. Preferably, but not a requirement, bought from GOG.com, because this way you support its creators 100%.
• Your base game can contain the two expansions, but it is not necessary. Both DLCs are of a very high quality. If you do not get them, you are missing a lot!
• The game versions that the mod officially works with are 1.31 / 1.32 / GOTY Edtion.
• Make sure you have at least 40-45GB of free space. I highly recommend that you install it on an SSD. This will speed up the loading times.

UPDATE: This mode is included by the developers in The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt Next-Gen Update!

How to Install and setup The Witcher 3 HD Reworked Mod

Print

This is a detailed step-by-step instruction to help you install the mod and get the most out of it so your game would look absolutely stunning!

Prep Time: 30 minutes

Active Time: 10 minutes

Total Time: 40 minutes

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Make sure you have at least 45 GB of free space on your hard drive. The game performs better if installed on an SSD, which speeds up the loading times.
2. Download The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It doesn't matter which platform you use, but GOG.com is CD Projekt RED's own service and if you use it 100% of the money you spent will go to them.
   Note: the price in the image below may be different when you open the link.
3. Download HD Reworked Mod by Halk_Hogan from nexusmods.com The mod supports versions 1.31, 1.32 and GOTY Edition. For version 10 the three files total to a little shy from 5 GB in size combined.
4. Install one after another all three parts of the mod. First click on "The Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project Part 1 and wait for it to finish. Remember to correctly point to where your game is installed. The mod needs to go into your Witcher 3 folder (where the game is installed). When prompted, follow up with Part 2 and Part 3.
5. Once everything is installed and ready. Start up The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
6. There is a trick to get the maximum out of this mod. Following the next few steps you, as the author says - "general quality of textures will be better (better sharpness, nof lickering/shimmering, better smoothness) and game can render 4K textures (instead of 2K)"
7. From the main menu in-game open Options > Video > Graphics.
8. Scroll down until you reach Texture Quality and make sure "Halk Ultra HD" is selected. If you see "##preset_value_Halk_Ultra HD" you are fine. This is just a localization issue and will not affect your game or the mod's performance at all. If it bothers you, download this quick fix.
9. The following is an example of how to setup a few things inside the Nvidia Control Panel for those of you with Nvidia graphics cards.
   - Go to Manage 3D Settings and click on the second tab called Program Settings.
   - Add "The Witcher 3 (witcher3.exe) if it isn't available in the drop-down list.
   - Set Anisotropic filtering to 16x
   - Set Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample optimization to Off
   - Set Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias to Clamp
   - Set Texture filtering - Quality to High quality
   - Set Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization to On
   - Set Vertical sync to On (optional, if you have a Gsync monitor)
10. Don't forget to thank Halk_Hogan PL and if you feel generous, donate to the author via nexusmods's automated tipping system.