Pinoy Gaming Network Where Pinoy Gamers Unite! 
TL;DR: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered goes live today, September 29, at 6PM PHT. It’s free if you already own the game. It’s also a good excuse to look back at the RPG that pushed a lot of Pinoy gamers into their first serious PC upgrade.
In May 2015, one question kept showing up in every Pinoy PC gaming Facebook group: “Kaya ba ng rig ko?”
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt had just launched, and it was the first game in years that made many of us nervous about our specs. The recommended graphics card was a GTX 770, and the minimum was a GTX 660. A lot of local gamers were still running hand-me-down builds or budget cards bought for Dota 2 and League. For them, those numbers were a wall.
So we did what Pinoy gamers always do. We saved up.
The great ipon era
Some waited for 13th month pay. Some went hulugan. Plenty spent a Saturday at Gilmore with a crumpled spec list, going from stall to stall to canvass the best price on a GTX 960. The dream card that year was the GTX 970, and not even its infamous 3.5GB memory issue stopped anyone from wanting one.
What made this upgrade different was the reason behind it. For years, a lot of us bought new parts so a competitive game would run smoother. We wanted better FPS in Dota, fewer lag spikes in CrossFire, and a stable connection for ranked. The Witcher 3 flipped that. People were spending real money for a single-player story, just to see Velen’s swamps and Novigrad’s streets the way they were meant to look.
It says something about how good the game was. Nobody breaks their ipon for a mediocre RPG.
Everyone has a Witcher story
If you played it, you remember a specific moment. Maybe the Bloody Baron questline, which hit a lot harder than anyone expected from a side story. Maybe finally reaching Toussaint in Blood and Wine and just stopping to look around. Maybe the moment you turned on Nvidia HairWorks to see Geralt’s hair flow in the wind, and then watched your framerate drop off a cliff. Grabe.
And then there’s Gwent. The card mini-game was supposed to be a side activity, but it quietly ate hundreds of hours from people who were supposed to be saving Ciri. “Isang round pa” at 2AM was a real problem for a lot of us. Some players still say they spent more time hunting rare cards than hunting monsters.
The game also landed at an interesting point in local gaming history. In 2015, PH gaming was very MOBA and comshop-heavy, and Mobile Legends wouldn’t arrive until the following year. The Witcher 3 was something many played alone at home, then talked about with the barkada the next day. It was the kind of game that got passed around by word of mouth, the “laruin mo ‘to, pre” recommendation that actually delivered.
Eleven years later, the game has sold over 65 million copies. It’s one of the best-selling games of all time, and a lot of that comes from people who kept recommending it long after launch.
2026: same question, different numbers
Now the Remastered version is here, and the Facebook groups are asking the same thing again: kaya ba ng PC ko?
The good news is that the answer is friendlier this time. The minimum GPU is a GTX 1660, a budget card that plenty of local gamers bought a few years back and are probably still using. You’ll also need an Intel Core i5-8400 or Ryzen 5 2600 and 12GB of RAM. For recommended settings, you’re looking at an RTX 2060 Super, RX 6600 XT or Intel Arc B580, paired with 16GB of RAM.
There are two catches. The game needs Windows 11 and 70GB of SSD storage, and a hard drive install is not an option. If your gaming rig still runs its library on an old HDD, this might be the push to finally grab that SSD. At least 70GB is reasonable by 2026 standards, and it already includes both original expansions.
The upgrade itself is sulit. If you own The Witcher 3 on Steam, GOG, Epic, PS5, or Xbox Series X|S, you get Remastered for free. Switch owners get it free on Switch 2 too, but it’s a separate download from the eShop, not an automatic update. For the first time, the game is also on Battle.net, which matters for everyone whose friends list lives there.
The Remastered version brings improved visuals, path tracing on PC, and changes to combat, controls, and skill progression. DLSS 4.5 works on RTX 20-series cards and up, while frame generation needs an RTX 40-series card.
What comes next
CD Projekt Red isn’t done with Geralt yet. A new paid expansion, Songs of the Past, arrives in 2027 and adds a new region called Letten. So if you’ve been meaning to finally finish the game, or replay it after all these years, now is the time to start.
For a lot of Pinoy gamers, the original Witcher 3 was tied to a memory of a first real build, a first GPU bought with our own money, or a first time a game made us care about a story that much. The Remastered version won’t bring back 2015. But it’s a chance to revisit those memories with much better lighting.
So, sa mga naka-GTX 960 dati: what are you running now? Tell us in the comments.
