The Witcher 3 fan compared a shot of Gaunter O'Dimm from the original and the remaster – in the reissue the image got worse due to lighting

Remasters almost always try to sell the same idea: what was dark and murky is now bright and clean. The problem is that in games, "dark and murky" is often not a bug – it's a deliberate choice made by artists who spent half their careers placing shadows just right.

That kind of contrast just landed on a Reddit thread, where a fan compared the same scene from the current version of The Witcher 3 with the upcoming remaster. The character models haven't changed – Gaunter O'Dimm's head is still pointy and angular – but the lighting looks noticeably brighter and glossier. The original poster didn't hide feelings: "Models are the same (Gaunter head is still pointy and angular), better lighting so everything is more shiny. Personally, I like the old lighting more"

The question fans keep asking is simple, as one user put it: "Better lighting or just more lighting? There's a difference and depending on how they do it can make or break certain scenes." The distinction matters. The original 2015 game relied on baked lighting and manual exposure work, where artists decided which corners of a room shouldn't be visible at all. Systems like the ray-traced global illumination added to the next-gen update in December 2022 calculate light in a physically accurate way, but physical accuracy and frame composition are two different disciplines.

Old version:

New version:

Anyone who lived through Dark Souls Remastered in 2018 knows this story already: reworked lighting made the picture more readable while washing out some of the oppressive gloom that made the original beloved in the first place. The original poster brought up the same worry: "Dark Souls remaster had a lot of problems after changing the lighting system. I hope W3 managed to avoid them" A similar effect shows up when comparing Novigrad or Witcher interiors – bounced light fills in the shadows, turning a painterly scene into a clean but flat screenshot. As one commenter put it, "The first looks like it could be a painting--the second does not allow you to forget it's a still from a video game."

There's also the popular argument about just turning down the brightness slider. Gamma correction shifts the whole curve evenly, raising or lowering brightness across the board, but tone mapping, indirect light intensity, and specular strength stay untouched. Lower the brightness and you don't get the old atmospheric scene back – you just get the same overlit scene, dimmer.