The Witcher 3 Remastered, CD Projekt Red’s fully reworked version of its 2015 role-playing game, launched this week across PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 with a sweeping suite of graphics improvements — yet one of its most iconic, if utterly unremarkable, in-game residents has slipped through the overhaul completely untouched. The game’s famously low-polygonal pigeons remain as blocky and charming as ever, a discovery that has delighted fans who had feared the beloved birds were about to be polished into oblivion.
As The Witcher 3 Remastered shipped with ray tracing, path tracing, and a complete visual reimagining of Velen, Novigrad, and beyond, players quickly noticed that updated pigeon models had been added to the game. But the change, it turns out, applied only to the birds pecking around on the ground — and the initial reaction suggested the flying pigeons had been left behind. One player posted a side-by-side comparison of the new grounded model and the old, shabbier flying version in a Reddit post captioned, “Gone, but never forgotten,” capturing a moment of collective fandom heartbreak over what appeared to be a two-tiered avian class system.
A False Alarm in the Streets of Novigrad
The panic was, fortunately, entirely unwarranted. Kotaku Editor-in-Chief Ethan Gach took to X (formerly Twitter) to confirm that the low-poly pigeon has, in fact, survived the remaster intact. The Witcher 3 simply uses different models for its flying and grounded birds, meaning the pixelated street performers have always been distinct from their airborne cousins — and they remain so in the upgraded release.
“This is a false alarm. Street pigeons have always been different from the ones flying.”
Ethan Gach, Kot
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