Fable devs say they're aiming to keep the RPG's combat "approachable" in line with the series' legacy.

Speaking to Edge magazine, associate director Will Kennedy explained that the combat in the original Fable games "has a legacy of being quite approachable, so that's something we kept in mind while developing our combat system." But while that means you're not in for Dark Souls-style brawls, it doesn't mean there's not different forms of complexity hidden in the combat system.

Arrows, for example, can be aimed at certain body parts. If you hit the leg of an undead 'Hollow' enemy, for instance, they'll fall to the ground and crawl towards you. "If you decapitate them," explains Craig Littler, another associate director, "they don't know where to go [...] When you do that to a ranged enemy [...] they're just firing off in every direction."

Elsewhere, the pair explain that the 'Befowl' spell, which turns enemies into chickens, behaves differently against Hollow; "they turn into undead chickens," explains Kennedy. "And if you use Fireball on a chicken, they turn into a roast chicken. There are lots of little details."

The approachability of Fable's combat is part of a wider move to not rely on fighting. Littler explains that rather than always fighting, some quests will rely on dialogue choices or the game's reputation system. "There are quests that are much broader," he says. "More exploration, even a puzzle or two along the way. One of the things we're really proud about is the variety of activities and how they all harmonize to tell a story that you feel really involved in."

Fable’s combat shows a lot of promise, but I'm glad it's not launching this year.

The past is a foreign country, and they do things differently there. At least, this is how I explain PC Gamer of yore's selection of Metal Gear Solid 5 for Game of the Year 2015. Meaning no offence to MGS5—a game I spent several hundred hours obtaining every achievement in, just to have an excuse to play more—speaking personally? Nothing's knocking The Witcher 3 off the pedestal of 2015's greatest triumph.

And now CDPR has gone over the whole thing with a fine brush, tweaking and enhancing it to second-quarter-of-the-21st-century fidelity. You might say, 'Didn't that happen several years ago?' Poor reader, that was merely a "next-gen update." Now is the time of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered.

There is already discourse, to no one's great surprise. Are the graphical enhancements good? Are they bad? Do they wrench The Witcher 3's beating aesthetic heart from its chest and stomp it into the dirt? I'm not exaggerating; people really are talking like this. Ignore them. It looks excellent. In the course of play I've found myself stopping regularly just to survey a sunset skybox, or the way tender motes of light slip through Geralt's beard. Actually, I've not been doing that second one. Don't put in the article that I'm doing the second one.

There is a way in which certain game worlds become home. They become actual spaces, fixed in your mind like places from your past. That's The Witcher 3 to me: its battlefields; its main city; and clean, icy Skellige, which arrives towards the game's end like a therapy session after it has spent tens of hours oppressing you with the first two regions. Going back feels like, well, going back—walking streets that were yours as someone younger, looking at nondescript corners and patches of pavement and remembering the specific, personal myths and legends that played out there in now-dead ages.

And it looks excellent, of course. Better than it did before, which means just as good as you remember it. So not only is The Witcher 3 Remastered like going home, it's like going home and finding someone has, in your absence, been in and aired the place out, run a duster around, and reupholstered the furniture. There are some lovely little additions too—minor new features and mechanics to smooth your way through the world.

You can, for instance, now see all your myriad quest objectives on the world map, and you can flip between focused quests (and objectives) right there with a squeeze of a gamepad trigger. The HUD is less cluttered, and a new loot feed tells you what stuff you've picked up or been given, which is rather nice for the myriad quests that end with someone telling you 'Here, take this,' without ever telling you what 'this' is.

There have been changes to the game's combat, too. Some fiddling to sand down some of the old jank. This may be very noticeable to some people, but I confess it's not to me. If, 11 years ago, you fired up The Witcher 3 and bounced off in revulsion at how its swordplay and sign-slinging felt, I don't think you're going to experience a sudden conversion here. That's no bad thing. I'd be upset if The Witcher 3 no longer felt like The Witcher 3, but I do wonder if CDPR was perhaps overegging the pudding with its stated goal of making the game feel, mechanically, like it released in 2026.

The Witcher 3 Remastered is a lovely little present and, with a brand-new expansion called Songs of the Past currently pencilled in to arrive some time in 2027, an excellent excuse, especially now both of the other expansions are free.

Obviously, I need to generate a new, 100%-complete save to take into the new DLC. And hey, I obviously need to see every inch of the game's newly remastered world.

What an autumn treat: a series of warm, placid nights await me, curled up on a sofa and making my way through Geralt's Big Adventure again. It's like 2015 never really went away.