The Witcher 3 expansion Songs of the Past – which is due to arrive 12 years after the base game was released – has finally been detailed in a debut trailer, but the big news is there’s also a The Witcher 3 remaster coming, and it’ll be free upgrade for all existing owners of the game. The remaster comes on 29th September – soon!
CD Projekt Red also gave us a glimpse of Songs of the Past as the closing trailer of Gamescom’s Opening Night Live showcase this evening. The trailer showed “enhanced combat”, “improved traversal and movement”, “enhanced monster behaviours”, a revamped skill tree and transmog for you gear, plus new finishers and a whacking great list of more that whistled past.
As well as all this, the two existing expansions for The Witcher 3 – Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone – are also free for all owners of the base game as of this evening, too.
As for the expansion, this is our first proper dose of Songs of the Past information since The Witcher 3 expansion was announced in May this year. All we knew about it then was that it starred Geralt, would be equivalent in size to the game’s other expansions, was being co-developed by external studio Fool’s Theory, and would release in 2027. Everything else about Songs of the Past – setting, timeframe, storyline – was speculation.
The expansion’s existence is remarkable because of its proximity to The Witcher 3’s original release. The Witcher 3 was released in 2015, and the two expansions that followed it – Heart of Stone, and Blood and Wine – were released more or less within a year of its arrival.
Since then, a lot has happened. CD Projekt Red moved wholesale onto another game project, Cyberpunk 2077, and all of the launch-related drama that entailed, and it has announced a new Witcher game in The Witcher 4, which is in full production at the moment for a 2028 release.
Much of the team that originally made The Witcher 3 has moved around or moved on, with the game’s director in particular leaving CD Projekt Red under a cloud to make new studio Rebel Wolves and new game The Blood of Dawnwalker, which looks very promising and is imminent.
The question is, then, can Songs of the Past recapture the magic that made The Witcher 3 so special? We’ll hopefully be able to partially answer this question after seeing the expansion at Gamescom this week. Stay tuned.
