CD Projekt RED’s beloved fantasy action RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt It may already be an 11-year-old game, but that doesn’t stop the studio from breathing new life into the 2015 title with a new expansion of Songs of the Past which was announced this week. It is the third in the game and will presumably lead into the story of its upcoming sequel. The witcher 4.
Very little was said about Songs of the Past when it was revealed, although its developers confirmed that it will “take you on the Road with Geralt of Rivia once again” and that it will come to Xbox Series|S, Windows PC and PS5 in 2027. Notably, it is also being developed in conjunction with Fool’s Theory, the studio that created The miracle workercontributed to Baldur’s Gate 3and is helping with The Witcher remake.
On Thursday, however, CD Projekt RED did talk a little more about Songs of the Past during your latest earnings reportwith CEO Michał Nowakowski and CFO Piotr Nielubowicz discussing the developer’s ambitions with the project and its overall scope.
“Scope-wise, I’d say it’s actually a little closer to Blood and Wine (the witcher 3),” Nowakowski said. “But this is super subjective, it really depends on how you are going to play, what your way of playing is. But ‘we’re definitely doing a proper big expansion’ is the message I would send.”
Nowakowski was very adamant that Songs of the Past is No a DLC, since CD Projekt RED doesn’t use that term interchangeably with expansions like many other developers do. “For us at CDPR, DLCs are small pieces of content that we release for free, like the additional costumes for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Expansions, on the other hand, are major pieces of content that provide many hours of gameplay, including new story, characters, etc.” explained Recently, social media manager Marcin Łukaszewski.
Idris Elba famously made this distinction while talking about Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Freedom: “To be clear, it’s not DLC. It’s an expansion. Do you know why? Because we make expansions. Big. Huge. Monstrous. We don’t make DLC. And when we do, we give them away.”
That’s completely in line with what you’d expect from something “closer to Blood and Wine,” as the 2016 expansion for The Witcher 3 was so big and impressive that it beat out completely separate games and won Best RPG at The Game Awards that year. It was even bigger than the game’s first expansion, Hearts of Stone, which by comparison was tighter and more focused on story than the freedom of the open world.
Ultimately, CD Projekt RED is signaling that that kind of experience is what players should expect: a huge new experience rich in new content, to the point that it could be considered a standalone game, although it’s technically an add-on to The Witcher 3. That’s incredibly exciting and has almost everyone, including me, excited to see more of this in Gamescom this August, and step into Geralt’s boots again next year.
Are you looking forward to playing Songs of the Past in The Witcher 3 next year? Share how you feel about it below.
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