Songs of the Past gives Geralt one last hunt

On Monday I published seventy hours of Night City that ended in a polite shrug. On Tuesday night in Cologne, the same studio showed the first footage of Songs of the Past, the third expansion for The Witcher 3, and my appetite came straight back. So my grudge was with the city, not with the people who built it.

I have the platinum trophy for The Witcher 3, expansions included, and the memory of a game I turned inside out without once getting bored. Which makes me the easiest customer this announcement could hope for, and the studio doubled down by revealing a free remaster for September 29, so I'll be back in the vineyard well before 2027.

Ten years after Toussaint, Geralt takes the road again

Blood and Wine shipped on May 31, 2016 and closed the book cleanly, with the witcher parked in his Toussaint vineyard and everyone's blessing on the retirement. CD Projekt reopened the file on May 27, 2026, near enough ten years to the day, and not entirely on purpose, since the announcement leaked the night before through the studio's own game launcher. The official line was that someone had "found something we didn't yet expect on RED Launcher"^[1].

The expansion arrives in 2027 on PC, PS5, Xbox Series, and Switch 2, a year later than planned, after the co-CEO and the team agreed to aim for "the best possible result from the consumers' standpoint"^[2]. Fool's Theory is co-developing it, a Polish studio founded by veterans of the third game and already handling the remake of the very first Witcher^[3]. CD Projekt also wants the word expansion rather than DLC, which it reserves for small free additions like alternate outfits, while an expansion promises a story, characters, and "lots of hours of gameplay"^[4]. The target size is Blood and Wine, so this is a proper reunion rather than a bonus chapter.

The Cologne trailer takes the witcher to Letten, a new region the studio calls an idyllic land of rural tradition and folklore, generous with harvests and festivals, with something old and unkind asleep underneath^[5]. You get flower crowns, a village mid-celebration, and a bark-skinned thing that calls out to Geralt, "come, sword bearer, bane of beasts," all in a Midsommar key that tells you within thirty seconds how the party ends.

Geralt picks up a new weapon out there too, a chain that hauls an enemy into range and takes his head off in the same motion. Level design lead Miles Tost pointed out that the same chain turned up in the intro of the studio's first Witcher game, a wink aimed squarely at anyone who started the saga in 2007^[6]. Doug Cockle is back in the booth as Geralt, which he had already given away in late July with a photo from a recording session captioned "just visiting an old friend, and of course Roach"^[7].

Eleven years after release, the game has sold more than 65 million copies^[8], which explains why nobody at CD Projekt wants to let that goose stop laying.

CD Projekt remasters the game and forgets to send a bill

The other half of the announcement is worth its weight in crowns. The Witcher 3 gets a remastered version on September 29, free for anyone who already owns the game on GOG, Steam, the Epic Games Store, PS5, or Xbox Series, and both original expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, are free for every base-game owner as of now, no waiting for September^[9].

Yigsoft co-developed the remaster, and it goes well past a fresh coat of paint. Combat gets revised targeting and smoother gap-closing, the skill tree is rebuilt, the witcher signs have new effects, Roach handles differently, and the monsters have picked up new habits. Transmog arrives as well, so you can keep the stats of one piece of gear while wearing the look of another and finally stop dressing like a scarecrow.

On PC the game moves natively to DirectX 12 and gains a path-traced lighting mode, which follows each ray of light through the scene instead of approximating it, with DLSS 4.5, FSR 4, and XeSS 2 standing by to pay for the frame rate^[10]. Almost nothing that old gets handed the most expensive lighting technique of 2026.

Two platforms join on the day itself. A native version arrives on Switch 2, seven years after the improbable port that squeezed the whole thing onto the first one, and the game turns up on Battle.net through a Blizzard partnership that throws in a Geralt skin for Diablo IV if you buy the expansion there^[11]. Watching the witcher carve up demons in a Blizzard game was not on my 2026 list.

A 2015 game that now asks for Windows 11

That generosity does come with a bill, payable in hardware. To make room for the remaster, CD Projekt is raising the minimum specs for The Witcher 3 to Windows 11, a 70 GB SSD, and 12 GB of memory, dropping DirectX 11 and mechanical hard drives on the way out, citing the end of Windows 10 support and the need to keep up with "ongoing technical improvements and modern hardware"^[12]. An eleven-year-old game tightening its requirements in 2026 runs the usual order of things backward.

The laptop I bought in June will take it without blinking, which is lucky, since replacing hardware right now costs a kidney. Anyone still playing off a hard drive on Windows 10 can roll the game back to an earlier version, which amounts to staying in 2015 while everyone else moves to the 2026 vintage.

Why I platinumed one and yawned through the other

That leaves the question of why I'd put up with any of that for this game, when the last one from the same studio couldn't hold me. In The Witcher 3 I lost whole evenings chasing Gwent cards while the Continent waited politely to be saved, I followed the Bloody Baron quest to an ending nobody walks away from clean, and I eventually earned the platinum, which means I searched every swamp on the map. I also picked between Triss and Yennefer with the gravity of a family council, and the stuffed unicorn Yennefer talks Geralt onto is still the least likely love scene I have ever played, staged by a game that never once looked embarrassed about it. In Night City I checked out early.

Fantasy explains part of the gap, as I wrote on Monday, since science fiction has always left me on the dock. My main suspect is the camera. Cyberpunk 2077 plays in first person, so you know your own character as two hands and the occasional reflection, while Geralt is on screen the whole time, with his heavy walk, his scars, and the way he sheathes a sword without looking back.

Framing isn't the whole story either, because V is a costume you cut to fit, while Geralt existed before you showed up, with the gravel voice and a shelf of novels behind him. Playing a written character is not the same as wearing an avatar.

Ciri takes over and it's going to feel strange

That written character is the one CD Projekt is about to retire. The Witcher 4 is targeting 2028, confirmed by co-CEO Michał Nowakowski in a video posted Monday, with more than five hundred people already on it and an admission from the man himself that this is a long time to ask people to wait^[13]. Ciri leads it as a full witcher in her own right, and Songs of the Past works as the bridge between the two sagas, a "prologue, not in a verbatim way"^[14] in which Geralt takes one more contract.

I love Ciri, whom the third game already hands you for a few stretches, and I have no doubt she can carry a saga. Still, the gruff witcher who complains about portals and refuses to pick a side is a companion you get used to. Watching him hand over the swords is going to feel strange, even knowing the right person catches them.

Starting from scratch is out, since I don't have those hundred hours lying around any more than I did when Guild Wars 3 was announced. My platinum save is waiting exactly where I left it, with Geralt settled into his vineyard, and that is where I'll pick things up. I'll be rusty, I'll have to relearn the signs, get back into brewing potions, and remember which of the two swords goes with which kind of trouble, but getting back into that world is worth a few hours of rehab. The vineyard won't even have to hold out until 2027, since September 29 already gives me a reason to walk back in.