CD Projekt Red has announced that another expansion for The Witcher 3 is coming. So said the storied developer recently, even if this announcement may surprise some.
After all, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (to give it its full name) is now more than 10 years old, and most gamers would assume the Polish studio would have moved on from the game in order to focus on their current projects. These include The Witcher 4, a gameplay video of which we saw last June.
Perhaps it may be the fact that The Witcher 3 has sold a whopping 65 million copies to date, making it one of the best-selling games of all time, the reason why CD Projekt Red is putting out a new expansion for the game.
The swords and sorcery RPG starring Geralt of Rivia, a professional monster hunter and witcher is truly an epic role-playing game and won numerous Game of the Year awards. It also got two meaty expansions. One is titled “Hearts of Stone” and the other “Blood and Wine”. The latter is a big expansion taking place in an entirely new location and featuring a plot involving vampires and Geralt’s eventual retirement, and it is so good it even won the Best Role-Playing Game award at the 2016 Game Awards…
So it remains to be seen if The Witcher 3’s new expansion, which is titled “Songs of the Past” will be of similar quality.
“Songs of the Past will return players to the role of legendary monster slayer Geralt of Rivia for a brand new adventure”, said CD Projekt Red in a press release, adding that the upcoming expansion “lets players explore a dark fantasy open world as witcher Geralt of Rivia as he takes on the most important contract of his life: saving his daughter Ciri”.
The new expansion will release next year, and will be available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.
Will the Witcher 3’s new expansion be as good as the earlier Blood and Wine?
Regarding the PC version of the game, CD Projekt Red also recently revealed that The Witcher 3’s system requirements will be changing… A more powerful PC will be needed in order to play Songs of the Past when it arrives next year.
The game will be requiring an SSD instead of an ordinary hard drive to run, but any gamer worth his salt has a solid state drive in his desktop PC or laptop these days anyway. Also, the game will be needing twice the memory (12 GB instead of 6 GB), more storage (70 GB vs 50 GB) and a faster processor (at least an Intel Core i5-8400 or equivalent) to run, as well as a beefier video card with more memory.
Another big change is the fact that CD Projekt Red won’t support Windows 10 anymore. The Polish company said “the lack of official support for it, including security updates” and also the fact that “soon one of our partners, Nvidia, will end Windows 10 support” were reasons for dropping support for the OS. Windows 11 will be required if you want to play Geralt’s new adventure, Songs of the Past next year, an expansion we’re hoping will live up to the original game and the magnificent Blood and Wine DLC when it releases in 2027.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt new minimum PC system requirements (via cdprojektred.com).
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600, Intel Core i5-8400
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660, AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB
VRAM: 6 GB
RAM: 12 GB
Storage: 70 GB SSD
OS: 64-bit Windows 11