The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Songs of the Past Announced

They’re doing an anniversary celebration stream of the release of blood and wine tomorrow on the 28th.

They will likely announce it, show it off, etc during that.

This has been the worst kept secret in gaming for like 8 months though that a bridge expansion was coming to Witcher 3 to serve as a gateway to Witcher 4 saving them a massive amount of exposition time in that game.

Since all the people talking about it early said it would be May when they announced it, I’m going to assume they’re right about everything else they said about it too and that it will be 30$ and similar in scope and size to what phantom liberty was to cyber punk

Now I'm gonna have to play Witcher 3 again to remember the controls

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Now I'm gonna have to play Witcher 3 again to remember the controls

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I just finished another play about a month ago, forgot how much I loved GWENT.

My guess is the expansion has gone gold but they don’t want a 2 year gap between the 2. Witcher 4 wasn’t going to meet its original date so they pushed this as well.

Fools theory hasn’t been working on anything publicly announced for like 3 years other than the remake of Witcher 1 which is still in pre production by their own admission and likely won’t even come until 2030. They’ve almost certainly been building this for the last few years.

Maybe this will give them time to make it even better though, or they might really have it as good as it can be and just move onto actual production of the remake of Witcher 1

Kinda looks like Claire Obscure

Steam

Blood of the dawn walker also launches September 3rd which is coming from a bunch of the Witcher 3s core team including the game director.

It looks pretty good. The structure of it is also pretty cool and unique. A bit like breath of the wild

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"We felt in the past that the sidequests are more rewarding and better than the main quest," he says. "When we talked about it, we decided that we want to step in another direction with our game, and we want to create the structure of it differently. We don't have the main story, which is quest after quest leading us to the end; we created it differently. We call it narrative samples. What it means is you have one goal, and all the quests around it are satellites, and you can do them in any order you want to, and you can build you own idea of how you want to beat the game and achieve the main goal: You can do that by playing the quests to gather allies, you can build yourself and do it by yourself. You have a lot of other options in the game."

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Full article on its structure and how choice driven it is

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It’s a top 10 game of all time for me

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same. i dont even know if i have my old saves etc. i hope they give a way to get back into it easy. its been so damn long. either way, im in!

I got through the first act on Wild Hunt on PS4 a decade ago, but I honestly don't remember much of anything about it, other than how difficult the crafting materials were to collect.

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What I really don't understand is why the remake of Witcher 1 is taking so long.

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The same people making witcher 1s remake made this expansion.

The original timeline seemed to be

Console mods for Witcher 3 2025- This happened
Expansion- 2026
Witcher 4- 2027

then Witcher 1s remake likely hoped for 2028 which would cap off an insane run of revenue for CDPR giving them up to 2 maybe even 3 more years to get Cyperpunk 2 out if they need them to ensure its polished perfectly.

I think there is 2 things at play here. This expansion for Witcher 3 is going to have to be made on the Red engine since thats what they used for the game before moving to unreal after cyber punk. Fools theory does have a lot of ex CDPR people but not all of them are so it likely took them a good amount of time to learn how to use a niche in house engine. Also while I do think this expansion will be large it depends where in the game they set it, are they building an entirely new map?, how much re used assets could they pull from the game and its existing expansions?

CDPR likely decided to remake witcher 1, then realized this would be a good idea to do as a bridge into witcher 4 since witcher 3 has an install base of 60 million and it will save them a ton of exposition dumping, so they tasked them to make this which probably took 2-3 years meaning if it is indeed done and its being pushed because of a delay to witcher 4 they at best are just now moving the remake from pre production into production.

The cynic in me says this was created solely to sort of be more about handing the torch to Ciri and setup Witcher 4 than any other reason.