The Witcher 3 Remaster announced, coming soon as free for existing owners, while expansion Songs of the Past’s revamped mechanics finally shown

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 surprise news is there’s also a The Witcher 3 – Remastered edition coming that considerably overhauls the game, and it’ll be a free upgrade for all existing owners of the game. Remastered comes on 29th September, and it’s coming to Switch 2 and Battle.net for the first time.

Remastered also sounds like a considerable effort. It’s been co-developed with a studio called Yigsoft, and not only does it offer visual and performance enhancements but gameplay has been revamped too, including, yes, combat. There are new finishers, new animations, and an adaptive camera. The skill tree has also been reimagined to offer more flexibility, and there’s a transmogrification system, “immersive meditation” according to The Witcher 3 website, an expanded photo mode, cross-platform mod support and more.

A trailer for Remastered showed “enhanced combat”, “improved traversal and movement”, “enhanced monster behaviours”, “improved mount handling”, as well as the new skill tree and transmog system for you gear, and some of the new finishers.

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, Song of the Past, this is our first look at it, showing the new continent region of Letten we’ll be exploring, which looks like an overgrown forested fantasy land. We see Geralt tussling with a warped tree monster, and talking to the other tree monster we saw in the Songs of the Past artwork.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Geralt has a new weapon for the expansion, and it’s a chain that looks a lot like Ciri’s chain she uses in The Witcher 4 trailer – that’s the link, it seems. It’s also, CD Projekt Red said on stage, the same chain Geralt uses in The Witcher 1 trailer, by which I assume the studio means the chain Geralt wraps around the Striga Princess that he kills for Foltest at the beginning of the game. This moment is also in the Netflix adaptation of The Witcher; it’s one of Andrzej Sapkowski’s first Witcher short stories.

On The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past website, CD Projekt Red wrote: “With enhancements to visuals, performance, gameplay, and more through the Remastered upgrade, the idyllic land of Letten is yours to explore. But a dark secret lurks beneath the surface, and Geralt must overcome never-before-seen foes as he fights to overcome its long-dormant evil. More than his life is at stake though; across a story filled with choices and consequences, the fate of the entire land, and even Geralt’s closest friendship, are also at risk.”

That friend, incidentally, is Dandelion, as suspected. Letten is Dandelion’s homeland and its “steeped in rural tradition and full of buried secrets”.

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.