CD Projekt Red Previews The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past at Paris Games Week

CD Projekt Red and Fool's Theory took the stage at Paris Games Week on October 24 for an exclusive session on Songs of the Past, the paid expansion sending Geralt of Rivia back into the field years after Blood and Wine closed out his story. CD Projekt Red senior narrative designer Alexandre Boiret and Fool's Theory producer Max Humbert walked the Bandai Namco stage through the expansion's lore, its cast of returning and new faces, and the technical work behind building a new region for a decade-old game.

Letten, a Festival Gone Wrong

Songs of the Past is set in Letten, a region CD Projekt Red describes as an idyllic land of rural tradition that hides a dark secret just below the surface. The first gameplay footage, shown at gamescom's Opening Night Live in August, opened on a late-winter festival that curdles into something closer to a folk-horror ritual than a harvest fair, with swamp country pressing in at the edges of town and a gnarled, half-animate tree that speaks directly to Geralt. CD Projekt Red and Fool's Theory have kept the full plot under wraps, but the pitch is a monster mystery that pulls Geralt out of retirement one more time, reuniting him with old friends while introducing enemies built specifically for the new setting, including a hulking, antlered Swarmion-type creature glimpsed stalking the marsh in the gamescom footage.

A New Weapon for an Old Witcher

Alongside the story beats, the gamescom demo introduced a new piece of Geralt's kit: a chained hook weapon that extends his reach in combat and, from the footage shown so far, factors into traversal around Letten's swampier terrain. CD Projekt Red paired it with broader combat refinements that echo the enhanced combat and monster behaviors coming to the base game's own remaster. Exactly how the hook fits into Geralt's existing Signs-and-steel combat loop was one of the details Boiret and Humbert were expected to dig into on the Paris stage, alongside character and lore specifics the studios have otherwise held back.

Fool's Theory's Return to Letten

Songs of the Past is Fool's Theory's second major project built on CD Projekt Red's world, following the Polish studio's own The Thaumaturge, and its leadership includes developers who worked on the original Wild Hunt. That pedigree is part of why CD Projekt Red handed the studio a brand-new region rather than DLC-sized content: Letten is built from the ground up rather than reusing assets from Velen or Toussaint, giving Fool's Theory room to write a new cast around Geralt without disturbing the trilogy's existing continuity. Letten's folk-horror framing — festival traditions curdling into something older and hungrier — gives the expansion a tone distinct from anything the base trilogy visited, closer to the Hearts of Stone's fairy-tale dread than Blood and Wine's sun-drenched Toussaint.

The Free Remaster Comes First

Before Songs of the Past arrives, every existing owner of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt gets The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered as a free upgrade on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, alongside a native Nintendo Switch 2 release and a new Battle.net version, all dated for September 29. The upgrade touches nearly every system in the ten-year-old game:

• Improved visuals and performance, with enhanced combat and better traversal
• New Witcher Sign effects and a revamped skill tree
• Revamped mount handling and enhanced monster behaviors
• Transmogrification, new finishers and an expanded photo mode

The Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions carry over for current owners at no extra cost, and the game remains available DRM-free on GOG.

What's Next for Geralt

CD Projekt Red has not set an exact date for Songs of the Past beyond a 2027 window, and the Paris Games Week session was pitched as a deeper look rather than a new release-date announcement. The expansion is confirmed for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2, with wishlisting open now on participating storefronts. For a studio juggling Songs of the Past against the earliest stages of The Witcher 4, Letten looks like a deliberate victory lap for the game that built CD Projekt Red's reputation, rather than a quick send-off before the next mainline entry. Players who want to see Letten for themselves before the expansion lands can start with the free remaster on September 29, which gives the new Sign effects, combat tuning and monster behavior their first real test run a full year ahead of Songs of the Past itself.

The official teaser for Songs of the Past, first shown at gamescom's Opening Night Live, introduces Letten's festival-gone-wrong mystery and Geralt's new hook weapon.