While the Songs of the Past expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will bring in many new elements to the RPG, the studio working on it alongside CD Projekt RED, Fool’s Theory, has revealed that the DLC simply wouldn’t have been possible without the enhancements brought along with the upcoming Remastered version of the game. In an interview with BBC News, Songs of the Past director Jakub Rokosz spoke about how intertwined the expansion’s development was with the remaster.
Without revealing too many details, Rokosz indicated that the new region of Letten that is being added to The Witcher 3 with Songs of the Past simply couldn’t have been possible to make without some of the visual enhancements brought along by the remaster. The fact that the remaster was already well under development before Fool’s Theory was approached with the idea of making the expansion likely also played a major role.
“Why we started developing this game is because stars had to align, and the conditions had to be just right to make this happen. And they had become right, because when the story of Dandelion’s past and homeland came into our spotlight when CD Projekt started talking to us about doing [Songs of the Past], this also meshed with work on the remaster, and those two things are intertwined in a way that the realization of Letten, Dandelion’s hometown, wouldn’t be possible without the remaster upgrades that we did. So, there are a few things that had to click together to make this possible.”
Rokosz and senior quest designer Despoina Anetaki also spoke about the story of Songs of the Past, and why the team decided to focus on Geralt’s relationship with his longtime companion Dandelion for the expansion. Anetaki noted that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt didn’t really have much room to explore Dandelion’s story since the main plot was quite busy dealing with Ciri and the Wild Hunt.
“When we were developing this idea originally, we really wanted to delve deeper into who Dandelion is, because there was no space in the previous games that were dealing with Ciri’s story and the family matters between Geralt and Ciri. This is more about Geralt and Dandelion, Dandelion and his family. Dandelion is more than comic relief, is more than a sidekick. He is actually a fully fleshed-out character. He has his own past, his own struggles. And this is a very compelling story to tell. It’s one of those that we really couldn’t let go of, and eventually, it landed with Fool’s Theory, which we are very excited for.”
Anetaki and Rokosz had previously spoken about how the expansion would focus on Dandelion and show fans of the RPG how much deeper the character can be beyond simply being comic relief.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered is arriving as a free update to owners of the game on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2 on September 29th. Songs of the Past is slated for release in 2027.
