It’s been more than a decade since The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was first released, but CD Projekt Red isn’t quite finished with the game just yet. Songs of the Past, the game’s third expansion, is set to arrive in 2027, bringing with it an entirely new region to explore, new monsters to hunt, and more stories to tell.
But how do you expand on a game as beloved as The Witcher 3 without upsetting its notoriously dedicated fans? And how do you keep things fresh while remaining faithful to a universe with decades of established lore?
IGN spoke to CD Projekt Red’s level design lead Miles Tost and Songs of the Past writer Paula Meissner at the Lucca Comics & Games festival about creating a distinct new corner of the Continent, the surprising importance of local booze, and why even bringing characters back from the dead doesn’t necessarily mean breaking canon.
IGN: Talking about Songs of the Past, from a pure level design perspective, is there a special new mechanical hook that you’re looking at for players? And also, how does the environment actively change in a way that maybe veteran players of The Witcher 3 are going to be finding something new?
Miles Tost: Generally speaking, the introduction of a whole new region. And if you’ve played the base game and the other expansions, for us, these regions are really fun. I think they have a lot of answers for that question by themselves because we try to always make each one feel unique, not just visually, but in the sense of the traversal. Skellig, for example, has a lot of boat travel as a reliance. It’s also very mountainous. No Man’s Land is a much wider space. And I think with the value of Lettin, you’ll basically see also that as you move around — we’re not introducing a new motion mechanic as far as I’m aware — but generally it’s really important to us that when you are in an area, you have this distinct feeling of being in this space.
And this goes further culturally, for example. The people of Lettin have their own cultural backdrop. There are some British influences in the aristocracy there, but also we have very, very many Polish countryside influences there. You see that in the architecture, and we usually go pretty deep in thinking about the cultural identity of these spaces. So with Skellig, we have the more Viking-esque influences, but here, these people have their own alcohol.
It’s a fun thing to mention because — Bracket is what it’s called — it’s a kind of fusion between honey and beer. It feels like such a small thing, but for us it’s very important, because it draws a lot on what this region is. So for the production of it, you need honey and you need hops. And so you will find both of these in the area. And other than it being a cultural export, of the area and the economical backbone of the place, it even changes how we think about monsters there. So in the demo we’ve shown, we’re basically introducing one new monster, the Swarmion, and these guys love honey. They use hornets as a means of protection, all that stuff. And so the logical reason there is because what kind of monster would live there? So the Swarmion makes sense. So you find that this seemingly small thing of these guys having their own alcohol, and it really has this huge effect on the entire area. And so this is a bit of how we’re trying to make things feel unique and special. And it goes into the quest storytelling and all of that.
IGN: Obviously, The Witcher has maybe one of the deepest lores in fiction, with lots of established canon. With Songs of the Past, was there a particular piece of deep lore that was particularly tricky to untangle? And as you were putting all this together, did you have to bend any of the established canon to make the story fit?
Paula Meissner: We actually do have an amazing lore team in CDPR that we are cooperating with. And these guys are just amazing. They know everything, every detail from the books, from every game, from every piece of franchise content. So we do talk with them on a regular basis to make sure that we don’t say anything stupid and that we stay actually truthful to the lore. But yeah, it is a tricky question because it touches on topics that weren’t revealed yet. So there were definitely challenges, but I don’t know how much I can say about those.
Miles Tost: The general thought is that we try to always also evolve and make things fresh. So it’s really important for us to not really think in this way of like, “Oh, can we do this or can we not? If we do, how? How would we bring Regis back?” If we just told people before Blood and Wine, “Yeah, we’re going to do it.” A lot of the hardcore fans would probably go like, “That’s impossible. He fucking vaporized. How would he?” And I think we asked ourselves those same questions, and ultimately I think we settled on something that works as an expectation where he’s like, “Yeah, he’s back, but he’s like 10% of his power, and he’s still recovering. He’s only been able to recover because he’s had help from this other higher vampire.”
Geralt, by himself, is already like, “Hey, let’s just bring him back from the dead.” And it works as long as you can explain it and make it make sense. And I think this is really the approach that we’re trying to take. So we don’t really try to retcon things, but we do try to find cool ways to expand and build on the franchise and the established lore as long as we can find ways to explain it.
Paula Meissner: We often actually use discussing challenges with the lore team as [original Witcher author] Andrzej Sapkowski would do it. If you look at the books and lore of The Witcher in the books, it’s such a mix of everything, to be honest. And even if you hear Sapkowski in interviews and people ask him these questions, he’s often like “Whatever.” So yeah, this is the ultimate argument that we use sometimes, and sometimes it works.
Rachel Weber is the Head of Editorial Development at IGN and an elder millennial. She’s been a professional nerd since 2006 when she got her start on Official PlayStation Magazine in the UK, and has since worked for GamesIndustry.Biz, Rolling Stone and GamesRadar. She loves horror, horror movies, horror games, Red Dead Redemption 2, and her Love and Deepspace boyfriends.
Michael is Global Head of Partnerships at IGNE, where he leads all 3rd party partnerships across games and entertainment studios, including for tentpole events lilke IGN Live, San Diego Comic Con, gamescom, and IGN Fan Fest. He’s spent 20 years working in the games and entertainment industry, and his adventures have taken him everywhere from the Oscars to Japan to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Follow him on Bluesky @MichaelPeyton