The Witcher 3’s New Expansion Almost Never Happened Because of One Major Technical Problem

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is getting another major chapter more than a decade after its original release, but new developer interviews reveal that Songs of the Past almost never happened. The team has now explained why it decided to return to the game after all these years and why the expansion is not being designed as a bridge toward The Witcher 4. 

Instead, you are getting what the developers describe as a missing chapter in Wild Hunt’s own story, with Dandelion finally taking center stage. The expansion is also closely connected to the remaster, as several technical problems that once made its ideas impossible have finally been solved.

The latest look at The Witcher 3 Remastered also came through Nintendo Direct, where CD Projekt Red showed the game running on Switch 2. 

The remastered version is set to arrive on September 29, and if you already own The Witcher 3 on the original Switch, you will receive a free upgrade to the Switch 2 version. Songs of the Past is also planned for Nintendo’s new console next year, giving Switch players another reason to return to Geralt’s adventure. 

The Switch 2 version is expected to run at up to 40 FPS in docked mode and 30 FPS in handheld mode, and it will also add gyro support and mouse functionality through the Switch 2 Joy-Cons. There are additional graphical upgrades being brought over with the remaster, giving the game a chance to look and perform better than it did on the original hardware. 

If you played The Witcher 3 on Switch before, the difference should be noticeable simply because the original version was already doing a lot to keep the game running. The new hardware gives CD Projekt Red considerably more room to improve the experience.

One of the biggest revelations from the recent interviews is that Songs of the Past is not intended to connect The Witcher 3 directly to The Witcher 4. Before Gamescom, it was easy to assume that an expansion released this late would exist to fill the gap between the two games, but that is not what the developers are going for. 

According to the team, there was a chapter missing from The Witcher 3’s own story, and they wanted to finally tell it. That means you are essentially getting one more story from the world of Wild Hunt rather than an extended setup for the next game.

The developers also acknowledged that an 11-year-old game receiving a new expansion is unusual, but they found a reason worth returning for. 

After Blood and Wine, the team felt that Geralt’s journey had reached a natural farewell, which made continuing his story difficult to justify. That changed when the developers discovered an untold story involving Dandelion that they felt was worth exploring. 

Dandelion is therefore at the center of Songs of the Past, and the developers want to show a side of the character that the games have not explored deeply enough. The Fool’s Theory CEO explained that Dandelion was always meant to receive more attention, but the base game did not have enough room to give him the spotlight he deserved. 

The team also pushed back against the idea that he is simply comic relief, pointing out that there is considerably more to his character. His background, intelligence, poetry, family, and upbringing are all areas the expansion wants to explore.

The team also went back to the original Witcher novels for inspiration while developing the expansion. That was important because Dandelion is treated with more weight in the books than in the games, giving developers a chance to explore the character further. 

The challenge was then to figure out what could realistically pull Geralt out of retirement after the ending of Blood and Wine. Eventually, the answer became simple: Geralt would not ignore a request from his best friend.

That idea forms the basic setup for the expansion, with Geralt traveling to Letin after Dandelion disappears. 

His search then leads him into the history of the Delinho family and a curse connected to one of Dandelion’s ancestors. It gives Geralt a personal reason to get involved rather than simply sending him on another adventure because the developers needed an excuse to continue his story. 

With The Witcher 4 expected to explore plenty of new material, keeping this particular adventure focused on Geralt and Dandelion allows Songs of the Past to feel like a final chapter of its own. It gives the developers a chance to give these two characters one more meaningful adventure without taking away from what is planned for the next game.

However, the story was not the only obstacle for the expansion. Fool’s Theory explained that the team already had a vision for Songs of the Past and the Letin region, but there were major technical problems preventing that vision from becoming reality. 

Some of those problems were so serious that the expansion could not have been built properly using the technology available when The Witcher 3 originally launched. The remaster eventually changed that situation by providing the improvements needed to make the developers’ original ideas possible.

One of the clearest examples was Letin itself. The region features lush vegetation, small bushes, and dense forests, but during early development, all of that caused problems with the game’s horse movement. 

The developers found that riding through the environment simply did not work properly, forcing them to rebuild the horse handling so that movement could feel natural before the area could become fully traversable. 

There was also a large lake in the middle of the region, creating an open view toward the horizon with fishermen visible across the water, which placed additional pressure on the engine. The lake added another technical challenge for the team, as the engine struggled to handle such a large, open environment alongside all the activity taking place within it.

This is ultimately why Songs of the Past could not simply have been released several years after The Witcher 3. 

The world the developers wanted to build was not something the existing version of the engine could comfortably handle, so the expansion had to wait until the necessary technology caught up with the idea. The remaster’s optimization work eventually provided that opportunity, allowing the two projects to effectively come together. 

It also helps explain why CD Projekt Red eventually moved away from its proprietary REDengine and toward Unreal Engine, particularly after dealing with the technical challenges surrounding Cyberpunk 2077.

The remaster is also responsible for another long-awaited idea finally becoming possible: Geralt’s new chain weapon. The weapon was actually planned during the original development of The Witcher 3, but the developers could not make it work at the time because of various technological limitations. 

More than a decade later, the remaster gave the team the opportunity to finally solve those problems and bring the weapon into the game. Importantly, the chain will not be included with the remastered base game and will instead be exclusive to Songs of the Past.

As for the size of Songs of the Past, the developers have not provided a specific playtime, but they have made it clear that the expansion is not intended to be a small piece of DLC. The expansion is being described as being on a similar scale to Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone, while the Letin region itself is roughly the size of Blood and Wine’s map. 

That suggests you should expect a substantial amount of content rather than a short side story. The exact number of hours will ultimately depend on how much of the region and its additional activities you choose to explore.

All of this makes Songs of the Past a surprisingly ambitious return for a game that is now more than a decade old. 

What started as an idea for another story involving Dandelion eventually became something that required technical improvements to the entire game before it could properly exist. The developers had to overcome several limitations that had previously made the concept too difficult to bring to life.

Now, the remaster and expansion are effectively arriving as two parts of the same project, with the new technology allowing CD Projekt Red and Fool’s Theory to build ideas that were previously left on the shelf. For you as a Witcher 3 player, that means there is an entirely new reason to revisit Geralt’s world without turning the expansion into a simple setup for The Witcher 4.