CD Projekt Announces Witcher 3 Songs of the Past, a Third Expansion Coming in 2027
Gaming | May 29, 2026
Witcher 3 Songs of the Past, a brand new expansion for CD Projekt Red’s 2015 RPG, was announced on May 27 after a leak on the RED Launcher forced the studio to move up a reveal it had planned for a live stream the following day. The expansion, co-developed with Fool’s Theory and targeting a 2027 release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, will be the third paid expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and the first new content for the game in a decade.
What Witcher 3 Songs of the Past Actually Is
CD Projekt Red’s announcement is sparse on specifics, by design. The studio confirmed that Songs of the Past returns players to the role of Geralt of Rivia for a new story, developed alongside Fool’s Theory, a studio described as comprising “industry veterans who worked on The Witcher 3.” More substantial details, including story scope, map size, and pricing, are being held for a late summer 2026 reveal.
What the announcement does establish is the project’s pedigree. Fool’s Theory is not an unfamiliar name in the Witcher ecosystem. The Polish studio has been responsible for the long-running The Witcher 1 Remake project that CD Projekt announced in 2022, a full ground-up rebuild of the original 2007 RPG in Unreal Engine 5. The studio’s principals include developers who worked on the original Witcher 3 and its previous expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine.
The timing of the announcement carries its own symbolism. May 28, 2026 marks the tenth anniversary of Blood and Wine, the second and final expansion for The Witcher 3, which released in 2016 and was widely regarded as a fitting conclusion to Geralt’s story. CD Projekt had planned to make the Songs of the Past announcement during a REDstreams anniversary live stream on that date. A premature appearance on the RED Launcher spoiled the reveal a day early, prompting the studio to confirm the news via social media with dry acknowledgement: “We originally planned to make this big reveal during our REDstreams tomorrow, but let’s say we found something we didn’t yet expect on RED Launcher.”
Why This Is a Significant Announcement
Ten years is a long time in games. The Witcher 3 launched in 2015 and sold over 50 million copies across its lifetime, making it one of the best-selling RPGs in history. The game received a full current-gen upgrade for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X in 2022, which brought a fresh wave of players to the title and extended its commercial relevance well into the current hardware cycle. But a new expansion, a substantial new chapter rather than a cosmetic pack, is something different. It signals that CD Projekt considers the Witcher 3 audience large and engaged enough to support a major content investment even as it develops The Witcher 4.
That calculation is not obvious. CD Projekt is currently working on at least four Witcher projects simultaneously: The Witcher 4, the Witcher 1 Remake, a multiplayer game set in the Witcher universe, and now Songs of the Past. Running that many parallel development tracks is ambitious for a studio of CD Projekt’s size. The decision to co-develop Songs of the Past with Fool’s Theory rather than handle it entirely in-house reflects both the scale of the ambition and the practical constraints of the studio’s capacity.
For fans of the original game, the existence of Songs of the Past also raises a question the announcement carefully sidesteps: is this a late addition to Geralt’s story, or does it fit into a continuity that The Witcher 4 is moving away from? The Witcher 4 centers on Ciri, not Geralt, marking a deliberate shift in protagonist and era for the main series. Songs of the Past, with its confirmed return of Geralt, occupies an interesting narrative position: a continuation of a chapter the series has formally moved past, designed for an audience that may not yet be ready to let go of it.
The Witcher 3’s Record and What It Means for the Expansion
Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine were both commercially successful and critically acclaimed, with Blood and Wine in particular often cited as one of the best pieces of RPG expansion content ever made. It introduced the Toussaint region, a visually distinct open world with its own politics, characters, and storylines, and ran to approximately 20 hours for a focused playthrough. Whether Songs of the Past aims for comparable scale is unknown, but the precedent Blood and Wine sets creates a high baseline for audience expectations.
The expansion will also arrive at a moment when Witcher 3 has a larger install base than it did during either previous expansion. The 2022 next-gen update, released free to existing owners and as a standalone purchase for new ones, brought millions of players to the title who had not experienced the original launch. A portion of those players are encountering Geralt’s story for the first time in its final form, without the ten-year wait between Blood and Wine and Songs of the Past that longtime fans have experienced.
CD Projekt’s Broader Witcher Pipeline
CD Projekt used the anniversary moment to reinforce the breadth of its Witcher investment without providing new specifics on any of the other projects. The Witcher 4 has been shown in pre-alpha form, including a tech demo released last summer that demonstrated the game running at 60 frames per second with ray tracing on a base PlayStation 5. That demo suggested a visual ambition on par with the current generation’s most technically demanding titles, and confirmed that Ciri, not Geralt, will be the playable protagonist.
The Witcher 1 Remake, in development at Fool’s Theory alongside Songs of the Past, has not received a release window. The multiplayer project remains the least-defined item in the portfolio. CD Projekt has been careful not to overpromise on any of these titles since the troubled launch of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020, a launch that damaged the studio’s reputation and required years of post-release work to recover from. The measured communication around Songs of the Past, announcing the expansion’s existence without committing to specifics, is consistent with that more cautious approach.
For Witcher 3 fans, the announcement is reason enough to revisit the Continent. More concrete details in late summer will determine whether Songs of the Past is a coda to one of the genre’s defining works, or something more substantial.
Sources: The Witcher 3 is officially getting a third expansion, Songs of the Past, VGC | The Witcher 3 Songs of the Past Announced, CD Projekt | Songs of the Past Is An Expansion, CD Projekt RED Clarifies, GamingBolt | The Witcher 3 Songs of the Past is a New Expansion Starring Geralt, Game Informer | The Witcher 3 New Expansion Songs of the Past Details, Game Rant
