The Witcher 3 Remaster announced, free for existing owners, while expansion Songs of the Past details finally shown

The Witcher 3 expansion Songs of the Past - which is due to arrive 12 years after the base game was released - has finally been detailed in a debut trailer, but the surprise news is there's also a The Witcher 3 - Remastered edition coming that considerably overhauls the game, and it'll be a free upgrade for all existing owners of the game. Remastered comes on 29th September, and it's coming to Switch 2 and Battle.net for the first time.

Remastered also sounds like a considerable effort. It's been co-developed with a studio called Yigsoft, and not only does it offer visual and performance enhancements but gameplay has been revamped too, including, yes, combat. There are new finishers, new animations, and an adaptive camera. The skill tree has also been reimagined to offer more flexibility, and there's a transmogrification system, "immersive meditation" according to The Witcher 3 website, an expanded photo mode, cross-platform mod support and more.

A trailer for Remastered showed "enhanced combat", "improved traversal and movement", "enhanced monster behaviours", "improved mount handling", as well as the new skill tree and transmog system for you gear, and some of the new finishers.

As well as all this, the two existing expansions for The Witcher 3 - Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone - are also free for all owners of the base game as of this evening, too.

As for the expansion, Song of the Past, this is our first look at it, showing the new continent region of Letten we'll be exploring, which looks like an overgrown forested fantasy land. We see Geralt tussling with a warped tree monster, and talking to the other tree monster we saw in the Songs of the Past artwork.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Geralt has a new weapon for the expansion, and it's a chain that looks a lot like Ciri's chain she uses in The Witcher 4 trailer - that's the link, it seems. It's also, CD Projekt Red said on stage, the same chain Geralt uses in The Witcher 1 trailer, by which I assume the studio means the chain Geralt wraps around the Striga Princess that he kills for Foltest at the beginning of the game. This moment is also in the Netflix adaptation of The Witcher; it's one of Andrzej Sapkowski's first Witcher short stories.

On The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past website, CD Projekt Red wrote: "With enhancements to visuals, performance, gameplay, and more through the Remastered upgrade, the idyllic land of Letten is yours to explore. But a dark secret lurks beneath the surface, and Geralt must overcome never-before-seen foes as he fights to overcome its long-dormant evil. More than his life is at stake though; across a story filled with choices and consequences, the fate of the entire land, and even Geralt's closest friendship, are also at risk."

That friend, incidentally, is Dandelion, as suspected. Letten is Dandelion's homeland and its "steeped in rural tradition and full of buried secrets".

سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.eurogamer.net/witcher-3-expansion-songs-of-the-past-trailer