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?
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