The Witcher 3 remaster will release for free on September 29 with a Songs of the Past trailer

CD Projekt RED announced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered during Gamescom Opening Night Live on August 25. The update arrives September 29 and goes to every owner of the game for free, with no separate purchase required. The debut trailer showed off reworked environments, character models, and monster designs.

The changes go beyond visuals. The footage showed improved movement for Geralt across the terrain, reworked monster behavior, and new finishing moves in combat.

All of this comes at a cost to system requirements. The minimum spec now calls for a processor around the level of a Ryzen 5 2600 or Core i5-8400, 12GB of RAM, and a graphics card like the GeForce GTX 1660 or Radeon RX 5500 XT with 6GB of video memory.

Players will also need 70GB of space on an SSD, since hard drives are no longer supported, and Windows 11 has joined the requirements list.

The second, bigger announcement was the full reveal of the Songs of the Past expansion, which until now existed only as a vague press release from May. The cinematic trailer laid out the whole thing, with a release window set for spring 2027.

What we know about the expansion so far:

• Players take control of Geralt of Rivia once again, voiced by Doug Cockle

• The story bridges the events of The Witcher 3 and The Witcher 4

• CD Projekt RED compares its scale to Blood and Wine and insists on calling it an expansion rather than a DLC

• Gwent returns with new cards

• Development is a joint effort with Fool's Theory, a studio staffed by veterans of the original The Witcher 3

The gap between expansions is unprecedented for the series. Blood and Wine launched in May 2016 and effectively closed out development on the base game, meaning roughly a decade passed before this follow-up. Rumors of a third expansion had circulated since mid-2025, but nothing was confirmed until May of this year.

CD Projekt RED has plenty of reasons to bet on a comeback like this. The Witcher 3 has sold more than 65 million copies since its 2015 launch and picked up over 250 game of the year awards along the way.

Songs of the Past is coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series. Gamescom attendees can check out the expansion with studio staff on hand at the business area, booth B065 in hall 4.2, from August 26 to 28, or at the entertainment zone, booths B030 and A031 in hall 8.1, from August 26 to 30.