CD Projekt is finally showing something of Songs of the Past. The Witcher 3 expansion, announced last May then left in silence, gets its first look on Tuesday 25 August during gamescom Opening Night Live. A first look for a game released in 2015, with an expansion planned for 2027.
A first look dated 25 August
The studio has confirmed the slot: the segment runs during the opening show hosted by Geoff Keighley, which kicks off gamescom the day before the doors open. The expansion will also be shown on the floor, in the business area from 26 to 28 August and in the entertainment area from 26 to 30.
The platforms are known and limited: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. No Switch 2, no previous generation. The exact release date does not exist yet. CD Projekt first aimed for 2026 before pushing to 2027 to get, in its own words, the best possible result.
Eleven years after the game, ten after Blood and Wine
This is the third expansion for The Witcher 3. The previous one, Blood and Wine, came out in May 2016. Eleven years will separate Songs of the Past from the base game, and ten from the last expansion.
The expansion runs on REDengine 3, the in-house engine from 2015, while CD Projekt moved its whole production to Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4. The studio is therefore keeping alive a technology it officially abandoned, long enough to ship this content.
Development is shared with Fool’s Theory, the studio also handling the first Witcher remake and lending a hand on The Witcher 4. The budget put forward by Polish analyst Mateusz Chrzanowski is 52 million zloty, around 12 million euros. That is an expansion budget, not a full game one.
The first reports go back to June 2025, when Polish analyst Borys Nieśpielak mentioned a third piece of additional content in development. That November, chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz half-confirmed to investors that « new content » might ship within the year and weigh on results. The official announcement came six months later, on 27 May 2026.
The Fool’s Theory team gathers veterans who worked on The Witcher 3 before founding their own studio. Handing this expansion to former members of the original production is coherent, and it explains keeping the old engine: these people know it.
Songs of the Past, the « prologue » that is not one
Co-CEO Michał Nowakowski describes the expansion as « in a way, a prologue » for the future of the series, while stressing it is not a literal prologue to The Witcher 4. The nuance is deliberate.
The same Chrzanowski wrote back in December that the expansion’s release « should kick off the proper marketing campaign for The Witcher IV ». The place of Songs of the Past in the calendar then becomes readable: a return to Geralt of Rivia to remind the series to those who left it, right before the studio talks seriously about its sequel.
The 25 August segment will be the first concrete thing since the May announcement. The full show line-up is in our gamescom 2026 round-up, and the week is busy: PlayStation devoted an entire State of Play to Phantom Blade Zero, and the code of Deadlock keeps leaking hints about Half-Life 3. The industry backdrop stays tense, with the 700 million EA has to cut every year after its takeover.
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