The Witcher 3 is the perfect videogame. Is that hyperbolic? Maybe a bit. But it’s unquestionably one of the greatest RPGs of all time, a game that arrived with a 92% review score and somehow got better through years of fixes, upgrades, and expansions, the last of which provided a perfectly satisfying conclusion to the epic of Geralt (and an even higher review score).
In his review for that brilliant denouement, former PC Gamer editor Tom Senior committed himself: “If one of these expansions came out every year I’d still be playing The Witcher 3 in 2020.” Good news for Tom, then, because a surprise third expansion, Songs of the Past, is on the way in 2027, and a full remaster of the base game and first two expansions is set to drop ahead of that—later this month, in fact. CD Projekt Red has big ambitions for that remaster, aiming to make it not just look and run better, but to feel better too—like a new game, rather than a 2015 release with a fresh coat of paint.
It’s a big undertaking, and it invites a question: Given the esteem in which The Witcher 3 is held, is there any worry about messing with it? For CD Projekt’s vice president of narration Marcin Blacha, who served as the lead writer of The Witcher 3 and story director on its two expansions, the answer is an easy ‘no.’
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“For me, The Witcher 3 is not a monument and is not untouchable,” Blacha told us in a recent interview. “It is still vivid in my memory, and it is still something that is not maybe a point of reference, but something that still may be improved. When I’m playing The Witcher 3, I still find some places that I think maybe nowadays, I would do it differently.
“So, you know, adding a new expansion is not such a huge deal. In fact, discovering we still have it, you know, we have this thing, and we are still able to create a story that fits not only vanilla Witcher 3 but also Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, It is still a very uplifting feeling—a time machine that brings me 10 years back, when I was younger and maybe more passionate and more enthusiastic.”
And what sort of things would Blacha do differently? “Maybe some things I would make more nuanced,” he continued, like adjusting Dandelion to make him a bit wiser and more supportive rather than just comedy relief, or adding more choices and consequences in Geralt’s dealings with the world around him.
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But Blacha also acknowledged that some of the changes would arise not from any problems or shortcoming in the game, but simply because—rather like Geralt—he’s changed over the years.
“It may be as well, my process of aging, when I see some things from a different perspective. Maybe the problem is not in the game but in me, looking at the game with a different eye,” Blacha said. That doesn’t mean Songs of the Past will be the videogame equivalent of a grumpy old man sitting on his porch yelling at the kids, though.
“We have a crew that has both veterans from The Witcher 3, but also developers that joined Fool’s Theory or the project quite recently,” Blacha said. “So I hope it is not a geriatric expansion. It will be fueled very much by the passion of writers and quest designers and developers of Fool’s Theory in general.”
The Witcher 3 remaster update is set to launch on September 29, and will be free for anyone who owns the base game.
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