The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past and Remastered Are the 2027 Reset CDPR Needed

CD PROJEKT RED used gamescom Opening Night Live to drop a pair of announcements that reframe the most beloved RPG of the last decade. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered is coming September 29, 2026, as a free upgrade for existing owners across PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and even Switch 2! Along with a brand-new expansion, Songs of the Past, which is planned for a 2027 release. Both announcements signal a studio finally giving its crown jewel the platform-spanning revamp it deserves.

The Big News

As announced on stage at Opening Night Live, Remastered isn't a paid re-release. It's a free upgrade that layers on top of the base game and its existing expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. CDPR is treating it less like a director's cut and more like a catch-all modernization: improved visuals and performance, enhanced combat, revamped traversal and movement, new witcher sign effects, overhauled mount handling, smarter monster behavior, a revamped skill tree, transmogrification, an expanded photo mode, and new finishers.

The headline technical story is path tracing. The Reddit and press chatter out of ONL points to global lighting rework, a new shading model, subsurface scattering, a new tone mapper, and DLSS 4.5 / FSR support, with a path tracing mode for those with the hardware to push it. That's a meaningful leap over the 2022 "next-gen" update, which already brought ray-traced global illumination and ambient occlusion to consoles and PC.

On the hardware front, Remastered also arrives natively on two brand-new platforms for the game: Nintendo Switch 2 and, through a fresh partnership with Blizzard, Battle.net. The Switch 2 native version is pre-orderable now, but it will also be gifted as a free upgrade for owners of the existing Switch 1 edition of The Witcher 3. That Blizzard tie-in is the eyebrow-raiser of the whole presentation: buy Songs of the Past on Battle.net and you unlock a Geralt-inspired skin in Diablo 4, with supposedly more to come at BlizzCon in September.

Songs of the Past

The expansion itself takes Geralt to the brand-new realm of Letten, described as an idyllic land of rural tradition and folklore, rich in harvests and festivals, with a dark secret just beneath the surface. It's a classic Witcher setup, and it comes with a new signature weapon: the chain. Players will face never-before-seen foes, reunite with old friends, and make the difficult, consequential choices the series is known for.

Songs of the Past is co-developed with Fool's Theory, a Polish studio with Witcher 3 veterans in leadership and credits on Baldur's Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2. Remastered itself is co-developed with Yigsoft, the Hungarian studio that worked on Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and the Witcher 3 Complete Edition. That's a credible pedigree, and it explains why CDPR can promise this much scope while its in-house teams are tied up on The Witcher 4 and the Cyberpunk sequel.

How to Watch and Play

Remastered launches September 29th on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and Battle.net as a free upgrade. Songs of the Past is wishlistable now and launches in 2027. CDPR is hosting guided presentations of both throughout gamescom in Hall 8.1, with REDstreams streams on YouTube and Twitch for those not in Cologne.

Where to play: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt -- Complete Edition on Steam | Wishlist Songs of the Past on Steam

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