The short version
- First look: Gamescom Opening Night Live, Tuesday August 25, 2026
- Songs of the Past is the third expansion to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, announced May 27, 2026 (and accidentally leaked a day early through CD Projekt Red’s own REDlauncher)
- Releasing in 2027 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC — no date within that year yet
- Co-developed by CD Projekt Red and Fool’s Theory, the studio also building the remake of the first Witcher game
- You play as Geralt, not Ciri — CDPR describes it as returning players to “the role of legendary monster slayer Geralt of Rivia for a brand new adventure”
- It’s the first Witcher 3 expansion since Blood and Wine in May 2016 — a full decade
- Still unconfirmed: price, release date, story details, length, and whether it comes to any platform beyond those three
CD Projekt Red has locked in a date to actually show Songs of the Past. The third Witcher 3 expansion gets its first look during Gamescom Opening Night Live on August 25, roughly three months after the announcement that it exists at all — and a decade after the last time Geralt got one of these.
What’s actually confirmed
Not a lot, and that’s the honest framing here. The May announcement was a short one: a third expansion exists, it stars Geralt, it lands in 2027 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, and CDPR is building it alongside Fool’s Theory. That’s still the entire confirmed picture.
No release date inside 2027. No price. No word on how big it is or where in the timeline it sits. No story premise beyond “a brand new adventure.” CDPR said at announcement that more would come in late summer 2026 — the Gamescom slot is that promise getting a calendar entry.
What CDPR will show on the 25th is described as a glimpse rather than a full reveal, so temper expectations accordingly. Opening Night Live is a trailer show; a dated, priced, fully-explained expansion is not usually what comes out of it.
Why Fool’s Theory being on this matters
Fool’s Theory is a Polish studio staffed largely with developers who worked on The Witcher 3 the first time, and it’s the team currently building the remake of the original Witcher. That makes Songs of the Past something closer to a trial run in public — the same studio, working in the same world, on a smaller and lower-risk project, right before the one everybody will judge much harder.
It’s also worth noting where this sits in CDPR’s schedule. The Witcher 4 hands the lead role to Ciri. Songs of the Past is, deliberately or not, Geralt’s send-off lap in the game he’s most associated with, shipped in the window before the franchise formally moves on.
Why it matters
The Witcher 3 has sold north of 60 million copies since 2015 and collected more than 250 Game of the Year awards, and its two existing expansions — Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine — are still the reference point most people reach for when arguing what good paid DLC looks like. A third one, ten years later, from a team that includes people who built the first two, is a genuinely unusual thing for a studio to do.
It’s also still eighteen-plus months out with no date on it, so the useful move is to mark August 25 and see what actually shows up. That’s when this stops being an announcement and starts being a real thing with footage attached.
Sources: CD Projekt Red press centre — The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Songs of the Past announced, GosuGamers — Songs of the Past to receive first look at Gamescom 2026, Wikipedia — The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Songs of the Past
