Ever since Songs of the Past, The Witcher 3’s decade-long expansion, turned out to be neither a sellout nor a case of empty rumor, I’ve eaten up as many details of its story as CD Projekt Red has served up. The truth is that apart from showing the setting and some of the characters Gerry will be chatting with, they kept their lips pretty tight. On the one hand, I want to keep the narrative surprises intact, but on the other, it would be nice to see the studio be less vague about this additional chapter of a story that people thought they had already lived to a satisfying ending ten years ago.
So, in addition to looking through other interviews about the DLC, I posed my own questions to CD Projekt Red’s story director, Marcin Blacha, who worked in this role and as lead writer on TW3 at the time.
My hope was to draw out more of what the DLC story, in which Geralt is brought out of retirement to help his old pal Dandelion, has to offer in terms of being the White Wolf’s last hurray – it replaced the excellent Blood and Wine expansion in this final role. I wasn’t hoping for a glimpse of every pending twist, just a pinch of a few clues more specific than a vague desire to see Gerry and the Bard ride together for a few more hours, or a sense of what makes the path Story of the Past chooses the one that fits this moment in the game’s lifespan.
Blacha was very open about the framework of the DLC. “Letten is the home of Dandelion, Geralt’s dear friend, and it is because of him that Geralt decides to return to the Path,” he told me. “The setting is unfamiliar to Geralt and the players, and even though Dandelion grew up here, he hasn’t been back for a long time. It’s only after he receives an urgent family matter that he decides to return, but he needs Geralt’s support as a friend. I would say that this new setting helps do one very important thing for us: allows us to tell new stories. We rarely see Dandelion as we will in Songs of the Past, forced to face their responsibilities, and in turn, we get to see how that also impacts Geralt as a character. With a new region, there are new stories and a lot of potential for players to discover a new side of a game they know so well. For us, Letten seemed like a really natural path.
This explains why Letten fits the story chosen by the expansion and clearly shows that CD Projekt Red wanted to build on a new corner of the continent. The other part of my question was whether, since Letten is a brand new Witcher setting, all the locations that Geralt has an established connection to were also considered. Blacha didn’t explicitly rule it out, but the suggestion seems to be that the studio potentially only had eyes for lands uncharted.
The developer has been much less open about the nature of the “long-dormant evil” that Geralt will fight on his journey to Letten. Again, I was curious if he bears any similarities to beasts or forces that the Witcher has previously faced or if he has any unique connections to him that predate the story of Songs of the Past. Blacha only lets slip that this enemy constitutes “certainly a new challenge for Geralt” and “an essential element of the mystery of the region”. We know there’s a curse involved, and there appear to be some tree-bound people to fight, but beyond that, it seems like nothing more can be revealed until the DLC releases.
Wanting to see if CD Projekt Red was as cryptic in describing previous Witcher 3 DLC to potential players, I took a look at Blood and Wine. Steam Summary. “Become professional monster slayer Geralt of Rivia and explore Toussaint, an isolated land untouched by war, where you will discover the horrible secret behind a beast terrorizing the kingdom,” it reads. “With all leads leading to dead ends, only a witcher can solve the mystery and survive the evil that lurks in the night.” It’s not much more accurate than the studio was with Songs of the Past, but the allusion to the malignant force being nocturnal is at least somewhat of an allusion to vampires. There’s also talk of visiting “a world of fairy tales gone wrong,” facing knights in a tournament, and even battling that spoon-picking ghost.
Hearts of Stone DLC Steam Summaryas for him, certainly does not lack details. “Hired by the Mirror Merchant, Geralt is tasked with defeating Olgierd von Everec, a ruthless bandit captain enchanted by the power of immortality,” it reads. Then he reveals that the Mirror Merchant is a soul stealer who helped Gerry find Yennefer and that the adventure includes “recruiting a team of burglary artists, spending a night partying with a ghost, and foiling the most bizarre creatures Geralt has ever faced.”
My point here is that it’s possible to give a lot of detail about what Witcher 3 DLC is or includes, without letting the cat completely out of the bag.
Back to Blacha, he wouldn’t question whether Songs of the Past has more homages/connections to the first Witcher game than the chain weapon that has been front and center so far. He didn’t say anything about returning characters aside from Dandelion, but said he “can’t wait to see players’ reactions to the new characters.” Finally, I asked him if there was anything that Blood and Wine didn’t or couldn’t offer, as an ending to Geralt’s story in the games, that the team hoped to deliver with this new final chapter. Blacha politely refused to answer. I understand that talking about the end of Songs of the Past would be premature, but I had hoped that CDPR might take the opportunity to reflect a little on Blood and Wine all these years later, and the role it will play in Gerry’s story once Songs of the Past arrives.
As far as I know, every Blacha or other Witcher developer has said that Blood and Wine is no longer Gerry’s last hurray, this is the first one to say The Guardian that it was “certainly something (the studio) had thought about”. He added that they saw Dandelion’s request for help as a suitable hook to pluck the witcher from the peaceful life in the vineyards, but did not expand further.
I always look at Songs of the Past much like a cat would look at a wrapped present that has been wordlessly placed in front of it. Despite my innate cynicism, I want to be sure that CD Projekt Red isn’t just putting more miles in Geralt’s footsteps for the sake of it. This is different, however, from their near-endless onslaught of post-release additions for Cyberpunk 2077. This isn’t just a car driving mechanic that I can choose to ignore if it gets a little too edgy. This is the end of one of my favorite stories in video games, which continues to tell this story and the hours spent building it – layer by layer and line by line – justice. While I don’t want this new conclusion to be spoiled, I still think CD Projekt Red could do more to help its already heavily invested audience understand why these twin swords should be coming out of their sheaths all these years.
