RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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In Print
This is a shorter version of an exclusive Witcher 3 – Songs of the Past cover feature that will go out in the next issue of PC Gamer magazine . Keep your eyes peeled!
Surprise! Songs of the Past, The Witcher 3's third expansion, isn't kicked off by some Ciri-centric weft in the space-time continuum, nor another curt and urgent letter from Yennefer. As for Triss, well, I didn't spot a single red hair of her in the hands-off demo that CD Projekt Red and Fool's Theory gave us.
It's Dandelion. Geralt's lute-plucking biographer has gone missing, and who better to find him than his best pal in the whole wide world? So when Songs of the Past releases next year, he'll be back on the path in a region of The Witcher's world we've never seen before—Dandelion's family home of Letten, in the kingdom of Redania.
And he's got another surprise for you, too: a full Witcher 3 remaster that aims to make the 2015 classic feel like it released in the modern era, due for release on September 29.
Over a decade since The Witcher 3's last expansion, the boys are back in town.
There's No Place Like
Where better to get a glimpse of Dandelion's true face than his family home? Dandelion's real name is Julian Alfred Pankratz, Viscount de Lettenhove, and it's to Lettenhove he invites Geralt for Songs of the Past's opening—to the sumptuous manor that marks the seat of power for his blue-blood forebears.
(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
To hear the devs tell it, this is a Dandelion-centric expansion all the way through: the focus is on Geralt and the bard's relationship—their "bromance," as multiple people I spoke to put it—and not so much on, oh I don't know, Ciri, for example.
"[Letten is] a completely new region in northern Redania, where Dandelion comes from," says Karolina Kuzia, Songs of the Past's vision director. "We visit because of personal matters that put a toll on him, so he needs his best friend at his side. Imagine you enter a lush green valley, hidden in a mountain range."
"This place was never touched by war, never ravaged like the rest of the continent," continues Kuzia. "People here are peaceful. They live their lives together with nature."
Not too peaceful, though. "Letten, albeit a land of plenty, has a dark underbelly," says game director Jakub Rokosz. "It wouldn't be a Witcher adventure if Geralt didn't have anything to do."
(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
The morning after
That dark underbelly was there from the jump in my time with Songs of the Past. Geralt awakens, hungover and far from home, in the aftermath of the local Belleteyn celebrations—a kind of Easter-style celebration—but in the party's afterglow, Dandelion is nowhere to be found.
A pretty walk later and the witcher is sat at a long mahogany table in Lettenhove itself, playing mediator between two of his best friend's most fearsome relatives, his grandmama and his cousin Lilla, as they argue over whether Dandelion is truly missing at all and, if so, what to do about it.
(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
Yes, we absolutely asked if you can romance grandmama, and I'm sorry to say it sounds like the answer is no.
Anyway, it's not long before Geralt's Belleteyn turns into a busman's holiday. He and the almost-definitely-romanceable Lilla venture out into Letten's gnarled, dark, and foreboding woods on the trail of a de Lettenhove family legend: the curse of Dandelion's ancestor, the mad Count Humbert de Lettenhove.
Given that it's been a while since The Witcher 3 last got an expansion, it might be worth saying something obvious: this is still The Witcher 3 at its core, with the loops and mechanics you remember.
(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
Soon after starting, the dev playing the demo I saw was dropping into his witcher senses to find lost items and people, and the expansion's first contretemps—an argument between Geralt and a bearded Letten-ite who had snaffled Dandelion's lute—let the player choose between trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement or resorting to the diplomacy of fists. We picked the latter.
"I wouldn't say that [Songs of the Past] will feel different," says Rokosz, "simply because Witcher 3 aged really well, as a game. It's still very relevant—it became a staple for RPGs back in the day when it came out, and even now, when you replay it, you don't really feel it's an old game."
(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
Chain reaction
But while it's still The Witcher 3, it quite literally has some new tricks up its sleeve. Geralt picks up a new weapon in the course of his time in Letten: a silver chain that wraps around his arm and can be used to handle crowds of enemies. You might recognise it. In The Witcher 1's intro cinematic (and in the first book), Geralt used exactly this weapon to fight off a monstrous striga.
And if you don't remember that, you might recall this: Ciri wields an identical weapon in cinematic trailers for The Witcher 4. Cue raised eyebrows.
(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
How does it work? I saw Geralt make use of his new weapon against a couple of different enemies in my time with him. First up, swarmions, a new enemy type and example par excellence of nominative determinism. They're big on swarming, you see, which means having a long chain to handle them with—yanking individual foes from the pack to deal with mano a mano, or whipping it around to keep foes at bay—comes in useful.
The chain is selected much like a sign or bomb in combat, and can either be quickly deployed with a button press or, if you want to give someone special treatment, you can manually zoom in to target specific body parts on your enemies, an action which slows down time to give you time to aim, much like the base game's crossbow.
(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
I also saw the chain used in my demo's concluding boss fight. Having hacked their way through centipedes, swarmions, and a few other nasties, Lilla and Geralt finally come to a mystical well that seems intricately tied to Dandelion's dis...
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