CD Projekt Red (CDPR) recently announced that it has a third expansion for The Witcher 3 in the pipeline. Yeap, that’s right: we’re getting a new expansion for Geralt before the Witcher 4, it seems.
The third expansion is called Songs of the Past, and comes 12 years after the launch of the first game 12 years ago in 2015, and 11 years since its last expansion, Blood and Wine, came out a year after the main game. Here’s the catch: the game is only coming out in 2027, but the problem here is that CDPR isn’t giving an exact launch date.
More Than A Trip Down Memory Lane
In conjunction with announcing Songs of the Past, CDPR is also beefing up the PC hardware requirements for The Witcher 3 ahead of its launch. The game studio cum developer justifies this by saying that hardware capabilities have evolved since the last change to system requirements. For the record, CDPR changed the requirements for the game in 2022, when it introduced new textures and ray tracing to the game.
The new system requirements aren’t surprising, and frankly, it feels par for the course. Basically, it’ll no longer support HDDs, and you’ll need an SSD for faster load times, smoother asset streaming, and just better overall performance.
The new requirement means that The Witcher 3 will run exclusively on DirectX 12, while Windows 11 will be the minimum OS, not just for The Witcher 3, but also its dystopian sci-fi title, Cyberpunk 2077. On that note, only processors supported by the OS and GPUs with ongoing driver support will be supported.
On the subject of hardware, the new minimum hardware requirements to run the game are either an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 or Intel Core i5-8400, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 1660 or Radeon RX 5500 XT, 12GB RAM, and 70GB storage on your SSD.
We’re going to go out on a limb here and assume that Songs of the Past will be coming out before The Witcher 4. On that note, The Witcher 4 is rumoured to land in 2027, although that title too hasn’t been given an official and specific date.
