GameRant got a behind-closed-doors look at Songs of the Past during Gamescom last week, and their preview has me more interested in this expansion than I expected to be. If you've been following along, the remaster hits September 29 and this expansion follows sometime in 2027, an odd release cadence until you remember CD Projekt has never done things the normal way.

Look at the part that got my attention: the expansion is billed as a self-contained story in the vein of Heart of Stone rather than a sprawl of Blood and Wine's size. Good call. Heart of Stone remains, for my money, the best thing CD Projekt Red has ever written. Tight, strange, melancholy, with Gaunter O'Dimm sitting comfortably among gaming's all-time great villains. If Songs of the Past is chasing that structure instead of raw acreage, we might be getting something special.

I want to say the last time an expansion genuinely recontextualized its base game for me was Shivering Isles back in 2007, and that's the bar these things should be measured against. An expansion doesn't need to be bigger, it needs to matter.

The preview confirms new quest lines, new characters, and a story that digs into the Wolf School's history, which is fertile ground the main game mostly left untouched. Geralt's past at Kaer Morhen got a lovely flashback sequence in the base game, but there's decades of untold material there. Vesemir alone could carry an expansion, and I've suspected since the title was announced that the old man is somehow at the center of this. A story called Songs of the Past that's quiet about its contents, arriving after a remaster built to reintroduce people to the world? That smells like a farewell tour.

Obviously, standard preview caveats apply. Behind-closed-doors demos at Gamescom are curated by design. You're seeing the best thirty minutes the studio can assemble, running on hardware you don't own. I got burned on that cycle enough times in my twenties to stop pre-judging anything from a convention floor. Ask me about the E3 demo that shall not be named sometime.

Still, the timing works in the expansion's favor. The September 29 remaster gives everyone a reason to roll fresh saves, and by the time 2027 rolls around, there will be a whole wave of players who never touched the original release walking into this with clean eyes. Smart sequencing from a studio that has gotten very good at managing its own legacy.

Songs of the Past feels like the studio closing a chapter properly instead of walking away from it. Nina and I were arguing about this last week, whether Square ever gave Final Fantasy expansions this kind of care, and I'll grant her Shadowbringers while noting that CD Projekt does it with a single-player game nobody expected to still be getting content twelve years later.

Have you gone back to Witcher 3 recently? September 29 is looking like the excuse to do it.