The Witcher 3 Expansion Pass Details Announced

More than a month wait lies for those who plan on picking up The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on PC, PS4 or Xbox One. Nevertheless, as the game continues its strenuous bug-squashing phase, that doesn’t mean the team at CD Projekt RED can’t look towards the game’s future. As announced in a press release, The Witcher 3 Expansion Pass information has been posted on the game’s website, detailing what is in store for both later this year and into the next.

“Hearts of Stone,” the website description reads, “will take Geralt on an all-new 10-hour adventure into the wilds of No Man’s Land and the nooks and alleys of Oxenfurt, where he’ll try to complete a contract from the mysterious Man of Glass. Caught in a thick tangle of deceit, Geralt will need all his cunning and strength to solve the mystery and emerge unscathed.

“Blood and Wine, a 20-hour tale that will introduce the all-new in-game region of Toussaint, will take Geralt to a land untainted by war, where an atmosphere of carefree indulgence and knightly ritual masks an ancient, bloody secret.”

It appears as though these Witcher 3 expansions will actually play like expansion packs of old, keeping CD Projekt RED’s stance against DLC models for content-light features. In fact, The Witcher 3 will still be handing out those content-light DLC extras for free, as opposed to what most other gaming companies would do in pinching every dollar they can. 30 hours’ worth of content, alongside new items, enemies, characters and areas, takes a lot of work, with Hearts of Stone getting an estimated October 2015 release. Blood and Wine will come out even later; within the first 3 months of 2016.

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Should the developers keep true, this is how you do add-on content properly; developing it after the vanilla game is released, in order to maintain a vibrant community of players for as long as possible. 30 hours of content is huge; it’s roughly how long it took me to complete Bloodborne for the first time (although the openness of either RPG does not make them comparable). Why some will argue against it, while singing praises of, or defending the practices of, Day-1 content DLC is beyond me.

Futhermore, the developers are forthright about expansion content of The Witcher 3. “While we’re offering the Expansion Pass now, we want to make one thing clear: don’t buy it if you have any doubts,” CD Projekt RED co-founder Marcin Iwiński insists. “Wait for reviews or play (The Witcher 3) and see if you like it first. As always, it’s your call.” I mean, who else would tell their consumers to wait to make an informed decision before buying their game, instead of outright hyping up their own product?

Pricing for The Witcher 3 expansion content is unknown at this time, with the base game releasing on May 19th.

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