The two expansions are in the base game

Here's what happened. On Tuesday 25 August, CD PROJEKT RED put Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine inside The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. If you already owned the 2015 game, the two expansions sit in the latest update. You don't buy them. You install them.

The remaster is the other date on the same press note. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered is 29 September 2026, a free upgrade on the machines that qualify. A native cart arrives the same morning on Nintendo Switch 2. Battle.net gets the game the same morning, under a new partnership with Blizzard Entertainment. Monday night, 31 August, is six days after Tuesday. The expansions are already in the build. The remaster is 29 days out. That's the order a first-time listener needs.

The short version is a support page, not a trailer. CD PROJEKT RED's technical FAQ, filed under issue 2998, is titled "Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine now included in the Base Game." The instruction is one sentence: update the game to the latest version. On PlayStation 4 and Xbox One the expansions are a free download instead of a merge. Standalone expansion SKUs are delisted. The base game on current storefronts is the Complete Edition. You cannot buy the 2015 campaign without the two packs any more. Saves still load. Cross-progression still works. Trophies and achievements stay, including the ones that lived on the expansions. You can still start Hearts of Stone or Blood and Wine from the main menu as a separate run. Mods, the FAQ says, should be unaffected because the game itself is unchanged in that patch; if a particular mod breaks, talk to the person who made it.

Xbox Wire carried the same Tuesday under Marta Piwońska, CD PROJEKT RED's expert PR manager. Digital owners on Xbox receive the expansions in the library automatically. Disc owners claim them from the Store. Xbox One is named in that paragraph. The surprise was not a rumour on a forum. Geoff Keighley said it on stage at gamescom Opening Night Live. CD PROJEKT RED's own press note repeats the line: all current owners gain the two original expansions at no additional cost, ahead of Remastered in September.

You might have missed this part. Patch trackers logged a current-gen build as 4.040.200 on 25 and 26 August, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. That number is a store version, not a manifesto. What the studio will put its name to is the FAQ: update, and the expansions are in the base game. Last-generation machines keep the expansions as a free add-on rather than a merged Complete Edition. That is the distinction the support page actually draws. It does not say those machines have been abandoned. It says they get the content a different way.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt shipped on 19 May 2015 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows. CD PROJEKT RED developed it in Warsaw. You play Geralt of Rivia, a professional monster slayer, looking for Ciri, his adopted daughter. The press kit still uses that sentence in 2026. Eleven years is a long time to keep a search on a disc. The search sold.

Two expansion packs were named on 7 April 2015, six weeks before launch. Hearts of Stone arrived on 13 October 2015. Blood and Wine arrived on 31 May 2016. A Game of the Year carton, with the base game, both expansions, and the smaller downloadable packs, went on sale on 30 August 2016. That last date is a nice coincidence for a Monday night desk in 2026: the GOTY box is almost exactly a decade old this week. The studio is not selling you a tenth-anniversary tin. It is folding the paid packs into the game you already have.

Hearts of Stone is the shorter of the two. The published premise is Geralt, a man called Olgierd von Everec, and a figure known as the Man of Glass. It is a contracted story with a small map and a hard bargain. Blood and Wine is the larger one. Geralt goes to Toussaint, a Nilfgaardian duchy the war has not chewed through, to hunt a beast. Vineyards, a city that looks like a postcard, a duchy that still throws tournaments. Blood and Wine took Best Role-Playing Game at The Game Awards 2016. The studio's own Complete Edition copy, reprinted when the Nintendo Switch version shipped, put the whole carton at more than 150 hours. That figure is theirs, for the base game plus everything they had released by 2019. It is not a review score. It is a duration they printed on a box.

Nintendo Switch got The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition on 15 October 2019. CD PROJEKT RED's launch note that day said it was the first time you could play the title at home or on the go. The Complete Edition on that cart held the base game, Hearts of Stone, Blood and Wine, and sixteen free DLCs. Retail came with stickers, a map, and a booklet. Nintendo UK still lists the date as 15/10/2019. Six years later the same studio is putting a native Remastered build on Switch 2. The 2019 cart was a port of the last-generation Complete Edition. The 2026 cart is the remaster, with a free claim if you already own the Switch original.

The next-gen step was 14 December 2022. CD PROJEKT RED announced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Complete Edition for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, with ray tracing, faster console loads, and a set of mods folded into the official build, plus extra content drawn from the Netflix series. Owners of any PlayStation 4, Xbox One, or PC release got a free next-gen update. The witcher.com patch note, dated 12 December 2022, said the game would show version 4.0 after that update, live at 1 a.m. CET on PC and Xbox and at midnight local time on PlayStation 5. PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch received a smaller update of their own. That 2022 pass is why a lot of living rooms already think they have the modern Witcher 3. Remastered is the studio saying the 2022 pass was not the last word.

Sales are a separate filing. On 27 May 2026, when Songs of the Past was first named, CD PROJEKT RED put the lifetime figure at more than 60 million copies, with more than 250 Game of the Year awards and 1,000 industry awards. A quarter later the number moved. PC Gamer, citing the group's first-quarter 2026 results commentary, quoted chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz: "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which recently celebrated its 11th anniversary, has just crossed another spectacular sales threshold: 65 million copies." The next sentence in that commentary: "This cements its place among the best-selling videogames in history." The 25 August press kit uses the 65 million line. The May note had 60 million. Five million copies in a year, on an eleven-year-old game, is the reason a remaster and a third expansion are not nostalgia products. They are still a business.

Songs of the Past is the third expansion. CD PROJEKT RED announced it on 27 May 2026. The snapshot that day was three lines: a third expansion; 2027 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC; co-developed with Fool's Theory, a team of Witcher 3 veterans. More details, the studio said, would come in late summer. Late summer was gamescom. Opening Night Live on 25 August put a teaser on the same stage as the remaster trailer. The new region is Letten. CD PROJEKT RED's own description: an idyllic land of rural tradition, bountiful harvests, lavish festivals, and a dark secret under the surface. Geralt faces foes the series has not shown before. The expansion is paid. It is on a wishlist now. Switch 2 joined the 2027 platform list in the August note; May had only the three current-generation living-room machines.

Xbox Wire, the same Tuesday, filled in the story the teaser only pointed at. Letten is Dandelion's homeland. Geralt travels with him on a personal matter. The land looks peaceful. The studio's line is the old one: there cannot be light without darkness. New monsters. New mutagens. A new weapon, the chain, which the copy says veteran players might recognise from the original Witcher game's intro cinematic. Crowd control is the job the chain is given on the page. PC Gamer's hands-off preview from the show floor put Dandelion missing, Letten in Redania, and a silver chain that wraps around the arm. That preview is reportage from a demo, not the press kit. The names that are on both the kit and the preview are Geralt, Letten, the chain, and 2027.

Fool's Theory is a Polish studio founded in 2015. The August press kit says its leadership is made up of Witcher 3 veterans, and that it is co-developing Songs of the Past and The Witcher Remake. The same kit names The Thaumaturge, a period RPG set in twentieth-century Warsaw, and Seven: The Days Long Gone, a stealth RPG, and notes work on Baldur's Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2. Remastered is a different room. Yigsoft, a Hungarian co-development company founded in 2021, is the named partner on the remaster. The kit says Yigsoft already worked on Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition. Two Polish-adjacent houses, two jobs. Fool's Theory on the new story. Yigsoft on making the old story current. CD PROJEKT RED sits on both.

Remastered is the free upgrade. CD PROJEKT RED's 25 August note lists what the announcement trailer showed: upgraded visuals, enhanced combat, improved traversal and movement, new Witcher Signs effects, revamped mount handling, enhanced monster behaviours, a skill tree revamp, transmogrification, expanded photo mode, new finishers. Xbox Wire, in CD PROJEKT RED's own voice, spent more words on three of those. Lighting is reworked across the open world, with improved textures on the environment, NPCs, and monsters, and improvements to ray tracing. Combat animations are revised so Geralt closes distance more cleanly; an Aard-based finisher is named from the trailer; the camera now tightens or widens with the number of foes. The skill trees are not a polish pass. "The entire system has been reimagined," the Xbox Wire piece says. New perks, reworked skills, a redesigned tree. Transmogrification means the look of a weapon or a set of armour can be separated from its stats. Photo mode gets new poses, camera controls, frames, filters, and models. Mods are coming to Xbox Series X|S. Xbox Play Anywhere is on the remaster, so a Series console, a PC, or an Xbox-supported handheld can carry the same save.

Game Informer's Charles Harte, filing the same afternoon, paused the trailer and typed out the rest of the crawl. Cross-platform mod support. Immersive meditation. Refined animations. New quest tracking. UI improvements. A looting rework. Refreshed motion blur. New accessibility features. Updated textures. Foliage shading rework. Tutorial modernisation. HDR improvements. GTAO. Improved menu navigation. Ray tracing improvements. A global lighting rework. A new shading model. Subsurface scattering. A new tone mapper. PS5 Pro support. Xbox Play Anywhere. Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive features, unnamed in the crawl. NVIDIA DLSS 4.5. AMD FSR 4. Intel XeSS 2.0. Path tracing on PC. Ray reconstruction on PC. Ray-traced hair. Native DirectX 12. Rendering parallelisation. That list is the trailer's list, transcribed. It is not a patch note with checkboxes ticked against a tested build. 29 September is when those lines have to be true on a machine you own.

thewitcher.com dated the consumer post 25 August. Free upgrade for owners on GOG, Steam, Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Pre-purchase on Battle.net and Nintendo Switch 2. If you own the Nintendo Switch version, you claim Remastered on Switch 2 when it releases. Both original expansions are in the Remastered base game as well as in the current update. The FAQ repeats the Switch 2 claim in support language: yes, a Switch owner can take Remastered on Switch 2 at no extra cost. Pre-orders for the Switch 2 native version were open the day of the stage. Switch 1 is not on the remaster platform list. The 2019 cart stays the 2019 cart. The new machine gets the new build.

Battle.net is the other new door. CD PROJEKT RED and Blizzard Entertainment are putting Remastered and Songs of the Past on Blizzard's launcher. Buy the expansion there and you unlock a Geralt-inspired skin in Diablo 4. Further details, the press note says, when CD PROJEKT RED attends BlizzCon in September. "Beyond the Game Blog" is the named place for more on the partnership. A Polish RPG on a Blizzard store is a distribution story, not a crossover cinematic. The skin is the crossover. BlizzCon is next month, in the same window as the remaster.

PS5 Pro numbers came three days after the stage, in a REDstreams: On the Go presentation at gamescom, Day 3. RPG Site reported the session. Remastered on PS5 Pro runs at 60 frames per second with ray tracing. A performance mode unlocks the frame rate; the same presentation showed 90 frames per second. The ray tracing feature set on Pro is the base PS5 set, running at 60 instead of 30. The team said there are not additional ray tracing features "right now." If you skipped ray tracing on a base PS5 because it locked you at 30 frames, Pro is the machine that keeps the lighting and doubles the frames. PSSR is in that report's headline as a supported upscaler. The 60 and the 90 are the figures the stream put on a graph.

CD PROJEKT RED is hosting guided presentations of Songs of the Past and the remaster in Hall 8.1 of gamescom's entertainment area, with REDstreams on YouTube and Twitch for anyone not in Cologne. The May 27 announcement had promised late-summer detail. The studio kept that date. The September 29 remaster is five weeks from the stage, four weeks from tonight. Songs of the Past remains a 2027 window, not a month. Wishlisting is the action the stores will take this week. Installing the two 2015–2016 expansions is the action the FAQ will take tonight.

The Witcher IV is the next numbered game, not this patch. Joint-CEO Michał Nowakowski recorded a message ahead of gamescom. Game Informer ran it on 24 August. The Witcher 4 would not be on Opening Night Live and would not be playable on the show floor. Then the sentence the clip was for: "While we're not showing the Witcher 4 at the event, and we're not ready to share an exact date, I can tell you this: The Witcher 4 is targeting a 2028 release window." The next two sentences, still his: "I know it's a bit of a wait, and you'd love to play it sooner, but let the team cook. It will be worth the wait." Ciri is the protagonist of that game in the public materials. Songs of the Past is Geralt once more, on the Path, before that. The 2027 expansion is the bridge the studio chose to build instead of a 2026 sequel date.

What you can do tonight is the FAQ, not the trailer. Update The Witcher 3 on PC, PlayStation 5, or Xbox Series. The two expansions install with the game. On PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, collect them as free downloads. On Xbox, digital copies land in the library; a disc copy goes to the Store. If you never bought Hearts of Stone or Blood and Wine, they are in the carton now. If you already bought them, they stay in the library and their content is patched into the base game. You can still boot either expansion from the menu as its own start. Your save is meant to load. Your trophies stay. Mods are expected to keep working; if one does not, that is a conversation with the mod's author, which is what the FAQ says.

29 September is the remaster. Same living room, a different build. GOG, Steam, Epic, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, Battle.net. Yigsoft on the co-dev line. The skill tree is the mechanical change the studio is willing to call fundamental. Transmogrification is the vanity change. Lighting, combat, Signs, Roach, monsters, photo mode, finishers, mods on Xbox, Play Anywhere. PC adds the upscalers in the trailer crawl, path tracing, ray reconstruction, ray-traced hair, native DirectX 12. PS5 Pro adds 60 frames with the current ray tracing, and a performance mode that has been shown at 90. Switch 2 is a native version with exclusive features the crawl does not name. Switch 1 owners claim that version for free when it ships. Last-generation machines keep the story packs for free and do not get Remastered. That split is in the FAQ. It is not a slight. It is a hardware line.

The 2015 game was a search for Ciri. The 2015 and 2016 expansions were a bargain with a glass man and a duchy of wine. The 2019 Switch cart was the Complete Edition in a hand. The 2022 update was ray tracing and a version number that started with 4. The 2026 Tuesday was the studio deciding the Complete Edition is now the default SKU, and that a remaster with a redesigned skill tree is a free upgrade rather than a second purchase. The 2027 expansion is Letten, Dandelion, a chain, Fool's Theory. The 2028 window is The Witcher 4, Ciri, Nowakowski's "let the team cook." You can hold all of those dates in one head. The one that is live on a Monday night in Adelaide is the first one: Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are in the base game. Update. Play the duchy. The remaster will replace the lighting in 29 days. The third expansion will replace the map next year. The numbered sequel is the year after that.

File it on the games tab. The stills are a Polish castle at night and a wolf in snow. No faces. The companies on the page are CD PROJEKT RED, Fool's Theory, Yigsoft, Blizzard Entertainment, and the stores that already had the 2015 disc. Geoff Keighley said the expansions were free on a Cologne stage. Marta Piwońska signed the Xbox Wire note. Piotr Nielubowicz put 65 million on the Q1 commentary. Michał Nowakowski put 2028 on a video. The FAQ is issue 2998. The remaster date is 29 September 2026. The expansion year is 2027. Letten is the new realm. The chain is the new weapon. Tuesday put the old packs in the cart. Monday night, they are still there. That is the news. Install them.