The Witcher 3's New DLC Comes With New Minimum PC Requirements

Well, that was quite the surprise, no?

CD Projekt RED announced today that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is getting new DLC.

"Medallion's humming... that can only mean one thing! It's time to announce The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Songs of the Past!" the company announced on social media. Co-developed by Fools Theory, the team behind the upcoming Witcher 1 Remake, the upcoming expansion will "take [players] to the Path with Geralt of Rivia once more," and is set to release for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 sometime in 2027.

More details will be shared during their upcoming REDstream.

New Witcher 3 Content Means New Witcher 3 PC Requirements

With the new Witcher 3 DLC announcement, CD Projekt RED wants to ensure "smooth performance and compatibility" on the PC platform. As such, they rolled out a change to the game's minimum requirements, which will go into effect on the next game update.

The developer also detailed some important changes since the last system requirement update. With Microsoft ending support for Windows 10 last year, they confirmed that Windows 11 is the minimum required operating system for both The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.

Additionally, HDDs will no longer be supported moving forward due to the faster load times and improved performance offered by SSDs. Finally, The Witcher 3 will exclusively run on DirectX 12, allowing the team to support continued technical improvements and modern hardware.

This may be the reasoning behind the lack of support for older platforms, as well as the Nintendo Switch 2. Given some of the issues with various third-party ports coming to Nintendo's newest console, it seems like Switch 2 owners will be on the outside looking in, at least at launch.

It is possible to revert to an earlier version of the game, and CD Projekt RED released a guide on how to do so here.

CD Projekt RED Has Been Keeping Busy

Perhaps the most surprising part about today's announcement of new DLC for The Witcher 3 is the fact that there are two other full games in development at CD Projekt RED.

Last year, there came confirmation that Cyberpunk 2 was entering the pre-production phase, with a bulk of the team focused on The Witcher 4. The company released a chart showing the number of developers on each team. Unsurprisingly, a majority were focused on The Witcher 4 (422 out of 730 devs), with Cyberpunk 2's team featuring 96 developers at the time of writing.

Beyond that, there were a handful of team members associated with other projects: 48 people were on project Sirius, 19 on project Hadar, and 14 people on "other projects." This does not account for the then 131 developers working on various Shared Services. We know that Hadar is a brand-new, standalone IP, while Sirius was always a new project set in The Witcher universe.

As recently as last year, Kendra Mattozzi, the VP and Executive Producer leading the team, released an interview about her career in the industry. It was here that Sirius was confirmed to be a multiplayer project, which leads me to believe this may be one of the "other projects" currently in development. All said, it's clear that CD Projekt RED is keeping very, very busy, which will make the wait for The Witcher 4 that much more bearable with new content for Witcher 3 coming next year.