‘The Witcher 3’ DLC Expansions Announced, Sixteen Free DLC Still Coming

CD Projekt RED, the developer for the highly anticipated game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, has a pretty good reputation among gamers for being an honest and transparent company. Even when they make an announcement that most gamers would cry over if another developer did so, CDPR still ends up looking pretty good in the end.

Announced yesterday, The Witcher 3 will be getting two paid expansions. We knew that The Witcher would have paid expansions, as CD Projekt RED has talked about them before, thanks to a 2013 interview with The Examiner. The Witcher 3 developers laid out their ideas behind paid-DLC.

“We could sell extra content to gamers down the road, but we don’t believe in that,” said game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. “Only something really big, and something that will not make you feel ripped off, justifies a price tag.”

Apparently CDPR believes their content for The Witcher 3 expansions justify a price tag. The two DLC additions are named Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. Between the two expansions, CD Projekt RED is promising around 30 hours of additional content, which dwarfs game time from a lot of current full-priced AAA games on the market today. This is also in addition to the 16-pieces of free DLC announced earlier this year, as reported by the Inquisitr.

In a press release from The Witcher 3 developers, Marcin Iwinski commented on the expansion philosophy of the successful Polish studio.

With the development of Wild Hunt coming to an end, the team has embarked upon the creation of two new really big adventures set in The Witcher universe. We remember the time when add-on disks truly expanded games by delivering meaningful content. As gamers, we’d like to bring that back. We’ve said in the past that if we ever decide to release paid content, it will be vast in size and represent real value for the money. Both our expansions offer more hours of gameplay than quite a few standalone games out there.

CDPR also mentioned to those looking at buying the game’s expansion who felt any hesitation, they should wait and see how the reviews pan out before purchasing. Currently you can buy the expansion pass and the game as a bundle on the official Witcher 3 website. Hearts of Stone is slated to release in October, while Blood and Wine is tentatively scheduled to release to Witcher fans in the first quarter of 2016.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is set to release on PC, Xbox One and PS4 May 19.

[Image via CD Projekt RED]