Gamers anxious to return to the world of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt don't have much longer to wait: the first expansion for the title, "Hearts of Stone," comes out next week.
A new launch trailer outlines certain details about the expansion, which features over 10 hours of new gameplay as well as a lot of new content with new characters, new monsters, new romance options and new storylines. However, according to the launch trailer, this DLC also contains a lot of action for Geralt of Rivia.
"Step again into the shoes of Geralt of Rivia, a professional monster slayer, this time hired to defeat a ruthless bandit captain, Olgierd von Everec, a man who possesses the power of immortality," reads The Witcher 3 official website.
"Hearts of Stone" is the first of two expansions planned for the game, with both expansions containing about as much content as The Witcher 2, the previous title in The Witcher franchise.
"The expansion packs will be whole new storylines with all the elements you've got in the main story (like cutscenes, new characters, new items, new Gwent cards) and many, many more," said The Witcher 3 director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz to Game Reactor. "They will be quite long. The first expansion will be around 10 hours and the second expansion will be around 20 hours ... and I think it's possible that they will be bigger, because it's always like this (that when we plan some time or hours, it's twice or something like this), but I'm not promising anything right now."
"Hearts of Stone" releases on Oct. 13 and costs only $9.99.
"We remember the time when add-on disks truly expanded games by delivering meaningful content," said CD Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwiński to IGN. "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 money."
The developer also announced that a physical limited box edition of "Hearts of Stone" will come with a download code for the DLC, as well as two real decks of Gwent, the card game that pops up often within The Witcher 3. That edition of the DLC retails for $19.99.
CD Projekt Red has continuously released updates for the game since its release on May 19, including a new upcoming patch that will fix the romance options in the base game: many players complained that Geralt's romance options for Triss weren't as fully developed for those as Yennefer.
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