An 11-Year-Old RPG Just Dropped Windows 10 Support

"It's real. It's coming. And for the last time, it's not DLC, it's an Expansion!" That's CD Projekt Red community manager Marcin Łukaszewski on X, responding to the flood of reactions after the studio confirmed Songs of the Past, a full new expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, arriving in 2027. The post racked up over 25,000 reposts and seven million views. But buried beneath the excitement is a detail that's generating a very different kind of conversation: CD Projekt is raising the game's minimum system requirements, and Windows 10 is getting cut entirely.

According to CD Projekt Red's support page, the new minimum spec calls for an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 or Intel Core i5-8400 CPU, an Nvidia GTX 1660 or AMD RX 5500 XT with 6GB VRAM, 12GB of RAM, a 70GB SSD, and 64-bit Windows 11. That's a meaningful jump from the original 2015 requirements, which asked for an i5-2500K, a GTX 660, 6GB of RAM, and ran on Windows 7. HDD support is gone. DirectX 11 is gone. If you're still on Windows 10, CD Projekt says it will no longer test the game on that OS, citing the end of Microsoft's security updates and GPU driver support.

I get why this rubs people the wrong way. This is a game people bought in 2015. Telling someone their hardware or OS is no longer supported for a product they already own is always going to sting, even when the technical reasoning is sound. And the reasoning here is sound: Windows 10 hit end-of-life in 2025, DX12 is the standard now, and SSDs have been the baseline for game development for years. But "sound" and "painless" are different things, especially when Steam's own hardware survey still shows a significant chunk of users on Windows 10.

What Songs of the Past Actually Is

CD Projekt is being very deliberate about calling this an expansion, not DLC. When a fan asked Łukaszewski what the distinction means internally, he explained that DLCs at CDPR are "small pieces of content we release for free," like additional outfits. Expansions are "major pieces of content providing lots of hours of gameplay, including new story, characters, etc." Cyberpunk 2077 associate game director Paweł Sasko reinforced the point by sharing a clip of Idris Elba from the Phantom Liberty campaign, where Elba draws the same line. If CDPR is putting this much effort into the framing, they clearly want Songs of the Past measured against Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, not a costume pack.

The expansion is being co-developed with Fool's Theory, the studio also handling The Witcher 1 Remake. It stars Geralt, and beyond that, concrete details are thin. The announcement itself appears to have been rushed out after the expansion leaked via the Polish version of CDPR's RED launcher, which is a slightly embarrassing way to reveal your biggest Witcher 3 news in a decade. A Blood and Wine anniversary stream was likely the intended venue.

Songs of the Past will skip PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, which makes the PC spec bump feel less arbitrary. CDPR isn't trying to run a 2027 expansion on 2013 console hardware, and the PC requirements are being brought in line with that reality. Players on Steam or GOG who can't meet the new specs can revert to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Classic, an older build available as a beta option. Epic Games Store users don't have that fallback, since the platform doesn't support rolling back to previous versions.

The GTX 1660 minimum is the same GPU required by 007: First Light, a brand-new release. For a game that launched when the GTX 660 was considered adequate, that's a full generational leap in minimum hardware for what is still, at its core, a 2015 RPG. I think CDPR is making the right call for the expansion's future, but they should be upfront that this isn't just about Songs of the Past. These new requirements kick in "from the next update," meaning the base game itself is getting pulled forward whether you buy the expansion or not.