Ten years after Blood and Wine launched, CD Projekt Red developer Paweł Sasko has pulled back the curtain on one of the best expansions in RPG games history, and the behind-the-scenes details are genuinely fascinating.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt nearly shipped its beloved Toussaint expansion under a completely different name. Bells of Beauclair was the working title throughout much of production, shortened internally to BoB. The name only changed midway through development, when the team settled on Blood and Wine because it better captured the spirit of the story and, as Sasko put it, was simply “easier to spell out and articulate.”
Get up to 80% off games only on GAMES.GG
Exclusive Discounts on Games
Seven months, one entirely new country
The timeline alone is worth appreciating. Hearts of Stone shipped in October 2015, and the team was already deep into building Blood and Wine before that expansion even released. The finished product launched on May 31, 2016, just seven months later.
Sasko described the scope on X: a completely new country, a full main story, new characters, new monsters, new mechanics, a player-owned vineyard, and a narrative designed to close out Geralt's journey. The internal bar was set even higher than that. The expansion had to surpass not just the base game, but Hearts of Stone as well.
Blood and Wine launched with around 30 hours of main and side content, making it larger than many standalone RPG releases at the time.
The forest problem that changed everything
Here's the thing: the expansion's most distinctive visual identity, its fairy tale world, was born out of a production constraint rather than a grand creative vision.
Writers needed a Druid's Forest for a specific story thread. The environment artists delivered the answer nobody wanted: not enough time, can't afford it. So the team pivoted. What if they built a fairy tale world instead?
The concept they landed on was not the sanitized kind. Sasko described the direction as "rotten and savage," built around twisted archetypes, corrupted stories, and a visual language CDPR had never used before. Internally it was called Kraina z Bajki. The artists signed off because it genuinely excited them creatively.
The punchline: "The Fairy Tale turned out to be way more expensive to build than the Druid's Forest ever would."
Graves, inscriptions, and a very cheerful writer
One of Sasko's favorite memories from production involves Mère-Lachaiselongue Cemetery, which appears in a quest about a spoon collector. Every grave needed a proper inscription. Writer Karolina Stachyra handled most of them, and her approach was straightforward: she "cheerfully demanded dead bodies from her colleagues."
A large portion of the dev team ended up buried in Toussaint as a result. The tombstone where Regis and Geralt sit and talk in one of the expansion's quietest, most memorable scenes? Those graves belong to Karolina Stachyra and Paweł Sasko himself.
What most players miss when they sit through that scene is that two of the people who built it are literally underneath the characters having the conversation.
What this means for the franchise right now
Sasko's retrospective landed just days after CDPR officially announced Songs of the Past, a third expansion for The Witcher 3 coming to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S/X in 2027. The timing is clearly intentional. Blood and Wine's tenth anniversary, combined with the Songs of the Past announcement, has put Toussaint back in the conversation in a big way.
The game has now sold over 65 million copies. A third expansion arriving more than a decade after launch is a direct result of that sustained player base, and the Blood and Wine anniversary posts from CDPR developers suggest the studio still carries genuine affection for what they built there.
For everything confirmed about the upcoming expansion so far, the Songs of the Past release date and details guide has the full breakdown. And if you want to revisit Toussaint before Songs of the Past arrives, the full Witcher 3 guide collection covers everything from quest walkthroughs to build recommendations.
