After Old Tunes Was Announced, He Could Finally Play The Witcher Like Everyone Else

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The Witcher 3 expansion Old Times Song has already attracted major fan attention, and one of the more revealing reactions came from outside the team. During Summer Game Fest, former The Witcher 3 director and current Rebel Wolves head Konrad Tomaszkiewicz told GamesRadar+ that he will experience the expansion for the first time as a regular player.

That matters for a simple reason. Tomaszkiewicz worked on The Witcher 1, The Witcher 2, The Witcher 3, and both expansions, and he said he has never experienced the series the way most players do. After spending so many years helping build that world, he now says he cannot even start The Witcher 3 again from scratch. For a role-playing series built so heavily on worldbuilding, quest design, and character relationships, the developer view and the player view are fundamentally different.

The key point is that he was not involved in the development of Old Times Song. For the first time, he will not know story beats in advance, won’t know how quests are wired behind the scenes, and won’t be judging every detail through a developer’s checklist. In a series like The Witcher, where immersion is one of its core strengths, that sets a clear test: can the new team pull even a veteran creator into the experience purely through the strength of the content?

He was also clear about where he stands in the interview, saying he hopes Old Times Song turns out well and that he wants the development team to get the content right. That matters more than the quote itself. Instead of distancing himself from the series after leaving, or using the moment to take a shot at its new direction, he framed the standard around the work itself. For players, that lands as more than a polite endorsement. The point is simple: new teams and new directions are fine, but The Witcher still needs to feel like The Witcher.

The timeline matters too. Tomaszkiewicz left CD Projekt Red in 2021, and the original report notes that this was one year before The Witcher 4 entered pre-production. That puts him in much the same position as players not only for Old Times Song, but for The Witcher 4 as well. For longtime fans, that shifts the question slightly. It is no longer whether the old guard is still in place, but whether the new games can maintain the series’ standard for quest quality, narrative pacing, and worldbuilding.

If you are a longtime The Witcher 3 player, the sensible approach is not to treat Old Times Song as a nostalgia play. Watch for the harder things to fake: the strength of the side content writing, the consequences behind character choices, and the consistency of world detail. Familiar names alone do not carry a series. Content does. The same applies to Tomaszkiewicz’s current project at Rebel Wolves, The Blood of Dawnwalker, which will be another measure of what he can build after CD Projekt Red.