We may know the chorus to his trademark song in the Netflix show, but we barely know a thing about The Witcher’s favorite musician, Dandelion. With his past little-known even in the novels, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s upcoming DLC, Songs of the Past, looks to reveal his hidden secrets.
At a PAX Aus hands-off demo and a panel discussion, Fools Theory CEO Jakub Rokosz and CD Projekt writer Barbara Szeląg, explained what we can expect from the unexpected DLC, which is launching over a decade after the game’s initial release.
“We all love Dandelion; he was a smart guy in the books, right?” says Szeląg. “He was very intelligent, well-spoken. In The Witcher 3, he looks (and I'm sorry to all cosplayers) a little bit like a plum. He's very vibrant, colorful. It's difficult to take him seriously.”
“We were thinking about Polish romantic poets from the 19th century. It's a big thing in Poland. They were all very dramatic, slept with a lot of women obviously, and had long hair, beautiful haircuts. We wanted to show another side of Dandelion. Hopefully you will like it as much as we did.”
Rokosz sees hidden depths in the “devilishly intelligent” character who used to be an Oxenfurt professor but is better known as providing The Witcher series’ comic relief. “It's a bromance. Dandelion is your best mate, and he really was long overdue a full storyline where we could show why these boys had this long-standing relationship throughout the games.”
Dandelion’s idyllic home, Letten, is described by Rokosz as a “land of plenty” fit to produce such an endearing and seemingly complacent dandy, modelled after the Polish and English countryside. Lush and vibrant and full of wildlife (showing off the remaster’s improved foliage system and draw distance), it also bustles with human activity, including NPC villagers driving by on horse-driven carts.
“We wanted to show you the place where Dandelion was born and grew up, but then he left,” says Rokosz. “And the question remains, why did he never come back?”
This beautiful locale has serious problems. And we get one hint why Dandelion doesn’t often return home when we see Geralt meet Dandelion’s demanding grandmother. She complains equally about her grandchildren’s timekeeping during a tense dinner after a harvest celebration, where Geralt was the only one who arrived on time.
Dandelion, unreliable as always, doesn’t show up at all. Maybe he’s just drunk in a ditch. But after a perturbing dream of him screaming from a well, and the discovery of his abandoned lute, there’s a serious possibility something worse has befallen him.
Alongside Dandelion’s cousin Lila — whose insistence on accompanying Geralt, paired with some rakish dialogue options, suggests she’s fonder of the White Wolf than her relative — they soon find more reasons his companion would reconsider a homecoming. Dandelion has drunkenly entered a sinister garden of thorns, cursed by witches slain by his ancestor.
With no time for the more time-consuming Witcher investigation that could open an alternative path, Geralt hacks past the thorns and encounters his first pack of Swarmers. These new enemies, drawn to the honey produced in Letten, gather in numbers that demand using Geralt’s entirely new weapon: the chain.
The chain’s origin harks back to the first Witcher’s opening cinematic, which showed Geralt wielding a chain to redirect a leaping striga and its rending claws to a safer distance back in 2007. Game director Jakub Rokosz says CD Projekt always wanted to include it. The topic was even discussed during The Witcher 3’s development, but it had been impossible to implement. That humble aspiration has finally been accomplished; it just took 20 years to get there.
Now that long-awaited mechanic provides crowd control to disperse swarms of enemies, such as the Swarmers, or drags an individual enemy up close for a new finishing move (the crowd cheers as Geralt beheads one in slow motion). It can also knock away shields or, better yet, bring down airborne enemies.
“Those Sirens in Skellige? They're not a problem no more!” says Rokosz.
The best demos always end with a boss fight, and this is no exception as Geralt and Lila encounter a moss-covered figure, a cursed relative of Dandelion’s clan, guarding a hidden well. It traps Lila in vines and turns against Geralt. The remaster’s snappy combat is shown at its best here; Geralt’s swordplay and dodges look better than ever. Vanquished with the help of some trusty witcher signs interwoven between silver sword strikes, Geralt leaps into the well, bringing the demo to a well-timed end.
While we’re left on a cliffhanger to see what awaits, Rokosz confirmed the DLC comes with new Gwent cards. That’ll help make up for the long wait until 2027.
