The Witcher 3 expansions could be as big as The Witcher 2

The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt is a massive and ambitious game, with at least 100 hours of gameplay as you sweep through the epic main quest and engaging side stories. The main game is huge, and it sounds like there's more on the way at that same scale.

Developers CD Project RED have already confirmed two full expansions packs are on the way, with one set for late 2015 and another for 2016, and we're finally getting more details. The first will be called Hearts of Stone and the second Blood and Wine and we're previously heard that they'll include about 10 and 20 hours of content respectively.

That sounds like a lot but having spent some time with Wild Hunt we know that's just the surface, likely the amount of time it would take for a player to skim through the main story. And even so, it's pretty comparable to the size of the last game in the series, The Witcher 2.

Game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has been chatting about that with Gamereactor. This is going to be huge:

"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. They will be quite long. And even now, if you sum up this 10 to 20 hours and you compare it to The Witcher 2, it's almost the size of The Witcher 2. And it will be cool, it will be new stories, it will be very emotional stories and I think that people will be happy."

Given that this is coming from CD Project RED you can be sure that they'll be a huge amount of extra content which isn't even covered in these conservative estimates, and with many more months to come before the first expansion releases, we wouldn't be surprised if they also end up offering more free content to their legions of fans around the world.

Hearts of Stone comes out in October 2015, Blood and Wine in early 2016. You can get both expansions for around €25 with the Expansion Pass and they'll also be available to buy separately.