Having already dumped more than 200 hours into The Witcher 3

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The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone Expansion Screenshots 3 IMAGES

While Hearts of Stone doesn't add many new mechanics or new locations (as the second expansion Blood and Wine will), it gives players a fat second helping of the excellent exploration and character-based storytelling that made Wild Hunt so enjoyable. The expansion's plot follows the titular Witcher Geralt as he gets caught up in a supernatural feud between the allegedly-immortal Olgeird von Everec and the mysterious Gunther O'Dim – who eagle-eyed players will recognize as the traveling merchant from the opening of Wild Hunt – and both of whom are clearly more devious than they let on.It's this sense of intrigue, of never knowing who was on which side of right and wrong, that really stuck with me after my demo had ended. Even though I only played a short portion of the main questline, it felt as if I were in the middle of a spy thriller – though with wizards and monster hunters in place of secret agents. With every NPC I spoke with or objective I completed, I was always learning something new about these new characters. Jose Teixeira, the Senior VFX artist from CDPR, explained that during it's design, "a lot of people likened it to the Bloody Baron questline [from Wild Hunt]," which focused more on in-depth character exploration through its many sub-quests, as opposed to the stereotypical "Go here, fetch/kill this" style of other RPGs.That said, it's going to be difficult to follow the main story to its completion, not for lack of substance but because it also appears to be chock-full of new side quests and additional content. After completing one of the earliest objectives of the HoS quest, I was immediately pulled away into a seemingly innocuous side mission. However, before I knew it I'd managed to track down a dangerous band of Fisstek dealers (basically the Temerian equivalent of crystal meth), and it was almost an hour before I returned to the O'Dim/von Everec storyline. While it's been teased that the expansion's story will last around ten hours, it's clear that invested players can expect to spend much more than that finding everything that will be on offer. Teixeira chuckled that, "We estimate that it's gonna take about 10 hours - much in the same way that we estimated that [Wild Hunt] would take 100 hours, and now we see that people are spending a lot longer than that. So we estimate 10 hours, but take that with a grain of salt... There's a very significant amount of content there."Ultimately, the Hearts of Stone expansion isn't changing the game in a major way – and that's not a bad thing. While they are introducing new upgrades called Runewords, which allow Geralt to combine the glyphs that buff his weapons for additional upgrades, it ultimately looks like this expansion focuses on delivering more of the excellent nonlinear storytelling that made Wild Hunt so good. Exploring the grey area between right and wrong and the motivations behind each character is something I've always felt The Witcher series did especially well, and I'm excited to see where Hearts of Stone takes players during its new campaign - especially if it takes me another twenty hours of my life to get there.

Jon Ryan is one of IGN's wiki gurus, as well as a loud-and-proud "Masshole." Argue with him in a funny accent on Twitter at @USofJR