Does hearts of stone dlc patch straight in to an active game or does it require you to play from the beginning to activate it?

Also, is there any new gear contained in it?

Hi there.

You have 3 Options with the HoS Expansion.

1) Start a totally new Game and after leaving the prologe the Quest should pop up.
(could not test this)

2) Load an existing Game and the first Quest is added.
(could test this, loaded an endgame save. The expansion shows a popup with some info
and new Quest is added.)

3) start new HoS exclusive Game.
(does work, Geralt is leveled up, gets some gear and some Info Popups. Main Story
is marked as completed in this mode but you can do all Sidequest. Thats at least what
those info popup tell. ).


For the New Stuff Question :
Cant say for sure (on work right now) but testing Option 3 from above indicates something like this.


Cheers

Thanks, I'm about 2/3rds the way through a deathmarch ng+ playthrough and started from scratch would have been a total hassle, I'm not sure I could face playing through the start of the game yet again.

Cool, so you can launch HoS as a completely fresh game, and play it separatly from the standard playtrough?

They really give us lots of options.