I wouldn’t expect this game to come out before 2024, by the way. I wonder what creative lessons (and workplace-environment lessons) CD Projekt Red will have taken from that experience. And even after the technical problems were (very slowly) solved, the game remained a depressingly cliché-ridden and unambitious take on the ideas of cyberpunk that felt inescapably adolescent. Despite years in development, extensive crunch and the presence of Keanu Reeves as a prominent character, it launched in an absolute state. (Gotta catch ’em all, I guess.) I never would have expected at that time that this game, not to mention this developer, would become one of the world’s most successful.Īnother interesting wrinkle here is that this next game will be the studio’s first since Cyberpunk 2077, a game whose launch in 2020 was, famously, an absolute disaster. (The 73-year-old writer remains famously uninterested in the video games that bear his creation’s name, by the way – and seems quite annoyed that he doesn’t profit from them.) The first Witcher game came out in 2007, when I was a baby journalist: I reviewed it at the time and remember it as a slightly shonky but nonetheless interesting action-RPG, with fiddly combat, a surprisingly rich story and – of course, infamously – a series of collectible cards with nudie ladies on them that you acquired by completing “seduction quests” with various female characters. The next Witcher game will be the fourth: Polish developer CD Projekt Red’s history with The Witcher began in around the late 90s, when it bought the rights to Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy novels. Considering its narrative spans 100 hours or more, it’s admirable that it manages to be interesting for almost that entire time. I’m not saying The Witcher handles everything with nuance and subtlety – there is one quest in The Witcher 3 where you basically have to fight an aborted fetus, which is absolutely not the pinnacle of taste. And he’s not the only interesting character in this series most of them have some gnarly qualities, and few are straightforwardly evil. He has failed relationships and intriguing regrets and all the other trappings of a life. Geralt makes mistakes and reflects on his choices. The reason The Witcher has stuck in my memory is its moral ambiguity, and the fact that you are no doubt a powerful character, albeit one who is not omnipotent. This ain’t a happy place, and you can’t make it better – but you can get to know it, quite intimately, and as Geralt you can at least make something of a difference. It is a world at the mercy of idiot kings and their wars, drunk nobles, criminals both petty and organised, and a whole menagerie of aggressive creatures that happily rip peasants apart. Geralt doesn’t have the power to save the world the Witcher drops you into. He is an outcast, a sword-for-hire who’s lived a long and interesting life – more of an antihero than your traditional wide-eyed, world-saving naif fantasy protagonist. If you’ve never had the pleasure, The Witcher stars a grizzled and fairly indifferent white-haired monster-hunter called Geralt. It’s sold over 30 million copies the series has topped 50 million in total. But this is still a big deal, because The Witcher 3 in particular is one of the most interesting and beloved (and successful) fantasy games ever made. There are almost no details about the game yet – just confirmation that it’s being made (in Unreal Engine 5, for the tech nerds). I’m going to begin this week’s Pushing Buttons with a personal plea to game developers and publishers: could you stop announcing huge news in the hours before (or just after) my newsletter deadline, please!? I basically had this week’s missive nailed down, and then CD Projekt Red went and confirmed the next game in the Witcher series, so now I’ve gotta talk about that.
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