The Witcher 3 is an astounding RPG full of countless quests. It ranges from sweeping epic battles to smaller, more intimate tales. I started playing the “Hearts of Stone” DLC recently and experienced a quest so wonderful, I had to take a deeper dive.
As we’ve established, many on our staff adore The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. We’ve written tons of articles about the game, and several of us have played it all the way through more than once. Our EIC Stephen Totilo, however, is still only a little ways into his first playthrough.
Today, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt gets a Game of the Year edition. It comes with all the updates, patches, DLC and expansions released over the last year. It’s also the rare “Game of the Year” edition that is appropriately named.
People don’t only love CD Projekt RED because The Witcher 3 was great. The company released 16 DLCs for free, talked openly about the game’s budget and profits, and included a “thank you” note in the box. It might be brilliant PR, but after speaking with the studio’s co-founder, there’s something else there, too.
If there’s a single story that encompasses the best of The Witcher 3’s narrative ambitions, it’s the Bloody Baron. Messy, emotional, and full of morally compromised individuals, it’s a tale that can end in some truly harrowing ways. To learn more about how it came together, I spoke with the people who made it.
I played 60 hours of The Witcher 3 earlier this year, and only stopped because I had other games to play. One question always nagged me, though: how did CD Projekt RED put together a sprawling open world game that avoided the genre’s usual preference for meaningless side quests? I called them to find out.
Not everyone was happy with the love triangle at the center of 2015’s hottest dating sim, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Fortunately, the game’s developers have been listening.
Since The Witcher 3 came out in May, developer CD Projekt Red has released 16 pieces of free post-release downloadable content, ranging from missions to outfits to gear. Some of that stuff was superb. Some was less superb. Let’s rank it all, worst to best.
If you were wondering whether The Witcher 3’s New Game+ mode makes the game harder, I have some good news for you: It does!
I’ve spent almost 100 hours in the Witcher 3, wandering the streets of Novigrad, galloping through Velen’s windswept woodland, sailing between the isles of Skellige. Yet in all that time, I never really stopped to enjoy the game’s quieter moments.
Along with the many small improvements offered by The Witcher 3’s most recent big patch, at least one problem slipped in: It was possible for Geralt to wind up stranded in the wilderness without a shred of armor to wear.
An animated parody of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, made by Matthew Shezmen, proves that being Geralt is not easy when there’s so much drama going.
Over the weekend, The Witcher 3 got a new patch that brought with it a bunch of changes. None of the tweaks are earth-shaking on their own, but taken together, they make the game feel noticeably more polished, user-friendly, and complete.
CD Projekt RED has a reputation for continuing to tweak and improve their games in major ways, weeks and months after release, and The Witcher 3 is no exception. The upcoming patch 1.07 has a slew of much needed tweaks, including changes to the inventory system.
The only problem with the addictive card game CD Projekt Red included in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is all the witching one has to do to play it. Thanks to a mod for Tabletop Simulator, the witching is now optional.
Last week we asked our readers to fix The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s missing penis problem. Our readers responded with the stuff of endless nightmares.
UPDATE: It works now. If you bought The Witcher 3 digitally on Xbox One, there’s a chance you can’t play the game right now. There’s a licensing issue—error “0x87de2726”—that’s preventing the game from booting up, but Microsoft is aware of the problem and working on it.
One step forward, one step back. As CD Projekt RED rushes to patch the ambitious Witcher 3, it’s also introducing new glitches. Right now, there’s one preventing players from gaining experience points when finishing quests six levels higher than what the game recommends.
Well, except maybe Geralt, but you can’t stage a massive battle between 20 bears and 20 cyclopes without breaking a few Witchers.
