First reported by GamesRadar, CD Projekt Red has thanked thousands of fans for doing something exceedingly rare in today's entertainment space: Not spoiling a hotly anticipated new show even though they got advance access.

6,000 fans showed up to the advance premiere of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 at LA's Crypto.com Arena (lol) as part of Anime Expo 2026, where they got to see the first episode of Studio Trigger's follow-up to its explosively popular 2022 anime hit. And while there are almost certainly descriptions of the plot somewhere out there on the internet, CD Projekt Red was sufficiently satisfied with the lack of spoilers and footage on the World Wide Web.

"So far, the first episode streamed at Anime Expo hasn't leaked," wrote CD Projekt Red's Japanese associate country director, Satoru Homma, on Twitter. "Thank you so much for keeping your promise properly."

CDPR global PR director Radek Grabowski concurred. "We really appreciate everyone’s understanding and for helping us keep the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 episode one screening at Anime Expo spoiler-free by not recording any footage," he wrote. "Let’s all experience it and the rest of the season together when the show launches this fall!"

Edgerunners was at least as much of a phenomenon as the game it was based on, and even a stepped-on cam rip of the second season's first episode with a watermark for a gambling website would prove a hot commodity. If there really isn't one out there on the information superhighway, you gotta respect the Anime Expo attendees' restraint on the matter.

As for the rest of us, we have to wait until the fall to get a load of Edgerunners 2. It seems like it will be worth the wait: I seriously dug Edgerunners 2's first trailer, while its story and character previews tickle the Cyberpunk lore-loving parts of my brain.

It's hard to imagine now, but Cyberpunk 2077 was an unmitigated disaster when it launched back in 2020. The PC version wasn't too bad, relatively speaking, but the console version was so wretched that Sony literally kicked it off the PlayStation Store. It was so far gone that several months after launch, with CD Projekt just beginning to start the work of cleaning up the mess it made, we recommended that it just fix the bugs and move on. Whoops.

I mention all this because that was then and this is now, and now Cyberpunk 2077—which these days sits comfortably with a "very positive" user rating on Steam—has surpassed 40 million copies sold.

Night City population: 40 million dreamers 🌃Thank you all for helping us reach this amazing milestone! 💛

— @cyberpunk.net (@cyberpunk.net.bsky.social) 2026-07-03T17:23:36.711Z

"40 million copies sold shows the incredible, lasting strength of Cyberpunk 2077 and is a testament to what CD Projekt does best—creating high-quality, immersive stories that keep players returning for years," co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said. "It's a great foundation for our upcoming projects in this universe, including the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 anime arriving this fall,"

It's a fairly typical corpo rah-rah statement, but you gotta hand it to him: It's also true. In an industry where companies typically opt to cut their losses when a new game faceplants off the starting line, CD Projekt kept hammering on it, ultimately turning Cyberpunk 2077 into a genuinely outstanding game and then capping it off with a brilliantly devastating expansion. More than once we declared the game's redemption arc complete, but CD Projekt kept going—maybe in part because studio leadership still doesn't entirely believe it.

"I'm not 100 per cent convinced we went through the full redemption arc," Nowakowski said in June. "I'm convinced that we lost the faith of some people indefinitely, and that's a fair thing. But I do hope we will be able to make it back—if not with The Witcher 4, then with whatever comes next."

A big chunk of Cyberpunk 2077's sales came via the power of pre-release hype—despite its multitudinous troubles, Cyberpunk 2077 sold 13 million copies in just 10 days, and maybe there's a lesson in that but probably not—and it's still well off The Witcher 3, which recently sailed past 65 million copies sold.

Be that as it may, you can't argue with numbers, and 40 million copies sold is a hell of an achievement, especially for a game that once looked doomed to end up like Mass Effect: Andromeda: A nice idea gone horribly wrong that we'd all just rather forget.

A day after revealing that Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is finally coming this fall, Netflix has dropped the first real trailer for the anime's second season. It has all the gnarly neon action I was hoping for, plus enough shocked-looking, crying, or mid-cyberpsychosis main characters to have me thinking we're in for another bummer of an ending⁠—but at least we'll have fun along the way.

This may be "Teaser 2," but Teaser 1 was entirely composed of shots from Edgerunners' first season, so I don't know if that counts. The action on display has the same vibrant, gory, kinetic quality that set the original Edgerunners apart, and I love the touch of having 4:3, scanline-laden footage from the character Roman, who looks set to film much of the series' events on a little retro-futuristic camcorder.

The trailer is pure vibes, but Edgerunners 2's official website has more context for everything going on. "Weak, a washed-up cyberpunk legend, is now forced to live without chrome as he searches for a sense of purpose in a world that's passed him by," reads the site's story synopsis. "Meanwhile, the deadly nomad D sets out on a path to revenge that brings him close to corpo secrets never meant to be found."

Alongside those two, there's also Talia, a member of Cyberpunk 2077's Maelstrom gang⁠—basically nasty cyborg orcs. In the proud tradition of orc sexual dimorphism, she appears to be some kind of sexy waif in contrast to the real freaky boys like Royce we saw in-game. Rounding out the revealed cast is Roman, the aforementioned boy wonder video journalist. I'm sure nothing bad will happen to him.

It's nice to get pulled back into this world, especially with such a long wait in the cards for Cyberpunk 2, CD Projekt Red's next game in the setting. This Edgerunners 2 build-up is making me want to reinstall 2077 and finally replay it for the first time since reviewing Phantom Liberty, though I'm holding out hope CDPR might have a free DLC tie-in in the works⁠—there's precedent in both Cyberpunk itself and The Witcher 3.

This article will contain spoilers for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is an excellent anime, and it's also very sad—its ending does a great job of reaching into your chest, busting past your ribs, grabbing your heart and ripping it out. It's a genuinely thoughtful examination of the cyberpunk genre's dystopia, the corrupt ideas of success and legacy we can get in a society that views people as disposable.

David's fate at the end of it (along with the unceremonious stomping of Rebecca mid heart-to-heart) is a prime example of that—there aren't any happy endings in Night City, just a staving off of entropy and cyberpsychosis, or a meaningless life in a dead-end gutter somewhere.

Basically, its ending is heartbreaking. But did you know it could be even worse? That's per an animecorner interview with the show's writer and producer, Bartosz Sztybor, who spoke to the publication about its potential endings:

"There was never a happy ending," Sztybor says, then follows up that light jab with the haymaker: "There were even worse endings. There was one ending in which David doesn’t die entirely. Arasaka gets him and [he] ends up fighting in Africa or South America in corporate wars as a robot."

The word 'grim' feels like an understatement. The idea of David's consciousness being torn off his dead body and placed inside a military robot to fight some corporate war for capital, all while his love is powerless to stop it—or worse, the idea that he might become some sort of reprogrammed Adam Smasher cyborg?

That's a bad ending that would've turned Edgerunners from a Shakespearian tragedy into a straight-up existential horror, even if it would've been deeply setting-appropriate. Good thing we aren't tainting the memories of deceased people with AI facsimiles in real life. That'd totally never happen.

Either way, Sztybor's adamant about keeping David dead and buried: "Yeah, I think it would be disappointing. If David is resurrected, finds Lucy and has seven babies, people would be like 'you destroyed those feelings.'"

Anyway—we're going to be getting round 2 of emotional devastation in Night City coming this fall, so Sztybor has plenty of other opportunities to roundhouse kick our little hearts into even mushier pulps.

I confess, even after several years writing about videogames for money, I still have to pause sometimes and remember which CD Projekt is which. I use this handy mnemonic rhyme: If CD Projekt Red you see, that's the folks who made The Witcher 3. If CD Projekt alone you view, that's the parent company. Doo bee doo.

But I guess it's time for me to throw that rhyme out, because CD Projekt is rebranding itself as CD Projekt Red, bringing the whole enchilada under the same brand. "In the opinion of the Management Board, the new company name will ensure full brand consistency and facilitate the identification of the Company with its products on the global market," quoth the company in the relevant resolution.

Which does mean that, in the future, I will now have an even harder time distinguishing between actions undertaken by CD Projekt Red (née CD Projekt) and, uh, CD Projekt Red (the games people). See? It's already happening. How could Marcin Iwiński do this to me?

I grudgingly admit it makes sense, though. To many of us, CD Projekt is CD Projekt Red. I am a lot more concerned with Cyberpunk 2 and The Witcher 4—both operations that fall under the company's game-dev rubric—than I am with the wider company's broad corporate machinations. To the public, this company is a game-development studio with some other stuff attached, even if the nitty-gritty of its corporate structure is the reverse.

So, hey, makes sense. But I need a new rhyme. If broader corporate decisions they're making, that's the corporate arm that used to be CD Projekt, and no mistaking. If designing Geralt's new beard they be, that's the game-dev arm. Fiddle de dee.

As reported by Polygon, we now have a release window for the second season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. We'll finally see more episodes of the explosively popular anime adaptation of Mike Pondsmith's tabletop setting and CD Projekt's 2020 RPG sometime this fall.

I had to do a double take when I noticed it's been a whole year since Edgerunners season two was first announced, but Netflix has finally begun spinning up the marketing machine for the highly anticipated continuation. The series is taking an anthology approach, following a new cast of characters after the events of the first season.

Edgerunners played a big part in Cyberpunk 2077's redemption arc: I've long maintained that, before the game's 2.0 update actually transformed its systems for the better in 2023, the universal goodwill around the Edgerunners anime led players to approach the game with a more open mind⁠

The power of anime is greater than that of memes about bugs and console framerates, apparently. CDPR had already done some tweaking and bug fixing by the time of Edgerunners' 2022 release, but it was sheer good vibes that got people to realize Cyberpunk 2077 was always good.

I'm curious to see when this new story will be set. I'm less familiar with where R. Talsorian Games has taken things in sourcebooks, but this could be the first new story in the chronology since Cyberpunk 2077. The Phantom Liberty expansion takes place contemporaneously with the main game, but does have one potential ending set many years in the future.

Edgerunners' first season, meanwhile, took place before Cyberpunk 2077 and is referenced ingame⁠—it's equally likely that Edgerunners season two will be a pre- or interquel of some form. CD Projekt, meanwhile, is firmly in a Witcher epoch: The Witcher 4 is on its way soon, and we probably can't expect Cyberpunk 2 any sooner than 2030.

The infamous launch of Cyberpunk 2077 was a low point in CD Projekt Red's history. With hype levels at critical mass, the RPG released in a buggy, unoptimised, and downright unfinished state that was so bad the PS4 version of the game was pulled from the PlayStation store. The company's share price tanked, investors filed a class action lawsuit, and CDPR's reputation was left in tatters.

Yet at the same time, Cyberpunk 2077 was a huge commercial success, and CD Projekt used some of those profits to fix its broken blockbuster. Its 2.0 patch, combined with the excellent Phantom Liberty expansion, addressed many of the RPG's problems, successfully turning around the game's reputation and cementing its place as a roleplaying great.

As far as I'm concerned, all is forgiven. But CDPR co-CEO Michał Nowakowski doesn't believe this is the case for everyone. In a live interview at DevGAMM Gdańsk republished in the Edge magazine's Knowledge newsletter (via GamesRadar), Nowakowski lamented that Cyberpunk's launch debacle likely lost the studio some fans permanently.

"I'm not 100 per cent convinced we went through the full redemption arc," Nowakowski told interviewer Jörg Tittel. "I'm convinced that we lost the faith of some people indefinitely, and that's a fair thing. But I do hope we will be able to make it back—if not with The Witcher 4, then with whatever comes next."

While there may still be some holes in CDPR's reputation, the experience of fixing Cyberpunk did leave the studio in an advantageous position. Not only financially, but also in terms of its team. "We were left with seasoned, battle-hardened veterans; leaders who were able to carry a different kind of challenge on their shoulders," Nowakowski explained.

This, according to Nowakowski, is why CDPR was able to spread into a multi-project company, with both The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 currently in production, as well as the mysterious Project Hadar. The goal is to become a more prolific developer. But not too prolific.

"Our dream is to be making more games, although we never want to turn into the studio that's going to be launching a big game every year," Nowakowski said. "It may happen. But this is not the goal. We have a rough ten-year rolling plan, but the goal is not to flood the games market with CDPR games."

It's going to be a while before we see the results of CDPR's more prolific structure. The Witcher 4 isn't due until 2027 at the earliest (and I suspect is more likely to arrive in 2028). Cyberpunk 2, meanwhile, may not arrive until 2030.

This is probably why CDPR has greenlit a third expansion to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Songs of the Past, which is being built by The Thaumaturge developers Fool's Theory, is due to be released next year. The expansion is expected to provide a big extra chunk of Witcher-ing, estimated to be similar to Blood & Wine in scope.

The Witcher 3 isn't exactly short of stuff to do, but I nonetheless lament that one of its most ambitious questlines never made it into the final game. Not only because it would have delved much more deeply into The Catriona Plague—a disease ravaging Velen that mostly serves as a background event in the final game—but also because it would have brought back The Witcher 2's best character, the elven rebel smokeshow Iorveth.

Details about this questline emerged back in 2024, courtesy of modders and dataminers Moonknight, Ferroxius, Crygreg, and Glassfish. Not content with simply discovering the details of this quest, however, that same team has set about recreating it in a hugely ambitious mod.

Named The WAR Project, the mod aims to recreate the Catriona Plague questline in the form of a 10-hour, 12 quest expansion based upon the datamined info discovered a couple of years back. Details were shared by YouTuber and The Witcher 3 specialist xLetalis, who is also assisting with the mod's production.

While the main attraction for me is Iorveth's return, the mod also reintroduces and/or expands upon several other characters in The Witcher 3. This includes a proper romance between Geralt and Ves, plus extra demonic shenanigans from Gaunter O' Dimm, the primary antagonist of Hearts of Stone who CD Projekt originally planned to introduce in this quest. O' Dimm's return also heralds the arrival of new demonic enemies for Geralt to chop up, alongside specialist Nilfgaardian soldiers with rad-looking vulture masks.

Now, ambitious mods like this crop up online all the time, but few actually make it to release. However, the team is composed of veteran Witcher 3 modders, with Moonknight and Glassfish having contributed to the Brothers in Arms mod that restores a darker ending to the Hearts of Stone expansion. They also say that the mod is 25% complete with things like Geralt's romance with Ves already implemented (a demo is available on Nexus Mods).

One major component the mod currently lacks is voice acting, as the original voice lines for these quests are sadly lost to time. Hence, the team is currently casting for numerous roles in both English and Polish languages, including ol' Geraldo Riviera himself. If you think you can match the gravelly tones of Doug Cockle (challenge level: impossible), you can sign up for auditions via the mod's Discord.

The War Project is due to release in February 2027. That seems a teensy bit optimistic to me, given the scope of the mod and the fact it's only a quarter done. Nonetheless, I am confident that this will see the light of day, and am excited to be reunited with my beautiful Iorveth whenever The War Project finally marches out of camp.

CD Projekt Red currently has more irons in the fire than Geralt of Rivia's favourite blacksmith. There's The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2, which on their own are enough to keep the studio busy for the next decade. But there's also the mysterious Project Hadar, which we know very little about despite it being in the works for years.

A few details have emerged over that duration. It's a new IP rather than a licensed game, one that CD Projekt had "established the foundation of" as of March 2026. Now though we have some idea of what those foundations are, thanks to a new job listing posted to CDPR's open positions page.

The listing (via Eurogamer) is for an engineering director—someone who will oversee the game's architecture and technical strategy. "In this position, together with the rest of the team, you will help push the envelope for the next, immersive game in the Hadar world, creating an emotional, open world experience that will stay with gamers."

From a developer that specialises in emotional open-world games, it's hardly a revelation. But I suppose it tells us that CDP is sticking to what it knows with Hadar rather than trying something radically different—at least as far as the structure of the game is concerned—and it's more likely to be defined by its world and theme than by offering a completely new type of game experience.

I had a recce around the rest of the jobs page to see if the listings revealed any further details, but the best I could come up with is that Hadar will have quests and NPCs, which is a bit like saying "this book will have nouns and verbs in it". Another job posting from last year suggested Hadar will feature melee combat, which is a bit more specific, but not much.

Given that the Hadar team is still small—26 people at last count—I expect it will be some time before the game properly breaks cover. In other CD Projekt-related news, what did break cover was the heavily rumoured third expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It's called Songs of the Past, is being developed by Fool's Theory—the team behind the (currently postponed) Witcher 1 remake—and will be "closer to Blood & Wine in scope"—in other words, massive.

Here's a nice little bit of trivia to carry you into your weekend: Amidst all the hullabaloo about the surprise Witcher 3 expansion Songs of the Past that was announced earlier this week, CD Projekt also revealed that Geralt's big(gest) adventure has now surpassed 65 million copies sold.

"The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which recently celebrated its 11th anniversary, has just crossed another spectacular sales threshold: 65 million copies," CD Projekt chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz said in the studio's financial results commentary. "This cements its place among the best-selling videogames in history."

And indeed it does: Over on Wikipedia (which, for the record, notes that its ranking "may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness" but is nonetheless, in my opinion, representative of the big picture situation), The Witcher 3 is now cited as the eighth best-selling videogame of all time. behind Terraria's 70 million copies sold, and ahead of Super Mario Bros. at 58 million.

That's still a long way from the true kings of the castle—Tetris, Minecraft, and Grand Theft Auto 5—but it's still a hell of an accomplishment by any measure, and especially for a game that emerged from an unlikely partnership between an unknown game studio and an equally obscure fantasy author—both from the not-exactly-a-gaming-hotbed (at the time) country of Poland.

What makes the accomplishment even more notable is the relentlessness of its advance. The Witcher 3 hit 20 million copies sold in 2019, four years after its release—an average of five million copies per year. Four years after that, it achieved 50 million copies, running the average up to a little over six million per year since launch. In 2025 it hit 60 million copies sold—another five million per year out the door—and now, one year later, five million more copies are in the book.

It's extremely quick and dirty math (the only kind I'm good at) but the picture it paints is clear: The Witcher 3 has not just a very long tail, but also a remarkably steady one. The cynic in me can't help but think Songs of the Past is a sign that The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 are a lot further off than we like to think and CD Projekt needs something to bridge the gap, but at the same time there's no denying that year over year over year, The Witcher 3 continues to be a hit videogame. Given that persistent interest, why not make more?

I imagine we'll see another notable sales bump in 2027, assuming CD Projekt is able to get the Songs of the Past expansion out on that schedule. Also note, though, that the studio teased even more new content coming this year—there may be even more life left in Geralt than we expect.

It's been a big couple of days for Witcher fans as an expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was confirmed (after it was accidentally leaked on the RED Launcher, whoopsie). But thanks to a Q&A portion at the end of the financial call we also now know a bit more about CD Projekt Red's aspirational release timeline.

After CDPR joint CEO Michał Nowakowski answered some questions about the upcoming Songs of the Past, and stressed how it is an expansion, not a DLC, he went on to discuss other potential expansions for the series (via GamesRadar). But don't get your hopes up, because with CDPR's current timeline there likely won't be any space.

Someone asked Nowakowski, "Given the very ambitious project pipeline, does the company see room for developing expansions for the new Witcher saga?" To which he answered: "As you mentioned in the question, the plans are pretty ambitious. Specifically, it's to release three Witcher games within a six-year period. It would be difficult, to be very honest, for us to add an expansion to the upcoming trilogy. This is where we are here and now with this particular issue."

Yeah that's fair. If the schedule does go to plan that would mean fans of The Witcher would be getting a new game every couple of years, which is a pretty decent timeline. There's also nothing to say that CDPR won't go back to The Witcher 4 or subsequent games after the trilogy is complete and add expansions after the fact.

But at the same time it's probably a good idea to not get our hopes too high, as I'm rather doubtful that CDPR will actually be able to keep up with this schedule. Not because of any lack of faith, I'm just a natural pessimist and have seen a great deal of game delays in my medium to short life so far.

CD Projekt finally confirmed yesterday that a new expansion for The Witcher 3 is in the works, called Songs of the Past. The announcement brought months of rumors and speculation (and one cheeky non-denial) to a close—ironically, a day earlier than planned, because CD Projekt accidentally let the big surprise leak out on its own storefront. Nobody to blame for that one but yourselves, fellas.

Anyway, very little about Songs of the Past was revealed yesterday, but today we got a little more insight into what to expect courtesy of CD Projekt's Q1 2026 financial report, which is when the studio had originally planned to reveal it. In pre-recorded commentary, in fact, chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz did announce Songs of the Past, as though nothing untoward had happened yesterday. No sense redoing the whole thing just for that, I guess.

The more interesting tidbits, though, came during the Q&A portion of CD Projekt's financial call, during which co-CEO Michał Nowakowski emphasized pointedly that this is not a DLC.

"First of all, I cannot stop myself. It's not a DLC, it's an expansion," Nowakowski said in response to a question about how Songs of the Past will compare to previous Witcher 3 expansions Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine—which the questioner referred to as DLC. "DLCs are the smaller ones which we typically give for free. Expansions are the bigger and juicy ones."

As for the comparison of scope the caller was asking about, Songs of the Past is "actually a little bit closer to Blood and Wine, but this is super-subjective," Nowakowski said.

"It really depends on how you're going to play, what's your playthrough. But we're definitely making a proper big expansion, is the message I would send out there."

CD Projekt had initially assumed that it would launch Songs of the Past this year, but ultimately decided to push it into 2027. But the studio also hinted that there might be other upcoming Witcher 3 content, still unrevealed, that will be out before the end of '26.

"For several quarters we've been disclosing that our pipeline includes some unannounced projects being in an advanced production stage, and one of those is the expansion being co-developed with Fool's Theory," Nielubowicz (I think) said during the call. "Our early plans assumed that Songs of the Past could be released this year. However, we decided that it will be launching in 2027.

"We obviously have some other content currently at an advanced production phase as well. And while it's obviously not on the same scale as the major expansion, we will plan to release it this year."

For the most part, CD Projekt is still keeping things under wraps, which is no great surprise given how far out Songs of Past remains. But it is setting expectations high: The Witcher 3's Blood and Wine expansion is phenomenally good, almost an entire standalone RPG unto itself, that delivers one of the most satisfying conclusions to a videogame character arc ever. Even without saying anything else about it, invoking Blood and Wine in a direct comparison with Songs of the Past is a bold choice.

It won't be too much longer before we get a proper look at Songs of the Past: CD Projekt also said today that it will be showing off the expansion at Gamescom, which runs August 26-30. We'll be there.

Wind's howling... And it's taking us to gamescom in Cologne!Come join us in the entertainment area, where we will be showing Songs of the Past!See you on the Path ⚔️

— @thewitcher.com (@thewitcher.com.bsky.social) 2026-05-28T19:45:53.586Z

CD Projekt finally confirmed today that it's working on a new expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, called Songs of the Past, that's expected to be out sometime in 2027. As part of that announcement, the studio also said it's updating the game's system requirements "to ensure smooth performance and compatibility going forward."

It initially struck me as a bit odd that CD Projekt would need to update hardware requirements for a game that's more than 10 years old—after all, PCs now are more powerful than PCs then, right? So you'd think that if anything, The Witcher 3 would run better than ever these days.

It comes down to the "compatibility" part of the statement: An awful lot has happened in the past decade, including the release, and end, of Windows 10. And that's the issue: The Witcher 3 supported Windows 7 and 8 at launch, and support for those came to a halt in 2023; Windows 10 got the ka-chunk, with some exceptions, in 2025.

As a result, when the next Witcher 3 update goes live, this will be the new minimum system spec:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600, Intel Core i5-8400
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660, AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB
• VRAM: 6 GB
• RAM: 12 GB
• Storage: 70 GB SSD
• OS: 64-bit Windows 11

CD Projekt said the updated requirements "reflect how hardware capabilities and software usage have evolved," and noted in particular that Windows 11 is now the minimum required OS following the end of support for earlier versions of the OS: "Without ongoing security updates, official platform support, and continued GPU driver support, we will no longer test our games on Windows 10." And as a result of that, only CPUs and GPUs with official ongoing Windows 11 support will be supported by CD Projekt.

DirectX 11 support is being dropped because going with DX12 exclusively "allows us to support ongoing technical improvements and modern hardware more effectively." And last but not least, HDDs will no longer be supported because SSDs are just so damn much better. (I just hope you already have one.)

Just for fun, here's the original minimum spec, as still (for now) listed on Steam, slightly re-arranged for a better line-by-line matchup:

• CPU: Intel CPU Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz / AMD A10-5800K APU (3.8GHz)
• GPU: Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 660 / AMD GPU Radeon HD 7870
• VRAM: Whatever, man
• RAM: 6 GB RAM
• Storage: 50 GB available space
• OS: 64-bit Windows 7, 64-bit Windows 8 (8.1)

Now, none of this is to say that you won't be able to play The Witcher 3 on a PC that comes closer to the original hardware requirements than this updated spec: "Not supported" doesn't mean "won't run," after all, and the Steam Hardware and Software Survey indicates that a lot of you are still holding on to Windows 10—and there are even some true hardcores out there white-knuckling it with Windows 7. (Respect.)

It does mean, though, that you're going to need hipper hardware than you had 10 years ago if you want to be sure The Witcher 3 and its new expansion will run, and more to the point, if you want CD Projekt to help you if it does not.

There is one other avenue of recourse for those with aging rigs, however, at least for users on Steam or GOG. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Classic, "an earlier version of the game"—CD Projekt's support page doesn't detail it further—is available as a beta option, so you can always roll back to that. CD Projekt also didn't specify whether the older version of the game will support the upcoming expansion, so you might be hosed on that front—and you're definitely hosed if you play The Witcher 3 on the Epic Games Store, as it does not support access to older builds.

The prophecy has been fulfilled. After much speculation CD Projekt has finally confirmed that it is indeed working on a Witcher 3: Wild Hunt expansion, going even further to confirm its release window as well.

"Medallion's humming, which can only mean one thing," CD Projekt says in a blog post. "It's time to announce we're working on a brand new expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Get ready to return to the Path with Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt—Songs of the Past, coming in 2027."

I had to save myself from getting too sad that the release window is so far away, because a year in adult time isn't actually that long. Sure if this was 10 years ago it'd be like waiting decades for the expansion, but nowadays a year zips past in almost no time at all. I blame my laundry.

I'm just happy the DLC is finally confirmed, especially considering we weren't meant to find out about it today: "We originally planned to make this big reveal during our REDstreams tomorrow, but let's say we found something we didn't yet expect on RED Launcher." That unexpected find was actually leaked news of this very DLC. Some players woke up today to find the Songs of the Past announcement post appearing on their RED Launcher, obviously this then spread through the internet like wildfire.

It's a shame that this announcement couldn't make it just another day, but at least it didn't mess with CD's timeline too badly: "We’re currently co-developing the expansion with Fool’s Theory and we’ll share more in late summer, so stay tuned."

Alongside this new expansion CD also shared its plans to update its systems requirements "to ensure smooth performance and compatibility going forward" for Songs of the Past. "These requirements will become effective starting from the next update."

In the event you have not yet gotten around to 2015's best singleplayer game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, then beware—spoilers await you ahead.

If you have gotten around to it, then you'll be agonisingly aware of its most harrowing scene. After spending so long searching for Ciri, Geralt and the gang are (relatively) safely ensconced back at Kaer Morhen, enjoying a bit of a breather after the White Wolf's long schlep across Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige. You're squabbling with Yennefer, trading stories with Eskel, composing poetry with Lambert.

Then the Wild Hunt rocks up and puts a blade in Vesemir, the Wolf School's master and a father figure to Geralt and his fellow witchers. It's a gut-wrenching scene, and you can tell because it apparently wrenched the guts of the whole dang writing team. In a recollection of The Witcher 3's development on X, its lead quest designer (and current associate game director on Cyberpunk 2) Paweł Sasko wrote that, when he suggested to a room of devs that they off Vesemir, the reaction he got was "wide eyes and silence."

Alas, they overcame their sadness and acknowledged that "the weight of [Vesemir's death] is exactly what the act needs. Ciri's outburst, the moment she throws the Wild Hunt back, requires that the floor fall out from under her first." So CD Projekt got to work killing our witcher-grandad. Which wasn't easy, it turns out.

"I prototype meteors, rifts opening in the forest, Wild Hunt pouring out of them, the ride back to the keep on horseback. So much of it does not work. Technical issues. The quest flow is unclear. Review feedback I get is negative, so I rebuild." Gradually, tragically, the scene began to come together properly: "Pieces start to hold. I begin to see why something works and why the thing next to it does not. Through repetition I truly start understanding the craft."

If designing Vesemir's death is when things started really coming together for Sasko, in terms of the craft of making videogame narratives and setpieces, then I'm beginning to understand why Cyberpunk 2077 (on which he was lead quest designer) and Phantom Liberty (on which he was quest director) were so chock-full of tragic moments and Sophie's choices. I'll give Sasko this: he and his team are pretty good at them! Perhaps too good!

Oh, and just to rub it in, Sasko says he was "having the time of my life" while working on this stuff. "Designers are showing each other ideas in the team room. Someone solves a problem, someone else builds on top of it, someone else innovates and iterates. We are playing. We are putting cool things into a game we love." And killing my grandad, Sasko, don't forget that.

Project Sirius, the Witcher spinoff game that was announced in October 2022 and has struggled ever since, has a new lead writer: Former Bungie senior narrative designer and narrative lead Kwan Perng, who comes to the role after four years of helping to shape the post-launch world of Destiny 2.

Perng announced his new gig on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, but it fell under the radar until he posted an update over the weekend on X (via GamesRadar).

In credits on Mobygames, Perng is just one of many people lumped in as a collective "narrative" team in Destiny 2 expansions including Shadowkeep, Beyond Light, The Witch Queen, Lightfall, The Final Shape, and The Edge of Fate. His LinkedIn page, though, says specifically that he was the narrative lead on The Final Shape, which is notable: The Final Shape ended Destiny's long-running 'Light and Darkness' saga, and it went out on a very high note.

"It's a big improvement from previous campaigns, which at their worst can feel like a meandering tour through destinations—spinning wheels to fill time ahead of the final confrontation," PC Gamer's Phil Savage wrote in his 92% review. "Here, you can see the castle you're progressing towards. The feeling of a journey—of the finality of your destination—gives some necessary stakes."

Kwan was one of 220 Bungie developers who were let go in the shocking layoffs imposed by the studio in July 2024, after which he spent several months as narrative and world lead at Last Epoch studio Eleventh Hour Games. His new role, helping head up a new Witcher game, is considerably higher-profile, but don't expect to be hearing too much about it anytime soon.

"It will be some time before I can talk about the project, but in the meantime I've been immersing myself in the dark and eclectic universe of The Witcher," Perng wrote. "It's humbling to get the opportunity to tell stories in this world and in the company of such talented developers."

It hasn't been the smoothest ride for Project Sirius: Over the five years since its existence was first hinted at, the project has been scrapped and rebooted, while developer Molasses Flood—which CD Projekt acquired in 2021—has ceased to exist as a distinct creative entity. Bringing on a new lead writer three years after the game was purportedly back on track makes me wonder if maybe some of those troubles have persisted, but the fact that CD Projekt refuses to give up on it even after all that makes me think it must be pretty confident in... well, whatever it is, or could be.

Alexander Morton, the voice of Geralt's stout, stalwart pal Zoltan Chivay in The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3, has died. Morton's death was reported in a tribute to the actor shared on social media by The Witcher developer CD Projekt.

"We're deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Alexander Morton, the voice of beloved Zoltan Chivay in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt," the studio wrote. "Our thoughts are with his family and friends. Thank you for bringing Zoltan to life. The Continent is already missing you."

We're deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Alexander Morton, the voice of beloved Zoltan Chivay in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Our thoughts are with his family and friends. Thank you for bringing Zoltan to life. The Continent is already missing you 💔

— @thewitcher.com (@thewitcher.com.bsky.social) 2026-04-17T16:42:20.495Z

Morton had a few other videogame credits to his name, including Fable 2, Age of Conan, Heavenly Sword, Killzone 2, and Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. But his portrayal of Zoltan is surely his best-known work among gamers: Gravel-voiced and foul-mouthed, Zoltan is nonetheless a relatively cool head among dwarves, although quite capable of spilling over into violent rage when the moment calls for it. Morton deftly captured that complexity in his portrayal of the character, making him one of the game's most memorable NPCs.

But while his videogame credits are relatively slim, Morton was an acclaimed actor in the UK. He was best known for playing the role of Golly Mackenzie in the series Monarch of the Glen, but appeared in numerous other series in a career stretching back to the 1970s.

"We're saddened to hear the news about Alexander Morton who made a significant contribution to Scottish television and theatre. His portrayal of Golly Mackenzie in Monarch of the Glen was a key part of the long-running drama's success," BBC Scotland commissioning head Louise Thornton said in a BBC report. "He will be remembered fondly for the depth and authenticity he brought to one of BBC Scotland's most cherished dramas."

Noted film and television actor Robert Carlyle also paid tribute to Morton in an Instagram post, saying he was "not only a brilliant actor, but one of the kindest men I ever knew."

Alexander Morton was 81.

The Witcher 3 is a deep, textured game with incredible worldbuilding—worldbuilding that the Witcher Online mod on NexusMods delves deeply into. Finally, you can explore the Continent with your friends, doing setting-appropriate activities like (checks notes) er, riding about on each other's shoulders, and (frantically sweating, flipping through notes in a panic) turning into a little kitty cat.

The mod in question, which has been available since January of this year, is an impressive feat—turning the singleplayer game into a mini-MMO. But with that feat accomplished, it seems like mod author rejuvenate has been throwing in some madcap ideas just because.

The latest update really is a fascinating spread of sensible additions and utter nonsense—so I'll get the nonsense out of the way first. Players can now ride each other's heads, forming a kind of horrifying totem pole of Geralts to, I assume, scare the monsters of Skellige so thoroughly that they die of a heart attack.

You can also turn into a cat, if you want—or a fox, crow, or owl. Some of these morphs are genuinely pretty cool, mind. Being able to fly around Witcher 3's game world does sound neat, but still, I must've missed the bit where Geralt became half-doppler. Maybe it's in the books somewhere.

To take my tongue out of my cheek for a moment, there are some genuinely neat additions to the mod that are more in-line with what you'd expect, too: Player trading, shared horses and boats, a player menu, and 23 whole emotes to share with your friends. One of them is just called "baguette".

In all seriousness, it's neat to see this mod develop further from its fairly rudimentary origins. Making use of CD Projekt's open world to turn it into a little MMO is a wonderful example of the Witcher 3 mod community's ingenuity, and a perfect encapsulation of its balance between silliness and genuine improvements.

Today's CD Projekt earnings report didn't deliver any news on the heavily-rumored but doggedly-unconfirmed Witcher 3 DLC we're all hoping for. It did however share "an important development update" about the other big CDPR mystery, Project Hadar.

"Work on the project is progressing dynamically, and the team has established the foundation of this entirely new IP," CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski said during the investors presentation. "Now, we have clearly-defined distinguishing features of this world, and established key pillars that will not only provide the foundation for the game itself, but also potentially for other future products. Of course this does not mean the end of work on IP itself, which will naturally continue to evolve, and develop on many fronts over time.

"The team is now actively designing specific elements that might be included in the game. We are creating multiple prototypes, and implementing them directly into Unreal Engine. This allows us to live-test and verify how selected mechanics and gameplay elements can perform."

As updates go, this one isn't exactly laden with detail, but it's notable for two reasons: One, Hadar will be CD Projekt's first all-original work—the studio described it as "a third, entirely distinct IP, created from scratch within CDPR" when Hadar was announced—and two, that announcement happened in 2022 and we still know literally nothing about it.

Some of that persistent silence may be attributable to hard lessons learned from Cyberpunk 2077 but I don't really care about that—I want to know what's going on with Hadar. So this is at least movement in that direction.

For now, though, the focus is clearly on The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2: CD Projekt has hired more than 200 new employees over the past 12 months, and while The Witcher 4 team is by far the largest, with 499 people working on it, the Cyberpunk 2 dev team has bulked up the most, growing from 84 employees as of February 28, 2025, to 149 a year later.

You may have heard rumors about new Witcher 3 DLC being developed, very quietly and in secret, by CD Projekt. Leakers have said it's happening; analysts have said it needs to happen; IGN Poland said, yeah bud, we heard all about this years ago. And now CD Projekt itself has finally chimed in to say it has nothing new in the works—for, umm, Cyberpunk 2077.

"We have no plans for additional DLCs or expansions," the Cyberpunk 2077 account on X (via RPS) said in response to a four-word inquiry from an account with 12 followers. "If anything changes, we will inform you all!"

There are some varied reactions to the message. Some Cyberpunk fans are disappointed, or angry, that CD Projekt doesn't have anything new coming to the game. Others take the "if anything changes" bit of the reply as, "So you're telling me there's a chance?" and hey, you have to admire the optimism.

But the most interesting reactions, I think, are coming from The Witcher side of the CD Projekt street, where some more conspiratorial thinkers (or maybe it's just me and Mark at RPS?) see it as potentially classic dad-style wordplay: There are no plans for Cyberpunk 2077 DLC, but we never said anything about Witcher 3!

(It's not just Mark and me, for the record.)

And why is CD Projekt replying to a 12-follower account anyway? I mean no disrespect, but people fire questions and demands at the studio's social media accounts all day, every day, so why a response to this particular question?

Unless, well.

Look, I know nothing about anything that's happening, and sometimes—as we saw with Iron Galaxy's Fallout: New Vegas "Please Stand By" screen, which looked so obvious yet ended up meaning nothing, if you believe that—smoke does not mean fire, it just means someone's blasting a cig out on the loading dock during their break.

Maybe that's the case here, too. But as I said about that New Vegas situation, you can't just drop this kind of stuff in the middle of a pack of ravenous, rumor-fuelled gamers and expect no reaction. The corollary of that, of course, is that if you do expect a reaction, well, maybe you have a little fun with it.

One other thing to note: CD Projekt's next earnings report is set for March 19, less than one week from today. Does CD Projekt make a habit of announcing new things during investors events? Not always on purpose, no, but sometimes, yes—and yes, I will be tuning in. I'll let you know if anything interesting happens.

Great news: here, at the long end of its redemption arc, Cyberpunk 2077 is finally, totally fixed. Its last remaining flaw has been repaired. The last gap in the edifice has been covered: You can now shit yourself to death.

Apologies for the blue language. That's usually against our style guide, but I feel that Flushing Etiquette, a mod for Cyberpunk 2077 with much more thought put into it than you'd expect, warrants it. In short, it adds the call of nature to Cyberpunk 2077—V now periodically has to visit the little samurai's room or risk consequences. What consequences? See above.

"Either food in NC creates zero waste or V is sporting some kind of chromed up intestine, V can no longer escape nature's call," declares author juiiicy00 This mod adds a new resource meter which you have to manage by visiting the toilet regularly. You could use it alongside Dark Future – Urban Survival Gameplay, which adds needs and addiction mechanics, if you choose. Or you could just freebase the poop mod. Your choice.

"Eat, kill, shit repeat" reads the mod's Core Gameplay overview.

You get a Sims-style bathroom gauge to which you must attend, to put it bluntly. Consumption fills it, using the flush interaction on a lavatory empties it. There are no new animations, thank God.

I admit, I'm writing about this because I'm 12 and think it's kind of funny, but that alone wouldn't be enough. It's also, just, weirdly robust as joke mods go. Yes, yes, eating and drinking fills the bar and bathrooms empty it. But alongside that, cheap food has a chance to give you food poisoning (instant 100% meter), your visits to the bathroom can be, uh, rough or smooth. A good visit? Buffs. A bad one? Pain. Which kind you get is determined by a diceroll.

Oh, and yes, the pièce de résistance: "When your meter hits 100%, your screen starts flashing and a timer begins. If you don't find a usable toilet before the timer runs out V violently shits their pants dying from embarrassment. No really… you will flatline."

Modding is an art.

It must be incredibly weird to play a game and constantly hear your own voice popping off—especially when that game is as long as The Witcher 3. But that didn't stop the best version of Geralt of Rivia, Doug Cockle, from playing through the entirety of the game and netting himself the best ending.

Chatting to GoatedSynro on YouTube (cheers, GamesRadar), Cockle said he's played through the game once, "I don't have enough time in my life to find all the endings", but that he got the ending he wanted the first time around.

"I knew the ending that I wanted. I didn't know all the endings, I didn't know exactly what CD Projekt Red had in store for us depending on the choices we make, but I knew that one of the possibilities was that Geralt would end up with Triss and that Ciri would be a witcher and everybody lives happily ever after. And that is the one I got. I was working towards it, but I couldn't remember all the choices, I didn't know the choices that would lead me there. I just made the choices that I thought would be helpful in getting me toward that ending."

Ciri becoming a witcher is usually considered the most favourable ending, though there's more of a debate over what romantic partner Big Gerry should end up with. Though I'm with Cockle, here. Yen's a bit of a bully, and he has a lot more fun with Triss. They're besties. Also, there's the hair: "I'm partial to red heads," he said.

Surprisingly, though, Shani beats out both of them for Cockle's favourite romance. Triss comes in at number two, and Yen at three.

Cockle also ranked all the areas, and Skellige is his favourite: "I loved the whole Crach an Craite thing," he said. "I love the whole place; I just thought it was a brilliant area to explore." And he's got a soft spot for Kaer Morhen, which comes in at number two. "I liked exploring Geralt's home," he said, "and so many fun things happen in Kaer Morhen. Kaer Morhen is where they all get drunk and dress up in women's clothes, and stuff like that. So that's good fun."

While it features The Witcher 3's best quest, he placed Velen closer to the bottom, behind Toussaint and Novigrad. He liked the area, especially Crookback Bog, but the Bloody Baron quest drove him "bonkers".

"The Bloody Baron, that quest drove me bonkers in the beginning, because it was before I had access to, or before I discovered the ability to fast travel in the world. So I was just riding my fricking horse up and down that hill. And you have to leave Roach and some point, and then you're just running up the hill. And it was just up and down, up and down, it drove me crazy."

Unfortunately fast travel wouldn't have made a difference, as the fast travel point isn't quite close enough to the titular baron to let you avoid running up and down that hill.

I don't think I'll ever tire of listening to Cockle talk about The Witcher—and thankfully he doesn't seem sick of talking about it, either. And it's also a treat to listen to a performer enthuse about the game as a player, rather than just as someone who worked on it. It's well worth giving the video a watch to hear his full romance and location rankings.

Nerial is the French indie studio behind Card Shark and the Reigns series, and not immediately the team you would pick for a Witcher game—unless it was a singleplayer Gwent story like Thronebreaker perhaps. Instead, Nerial is adapting the Reigns series to Geralt's adventures, having had what they call "great success" with a Game of Thrones version in 2018. A conversation with CD Projekt Red at GDC a couple of years ago got the ball rolling, and later this month they'll be releasing Reigns: The Witcher.

"The games were our first point of reference, as we're working with CDPR", creative director Francois Alliot and narrative designer Oscar Harrington-Shaw say, answering my questions via email as a gestalt. "So you'll meet familiar characters such as Yen, Triss, and Regis who more closely resemble their character in the games rather than the books, and we've adapted many popular quests and iconic moments—you might encounter a stuffed unicorn, or a mute druid."

While this game's cartoon versions of everyone from Dandelion to godlings are faithful to The Witcher 3, Nerial has added to the lore as well. Playing a preview build I was eaten by a tarasque—not the D&D monster with two Rs in its name, but the lion-headed dragon-turtle of French mythology. As Alliot and Harrington-Shaw say, "we love how [Witcher creator Andrzej] Sapkowski poached from lots of disparate strands of mythology to inspire the books, and so we also took this approach when writing new storylines, taking inspiration from Euripidean tragedies, the lais of Marie de France and even Provençal folklore."

Getting their game to gel with the existing world of the games and the books was made easier when they hit on the structure, with each of your pick-a-path adventures a ballad being composed by Dandelion based on Geralt's saga, rather than a "real" event from his life. It took a while to come up with this more fanciful spin on the regular Reigns structure of playing a ruler and then their heirs.

"One thought was to frame the game as though you were playing through a mage's prediction of a potential future for Geralt," they say, "using cards to divine possible upcoming events. We wondered if the reveal at the end could have been that this card divination was in fact the original use of Gwent cards, as though Reigns: The Witcher was the backstory of Gwent. Sort of the reverse of the history of Tarot, which began as a card game and was later used for fortune-telling. But it was hard to square this with the chronology of the Witcher universe."

Each decision you make has an effect on four meters measuring how liked or hated Geralt is by different communities, and how committed he is to the witcher's path. Turn down a noble who demands you burn a mage's tower for daring to be taller than his own and the magical community will like you more, while the human population will like you less. Make enough decisions that bottom out Geralt's human appeal and you'll be lynched. Making decisions that top out meters can be just as dangerous, like when I cozied up to the mages too much and died of overexertion in a drug-fueled sorceress orgy.

An earlier version of the favorability system "placed too much of an emphasis on the class politics of the Witcher world, as opposed to human vs nonhuman conflict, and didn't allow much focus on combat," the developers say. "By reducing the factional values to three (human, nonhuman and mage) and introducing the monster-hunting value, this shifted the balance closer to the source material, where Geralt is balancing the favor of hostile groups, but also trying to survive as a sword for hire. When the monster-hunting value reaches the maximum it triggers a fight with a monster, generally the one you're currently tracking."

These fights are new to Reigns, a rhythmic minigame where your opponent rains attacks down a board as you hop left and right to dodge them while trying to catch swords and land on signs to defeat your foe. While traditionally Reigns has found most of its audience on mobile, where swiping to make decisions has a deliberately dating-app feel, this makes it seem more at home on a handheld. "We've done a lot of our testing on Steam Deck", Alliot and Harrington-Shaw say. "It's been Steam Deck Verified by Valve and we think it's one of the best ways to play the game. It feels right at home."

Though if you're playing it in public, don't let anyone see what you get up to with the stuffed unicorn and the sorceresses. Reigns: The Witcher will be available on Steam and GOG from February 25.

Artur Ganszyniec, the lead story designer of the original Witcher RPG, recently completed a full playthrough of the game he helped create nearly 20 years ago, documented across 26 separate episodes on YouTube. And at the end of it all, he dropped an interesting little bit of trivia: The game's epic, out-of-nowhere ending wasn't originally what the story team wanted, and he thinks it was a "mistake."

First things first, the ending in question: Geralt collects his payment from King Foltest and heads for the door, but there's trouble afoot!

Cool fight, but it's the up-close look at the dead dude that really sets the table: The would-be assassin is a witcher! It's a very obvious setup for a sequel, which you might naturally think meant that CD Projekt had something specific in mind for subsequent games. And maybe CD Projekt management did, but the story team? Not really.

"That's where we wanted the game to end, like with an open question and open future," Ganszyniec says as the game's closing montage plays. "But while we were finishing the game, someone decided—like the board decided, or [CD Projekt co-founder Michał Kiciński] decided that we needed an animated outro of the game.

"And the script for this ... it was created not really involving the story team. So it was sort of, we weren't really paying attention. And that was a mistake I think."

The problem, in Ganszyniec's mind, is that the outro effectively locked The Witcher 2 onto a particular path: "It became evident that the next game will have to follow up on this and tell a story about witchers who are killing kings for some reason. And that's why the second Witcher is very political and there's not really much room for exploring who Geralt is, his family, his history, and stuff like this."

I can understand Ganszyniec's frustrations. Building to an open-ended conclusion that leaves Geralt's future adventures open to whatever, only to have it superseded by a surprise twist that really constrains the creative direction of the follow-up game, has to suck a little bit. On the other hand, it's hard to argue with success, and The Witcher 2 was very successful indeed: As of January 2026, it's sold more than 15 million copies, helping turn CD Projekt into one of the biggest game studios in Europe.

"That was a very satisfying half of the year," begin Artur Ganszyniec's closing comments as the credits roll on CD Projekt's original Witcher game from 2007. Five months prior, he took to YouTube to share a full let's play of the cult classic RPG in a series appropriately called "The Witcher with a designer's commentary." The last episode just went up yesterday.

If you're a fan of the original Witcher RPG or the blockbusters that followed it, it's a treasure trove of insights into the series' humble beginnings. Ganszyniec was lead story designer on the original game and also wrote some dialogue here and there, and his video descriptions note, are all about "adding context to some design choices, sharing anecdotes, and providing behind-the-scenes."

The whole thing is 26 episodes, each around an hour or two long, so it's easy enough to treat like a podcast you can throw up on a second monitor. As the first video in the series notes, it's Ganszyniec's first time playing the game in "almost 20 years."

The game has certainly aged—it was admittedly rough the day it dropped—but it was an ambitious game that's easier than ever to play now with the overhauled Enhanced Edition. It's overshadowed these days by the other two fantastic Witcher games, as well as the multiple TV shows and spinoffs the fantasy novel series has inspired, but it still stands as a big milestone in CD Projekt's history and stands tall as a worthwhile RPG. It may not be the best, but it'll always be the first.

I suppose that's why it's got a full remake on the way, which Ganszyniec says he hopes will be good toward the end of his let's play series. We've come a long way since 2007 in more ways than one, and maybe it's good enough to not even warrant remaking, but either way, the original is still there and worth remembering. If 19 years of fermented jank is too much to bear, this let's play might be a good way to get a sense for what you missed all those years ago.

Brothers in Arms is a mod for The Witcher 3 that combines bug fixes with restoration of cut content. It's a frequently updated mod—last time we checked it restored a bunch of dialogue, including a Yennefer romance scene—but the most recent update is particularly substantial. The lengthy list of additions in version 3.1.0 includes the note: "Restored a completely new plotline - Shani's fate during Hearts of Stone expansion. Features a new ending for the expansion (optional)."

As shown by YouTube's exhaustive Witcher 3 documenter xLetalis in the video above, this plotline helps explain why Shani returns in the Hearts of Stone expansion. At one point in development her life would have been at stake if you crossed the expansion's villain Gaunter O'Dimm.

The restored scenes use dialogue found in the game files, which suggests this plotline was cut quite late in development, but everything else has been made from scratch. It's incredible how well it fits, with everything from camera angles to character animations and lip-sync up to the standard of the rest of the game.

That said, I'm not particularly fussed this storyline was cut. The conclusion, in which your local version of Lucifer kills Shani with lightning, doesn't seem quite right. It's an unsubtle maneuver, and one that can be countered because the wording of his specific threat, "there will be no place under the sun where she will be safe," doesn't extend to the cellar. Though it does include the other indoor areas of her house? I prefer the way things play out in the version we've already got.

Fortunately, Brothers in Arms lets you choose what you add, with an extensive in-game menu letting you toggle its various additions. You can download it from Nexus Mods. If you're using other mods, you'll want to run Script Merger as well to detect conflicts and let you merge them to override any problems.

A modder called rejuvenate, previously responsible for the Wolven Trainer (which bundles together freecam, a time-of-day changer, a wardrobe editor, and a bunch of other tweaks), has finally done it. The Witcher 3 is multiplayer now.

Witcher Online is a mod that lets you connect to a server full of other witchers (and Yennefers and Dandelions and the like) who can hang out together and emote via console commands. Before you get your hopes up for the kind of co-op you get in Skyrim Together, I should warn you that Witcher Online doesn't sync enemies between players, meaning that you won't be able to team up with some friends to take down a boss.

It also doesn't sync horses, so anyone riding one will appear to be racing along in midair, and the same goes for sailboats. You can't play Gwent together either, though you can enjoy some company while fishing on the pier. Which is nice.

Witcher Online is more about taking the dark fantasy world of the Continent and making it a comfy place, as the mod description puts it, "to play with your friends, customize your character using Custom Player Characters and relax in taverns using Chill Out. Chat with strangers and perform emotes to roleplay with other players."

It's impressive that it exists at all, even if it can't synchronize the time of day between players or let you take down a mob of nekkers together. And if you really want to play Gwent with pals, there's already a way to do that.

You can download Witcher Online from Nexus Mods, though you'll need to install Custom Player Characters, Chill Out, and Community Patch – Shared Imports first. A full installation guide is available.

The maker of the popular R.E.A.L. VR mod for Cyberpunk 2077 has accused CD Projekt of "iron-clad corpo logic" after the studio issued a DMCA demanding the mod's removal.

"Many of you have noticed that two of my recent posts disappeared about a week ago," mod maker Luke Ross wrote over the weekend on his Patreon. "I apologize that I could not comment personally about the fact, because there was an ongoing legal exchange.

"Now that the dust has settled, I'm even more sorry to announce that we are leaving behind an adventure that so many of you deeply loved and enjoyed. CD Projekt SA decided that they would follow in Take-Two Interactive Software's steps and issued a DMCA notice against me for the removal of the Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod."

Ross is the maker of R.E.A.L. VR, which is essentially a mod framework that brings VR support numerous games, including Elden Ring, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Far Cry 4-6, Marvel's Spider-Man, Star Wars Outlaws, and others. All very cool: The problem is that if you want the mod, you have to subscribe to his Patreon, and charging money for mods is something that most big publishers—including CD Projekt—take issue with. The Take-Two comparison in Ross' message arises from that company's DMCA claims against the R.E.A.L. VR mod for Grand Theft Auto 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and the Mafia trilogy in 2022.

"In the end it amounted to the same iron-clad corpo logic: every little action that a company takes is in the name of money, but everything that modders do must be absolutely for free," Ross wrote.

"As usual they stretch the concept of 'derivative work' until it's paper-thin, as though a system that allows visualizing 40+ games in fully immersive 3D VR was somehow built making use of their intellectual property. And as usual they give absolutely zero f***s about how playing their game in VR made people happy, and they cannot just be grateful about the extra copies of the title they sold because of that—without ever having to pour money into producing an official conversion (no, they're not planning to release their own VR port, in case you were wondering)."

For the record, the R.E.A.L. VR mod is popular and apparently very lucrative: A 2022 report by The Verge said Ross (not his real name) was earning more than $20,000 per month from the mod.

Some of the responses to Ross' post on his Patreon page are critical of CD Projekt, and urge followers to write the company and ask that the takedown request be lifted. Others point out that he could simply release the Cyberpunk 2077 mod standalone, for free, with an optional button for donations.

There appears to be even stronger pushback on the Virtualreality subreddit. "This is not the first mod the modder had taken down because he tried to make a live service out of it," Frraksurred wrote. "He knew he was outside the ToS and just chose to get away with it as long as he could. Now he's trying to play the victim."

Redditor ottermoment also made a not-flattering comparison between the Cyberpunk 2077 takedown and the disappearance of those VR mods for Rockstar games.

Comment from r/virtualreality

"'By the corpos' who created everything and they clearly say that paid mods aren't allowed," redditor MotherFunker1734 added. "Mods aren't a profit machine. Not everything has to be made for profit. No, he doesn't have to get paid 100,000 times for something he wrote once using someone else's code."

Taking the donation route would almost certainly be fine. CD Projekt has historically been supportive of modding, but the first "golden rule" of its fan content guidelines is "no commercial usage," and describes almost exactly what Ross is doing with the R.E.A.L. VR mod: "We’re happy for you to accept reasonable donations in connection with your fan content, but you’re not allowed to make people pay for it or have it behind any sort of paywall (e.g. don’t make content only available to paid subscribers)."

Even so, Ross admitted to being "bitter" about the takedown, "especially when they never even knew or cared during all this time that the VR conversion was there, and are only knee-jerk reacting now because somebody reported to them that it existed and it was not free."

Despite that obvious anger, Ross said he wanted to end his message on a positive note, which he did by announcing that R.E.A.L. VR now supports Baldur's Gate 3. I guess we'll see how Hasbro feels about this sort of thing soon enough.

With nearly half a million words in its script and 950 speaking roles to voice them, one thing The Witcher 3 isn't short of is dialogue. Yet like any properly edited work of fiction, there were originally a lot more words in CD Projekt's brilliant RPG. Hundreds of cut voice lines lurk within The Witcher 3's game files, ranging from simple one-liners to dialogue choices and even entire cutscenes.

Under the forensic eye of PC gaming's modding community, however, nothing remains hidden for long. Over the last few years, The Witcher 3 mega-mod Brothers in Arms has restored hundreds of these cut lines (alongside other features like missing NPCs, restored books and journal entries). Brothers in Arms has been regularly updated since its release in 2021, with a new update reinstating even more missing dialogue from CD Projekt's cutting-room floor.

These newly restored lines and cutscenes were highlighted by YouTuber xLetalis. The most notable is a new romance scene between Geralt and Yennefer that occurs during the quest The Last Wish. It revolves around a dialogue choice for Geralt where he chooses whether to say "I love you" to Yennefer.

In the original version, if he chooses not to say it, it leads to a brief and cordial exchange between the lovers. In the restored version, however, choosing not to say "I love you" not only results in a longer exchange, but it's also more romantic, with Geralt and Yen sharing a kiss before parting ways. This isn't the only additional scene from The Last Wish that the updated mod restores, either. Another choice, made at the end of the quest, has been expanded with a scene where Geralt and Yen hold hands.

Elsewhere, other restored lines include a scene where Ciri talks to the warriors of the Wild Hunt, an additional conversation with fellow Witcher Eskel when Geralt returns to Kaer Morhen, and an expanded list of dialogue choices during the Witcher 3's Bloody Baron quest. Here, the player can more clearly vocalise whether they intend to kill or cure the Botchling while speaking to the Baron, although the choice doesn't force you to pursue either of those approaches—possibly why it was cut.

Indeed, for most of the cut lines, I can see a case both for CD Projekt removing them and the modders restoring them. A few are no-brainers, though. Primarily, the first restored line covered by XLetalis is uttered by the Noonwraith monster when Geralt first encounters it: The Noonwraith's ridiculous cackle undermines the tension of the moment, so it's obvious why it fell victim to the editor's scissors.

If you fancy packing The Witcher 3 with even more words, you can download Brothers in Arms over on NexusMods. There's also an outside chance that CD Projekt might officially expand The Witcher 3 this year. Rumours that the studio is working on new DLC for its fantasy RPG are currently swirling, with IGN Poland claiming that it heard about this expansion years ago. Given The Witcher 4 won't be out before 2027, CD Projekt wanting a stopgap isn't completely implausible, and it would certainly be nice to have one last adventure as Geralt before stepping into Ciri's shoes in CD Projekt's highly anticipated sequel.

In an industry whose most recent high-profile buyouts cost tens of billions of dollars, the December sale of GOG—for the relatively humble sum of around $25 million—might seem like barely a ripple in the pond. But the impact of the buyout was incommensurate with its cost. For years, GOG has marketed itself as the videogame storefront with values: preserving games, keeping them DRM-free, and letting you actually own them. But values have a tendency to fall by the wayside in the tumult of a corporate sale. Players were concerned.

But perhaps there's comfort to be taken from the fact that GOG's new boss is, quite literally, the same as the old boss. The store was acquired by Michał Kiciński, its original co-founder, under the explicit banner of preserving its integrity and mission statement.

"I think it has a very solid foundation as a company," Kiciński tells PC Gamer. "Good results, a very good brand—known, respected—with very clear values, and customers love it and stand behind it."

Plus, Kiciński has a sentimental attachment: "The less business[-y] reasons [for buying GOG] were: I'm kind of a parent of the company. I invented it back in 2005 together with Marcin Iwiński, and, for a moment, I was the first boss of the company… So I know the business. I know the company, and I didn't want it to be sold to, I don't know how to say it, to some random company." You know, the kind that might see all that chatter about DRM and game preservation as an obstacle to maximising profit.

Gold rush

The sale itself occurred in a remarkably compressed timeframe. "It was rather faster than it usually happens," says Kiciński. "Around September [2025], I found out that CD Projekt planned to sell GOG," recalls Kiciński, "so I joined the process around September." The next few months were a flurry: "It was quite an intensive few months: September, October, November, and especially December—the process was quite competitive."

Kiciński doesn't actually know who he was competing with for ownership of GOG—"We know only that there was one, probably big company competing with me," he says, and "some science shows" it was likely a US one—but he says he was concerned nevertheless. "I've seen some M&A [mergers and acquisitions] processes in the past, and I saw smaller companies being purchased by bigger companies, and then within a year or two disappear from the market.

"The database of customers was taken, the database of products was taken, teams were fired, things like that. I didn't want it to happen to GOG."

Why was CD Projekt looking to sell GOG, a company it owned for 17 years? Part of the reason isn't too hard to guess—GOG's simply not that profitable a part of the company compared to the megabucks the rest of it pumps out. Its net profit of, say, $1.2 million in 2022 might sound very nice to mere mortals like you and me, but CDP as a whole reported profits of over $120 million in 2024. Those are two quite different economic realities.

But there are broader, strategic reasons too. "I think it's become pretty clear for CDPR and GOG that we are pursuing two different strategies," said Maciej Gołębiewski, GOG's managing director. "CDPR has their strategy of developing triple-A games [with] story-rich, immersive worlds and creating franchises around them.

"GOG has its own strategy of bringing the finest visions of modern classics to gamers and creating a community around it… it does not make a lot of sense to keep them together for the long-term."

For Kiciński, "it was a very natural decision to split the company." The sheer difference in scale between GOG and CDP's other operations meant the storefront ended up overshadowed. "When you have two entities in one family, and one is much bigger and more profitable, it's very hard for the smaller entity to get enough attention, and it's very natural that the focus and attention goes into the bigger part of the company."

"I always felt that there was good faith and kindness coming from CDPR," says Gołębiewski, but "it was also visible that they have really ambitious projects, they have a lot on their plates, so… it could be felt that their eyes were on their challenges and on their strategy."

"This [sale] gives the opportunity for GOG to be fully focused on itself, let's say," concludes Kiciński, "and it's not like you are a smaller part of a bigger group, where there's something more important [happening], because a new game is coming out, or something like that."

For its part, CDPR has come out of the deal quite well. The "spirit of the agreement," as Kiciński puts it, is that arrangements between GOG and CDPR remain unchanged, at least for now. That includes the generous royalties CDPR gets from its games sold on GOG: "They have an exceptionally good royalty rate from GOG," says Kiciński, "And that's still the case, because there is no other place in the world where CD Projekt Red has such a big royalties from every game. So they kind of, you know, eat the cake and have the cake."

Future perfect

Loosed from the embrace of a studio giant with $120 million-worth of irons in the fire, what does the next move for GOG look like?

If you've got a plan, Kiciński and co might like to hear it. The rush to secure GOG's purchase over the last few months has left precious little room for grandiose visions of the years ahead. "We've just finished something that was both a marathon and a sprint," says Gołębiewski, "so we'll need to take some time to discuss our strategic options."

Still, that doesn't mean there aren't ideas floating around. No longer under someone else's control, GOG is freer than ever to take risks. "It's natural that in much bigger companies, the risk appetite—especially being a public company—tends to be smaller," says Gołębiewski, "and that removes some of the nimbleness of the company."

Reduced nimbleness does you no favours when your chief competitor is a behemoth like Steam: "Attacking a Goliath in wrestling is not a good idea," says Gołębiewski. "One needs to have good agility."

"One good example of risk-taking," adds Kiciński, "is publishing activity, because publishing activity has a tremendous amount of risk." He's not sure, but Kiciński reckons that risk is what held GOG back from publishing games when it was part of CDPR.

But Kiciński is fairly deep in game publishing—"I'm already in the publishing business through Retrovibe—I have 50% in that company"—and he thinks GOG could make a splash there too. "I'm absolutely open to taking risks in publishing, because I believe that if you have good people—knowing the games, knowing the industry, you can really minimise the risk to an acceptable level."

There are other obvious avenues the store could go down. When I ask if it might be tempted to get more heavily into preservation—not just uploading old games to its storefront and making sure they work, but actively working on them à la Nightdive—Gołębiewski plays his cards close to his chest. "I think that there are not that many companies that do it well," he says (though adds that "Obviously, Nightdive is one of the ones that are doing it well").

In his view, that means "there is space for another good company on that scene. I'm not saying definitely that it will be GOG in 2026, but certainly there is a space there. We are fans of Nightdive's work, but also we believe that competition is always good."

So, doubling down on the things GOG already does and knows, is how that sounds to me, continuing on with the tack that has seen the store, over the past year, lean much harder into its old Good Old Games brand with a focus on preservation and untangling classic rights. Looking forward, that means leveraging connections with developers and rights-holders to explore game publishing and, maybe, turning initiatives like the GOG Game Preservation program into something more dramatic, more remaster-esque.

Will that be enough to topple that old "Goliath," Steam? Well, no, probably not, but neither Gołębiewski or Kiciński are (currently) pitching themselves as out to conquer Gabe Newell's empire. "I think hooking people off of Steam is a byproduct of us trying to provide superior editions—something we call the finest editions of classic games," says Gołębiewski, "If there's a version of the game that's clearly better on GOG, and it has the promise that it will run forever… people will come."

"We are not really putting direct competition to Steam [in the sense] that we have to unhook somebody from Steam," says Kiciński. "Rather, we would like to persuade people, 'Okay, if you have an option to purchase a game—more purchase than rent—and you value having your classic, beloved game to own, then check out GOG. If it's not important, or you have different priorities, go for Steam."

GOG willing

Will GOG make it on its own? It seems up for the challenge, at the very least, and whether it succeeds—if you ask me—is down to just how salient the issues of game ownership and preservation become over the next several years. The issue "comes and goes," says Gołębiewski, "but as long as GOG exists, we are a point of reference on that scale. And if GOG doesn't exist, then, okay, we can actually say that people have given up.

"I think it is a challenge to operate in this industry in this day and age, and still stay true to the values, right? And to the mission. I think, judging by the reception we got last year, it holds up, and we'll see whether it holds up in 2026 and beyond."

We first reported on rumors of a new Witcher 3 DLC back at the tail end of 2025, after a Polish financial analyst and a known leaker said separately that a surprise new expansion is in the works. And while that DLC remains firmly in the realm of hopes and dreams for now, with a new year now upon us I am here to tell you that the foundation for that rumor has grown somewhat stronger.

There are two big reasons for this. The first comes from IGN Poland, which said earlier this week (Google translated) that it first heard about this new expansion, "from someone who has repeatedly provided us with reliable insider information," years ago. IGN Poland said it didn't publish anything about it at the time because the information all came from a single source (that's how actual journalism works), but in light of these new rumors it's opted to make the story public.

IGN Poland said its source at the time claimed the new expansion would take players to the far-off desert of Zerrikania, which is mentioned in passing at a few points in The Witcher games. Zerrikania is also different enough from The Witcher kingdoms we already know that it could be a place where, for instance, Ciri could successfully undergo the Trial of the Grasses, which is commonly believed to kill girls who attempt it—although The Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski clarified in 2025 that he never said in his books that women can't survive the process and, in fine Sapkowski fashion, he doesn't care either way.

Even so, given the difficulty of making new witchers (the process has been largely lost, and even when it was in active use it was incredibly dangerous for candidates, killing seven out of 10 potentials), having Ciri go through a same-but-different mutation process in a very distant, more advanced realm makes reasonable narrative sense.

The second reason the rumor feels at least somewhat grounded is far more practical, and has nothing to do with the game. Instead, it's all about CD Projekt itself. You may recall that when CD Projekt said The Witcher 4 won't be out until 2027 at the soonest, it did so using some archaic corpo-financial speak during an investors call: "The game will not be launched within the time frame of the first target for the incentive program which ends 31st of December."

CD Projekt said during that same call, in March 2025, that it still needed to generate a little more than 1 billion Polish zloty (around $277 million) by the end of 2026 in order to achieve that incentive program target—something one investor on the call noted would be "extremely difficult" without releasing any new products.

Noble Securities analyst Mateusz Chrzanowski, who spurred our December 2025 report on the DLC rumor, told Eurogamer that CD Projekt is still roughly PLN700 million short of its goal, with just five financial quarters remaining: "This implies the need for something significantly larger than just another update or a version for a niche platform."

Something like, for instance, a surprise Witcher 3 DLC. Chrzanowski predicted that a new expansion would ring up roughly $330 million in sales through 2026, translating to nearly PLN1.2 billion, putting it well over the line CD Projekt needs to cross in order to make even more money for its bosses.

To repeat what I said in December, all of that and 20 bucks will get you a copy of the brilliant Witcher 3 expansion Blood and Wine (which you really should play if you haven't already): CD Projekt has remained stubbornly closed-mouthed about the whole thing, and we don't have any handy leaks from, say, PEGI or Ubisoft that effectively confirms it. But the sheer weight of the claims are starting to add up. I can't say that I believe just yet, but I want to.

Jackie Welles, for some gamers, is one of the most beloved videogame companions of all time: A solid dude of hidden depths whose fate was sealed the moment he crossed paths with V. He made enough of an impact that former PC Gamer writer Emma Matthews called him Cyberpunk 2077's best character, and bemoaned the limited amount of time we got with him before, well, you know.

But not everyone agrees that we should've had more time to spend with Jackster—including Cyberpunk 2 creative Igor Sarzynski, who says Jackie might've been a great guy but he wasn't really part of the story.

"So would extending Act 1 (before the heist) in CP77 make the game better?" Sarzynski wrote on Bluesky (via FRVR). "No it wouldn't. It's like saying we should spend more time on Tatooine with farmer Luke before he got involved with all this Jedi stuff."

Sarzynski also pointed out that while some players ended up losing Jackie very quickly, others (including, possibly, yours truly) "manage to squeeze 20h out of Watson," Cyberpunk 2077's opening area, where players are confined before embarking on the big Arasaka heist. And because the goals and motivations of that area are very vaguely defined, prolonging it "would result in [a] meandering, unfocused experience."

So would extending Act 1 (before the heist) in CP77 make the game better?1. No it wouldn't. It's like saying we should spend more time on Tatooine with farmer Luke before he got involved with all this Jedi stuff. (1/3)

— @srznsk.bsky.social (@srznsk.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-01-05T23:48:58.222Z

He also rejected suggestions that Cyberpunk 2077's Jackie-heavy prologue montage is built on cut content, saying CD Projekt "always planned it like this."

"Is it enough time to bond with Jackie? For some it is, for some it isn't," Sarzynski wrote. "All things considered I think we struck a good balance."

Sarzynski's thread naturally drew some replies from fans convinced that he's wrong, and he made some equally interesting points in response, such as saying that most players need a specific, measurable goal to pursue in order to properly advance the game, which is why V has no progression in the game's first act.

V also has no progression in Act 1 because the *actual* story - Terminal sickness, what do i do with the time i have left? What does it mean to live and to become immortal? - hasn't started yet. Yes, i'm saying this is all by design and Act 1 being longer would not benefit the main story.

— @srznsk.bsky.social (@srznsk.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-01-05T23:48:58.258Z

He did acknowledge that the urgency of V's situation was belied somewhat by the presence of side gigs, which enabled the character to horse around in Night City with no ill effects—something I felt acutely during my long, oft-diverted Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough.

"I don't disagree with the ludonarrative dissonance between saving yourself and doing other shit," Sarzynski wrote. "If I were to do it again, I'd contextualize gigs and side quests as escaping death in a different way—by creating your own legend. And maybe gate a specific ending behind doing enough side content."

He also made the point that despite its open-world trappings, Cyberpunk 2077 is a narrative-driven game, and that's what the majority of CD Projekt fans are looking for: "We're not doing GTA, our games are much more story / character driven."

i'm not saying it would be boring. i'm saying that it wouldn't carry story-oriented players (and this is large part of our brand) for long. we're not doing GTA, our games are much more story / character driven

— @srznsk.bsky.social (@srznsk.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-01-05T23:48:58.296Z

The discussion is entirely academic, but it also provides some interesting insights into what we might expect from Cyberpunk 2: When Sarzynski says "if I were to do it again," after all, it can easily be construed as a gentle reminder that he effectively is doing it again. He's also quite clear that regardless of whether suggestions are being made in good faith or otherwise, CD Projekt already has a pretty good idea of what it's doing: "We won't be doing 'same story but with player feedback'," he wrote in response to one follower, "so requests for specific structural changes to '77 are not really relevant."

No one really does it like GOG, the classic and DRM-free digital storefront that, up until today, was owned by Witcher developer CD Projekt Red.

GOG always had you covered when you got an itch to play some old '90s shooter that you lost the CD key to long ago. And according to its new owner, it has some big goals for next year and beyond when it comes to expanding its library of classic games.

Announced today, GOG will now be in the hands of Michal Kicinski. Kicinski isn't some random suit, however, he was a co-founder of GOG when it started in 2008 under CD Projekt Red—which he also co-founded.

Everything about GOG will stay the same, including the games available on the platform and everyone's library of games. Kicinski preached GOG's goal of being a place for "freedom, independence, and genuine control," over the games you own in the announcement post.

"This new chapter is about doubling down on that vision," the post reads. "We want to do more to preserve the classics of the past, celebrate standout games of today, and help shape the classics of tomorrow, including new games with real retro spirit."

It's also pointed out in the post that GOG has plans to "undertake even more ambitious rescue missions in 2026 and 2027" that it will detail next year. Whether that's an expansion of its in-house Windows compatibility efforts with the Preservation Program or something else remains to be seen.

The post also confirms that CD Projekt Red's relationship with GOG will continue and its existing and upcoming games will still show up on the platform. This is also a welcome reassurance that the studio's recent deal with Epic Games for the Witcher 4 doesn't include Epic Games Store exclusivity or anything like that.

While the plans are to mainly embrace classic games and classic-styled games, it will also be interesting to see if GOG will also embrace being a safe haven for games that are rejected from other storefronts. Valve and Epic Games recently banned psychological horror game Horses from their platforms for breaking their rules on inappropriate content despite the developer's claims that nothing in the game was against the rules. Horses launched without a hitch on GOG and quickly shot up the list of top-selling games. Even though there aren't a ton of games coming out like Horses, GOG's insistence on giving users the freedom to own any games they want could help it become a home for outsider art that doesn't fit on the big platforms.

It's been 10 years since the debut of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and nine since the release of the second and final expansion, Blood and Wine. But while CD Projekt is now full steam ahead on The Witcher 4, there are rumblings—not much more than vibrations, really—of something new coming for Witcher 3.

Ears pricked up following a Strefa Inwestorów report (Google translated) quoting Noble Securities analyst Mateusz Chrzanowski predicting a Witcher 3 expansion for May 2026.

"We expect another paid add-on (DLC) for The Witcher 3 to be released in May 2026," Chrzanowski said. "We anticipate sales of 11 million copies at USD 30 each next year. We estimate the production budget at PLN 52 million ($14.5 million). The release should kick off the actual marketing campaign for The Witcher 4."

That's not a whole lot to go on, but it does make sense. Chrzanowski also said he expects The Witcher 4 to launch in Q4 2027, which puts it in the admittedly massively open-ended time frame of 'not until after 2026' previously shared by CD Projekt.

New Witcher 3 DLC would also be a guaranteed moneymaker. Some quick napkin math: CD Projekt has now sold more than 60 million copies, and if we assume a DLC attachment rate of 20%—roughly where Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty DLC sat at the end of 2023—that's 12 million copies at $30 each, or $360 million.

Chrzanowski's forecast is a little lower than that, but even if sales come in under both marks and only achieves 10 million (and that's a pretty loose use of the word "only"), that still adds up to, as my colleague Rich Stanton might say, a big bucket o' dosh. Cyberpunk 2077 recently took over as CD Projekt's "main source of income," but I could see that changing in a hurry if new Witcher 3 DLC actually happens.

There's a quite a few witchers on The Path...The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has sold 60 million copies. As we celebrate #10YearsofTheWitcher3, we want to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who has joined us on the hunt. It's been downright glorious! ⚔️❤️

— @thewitcher.com (@thewitcher.com.bsky.social) 2025-12-23T21:59:39.210Z

Money aside, dropping new Witcher 3 DLC would also be an absolutely baller PR move. It's been nearly a decade since The Witcher games were fresh in mind: What better way to put the series front-and-center again than by rolling out a surprise Witcher 3 expansion, with a little note tied to it saying "Witcher 4 next year?"

Note also that The Witcher 3 is still pulling enviable player numbers, and remains embedded in Steam's top 100 most-played and top-selling games. Regular deep discounts no doubt drive the sales chart presence, but look at these concurrent player numbers on SteamDB: This is a game that endures.

But this is where it gets really interesting: This isn't actually the first time this rumor has floated to the surface. As noted by PCGamesN earlier this month, leaker Borys Nieśpielak has said multiple times that Witcher 3 DLC is in development at Fool's Theory, the studio currently working on, among other things, a remake of the original Witcher. Fool's Theory is also headed up by Jakub Rokosz, previously a quest designer on The Witcher 2 and 3—not a bad choice if you want to make new Witcher 3 quests.

One more thing, since we're piling it on: CD Projekt announced in May that it's got "one more patch" in the works for The Witcher 3, now slated to come out sometime in 2026. It's possible that over-optimistic followers are conflating the patch with a full-on expansion, but it might also be that CD Projekt has more cooking than it's letting on, Either way, despite all the years gone by it's clear the studio isn't finished with the game just yet.

All of that and $2 will get you a cup of coffee, as the saying goes, but it sure seems like something's going on—or at the very least, that something could plausibly be going on. My advice? Keep your expectations low, and keep your eyes on this space in 2026.

Cyberpunk 2077 launched on December 10, 2020, which means that the fifth anniversary is just over a week away. Despite that age, and the fact that it's a singleplayer RPG with no live service grind, its peak concurrent player count today on Steam—and only Steam—was nearly 44,000. That's genuinely astounding, especially when you consider that the game was such a mess at launch that it literally wiped 75% of CD Projekt's valuation off the books.

So here we are, five years later, and an awful lot of fans are holding out hope that CD Projekt is cooking up something big for the big birthday. Not just because five years is an obvious benchmark for such things, but because of a December 1 post on X.

• SECURE COMMS CHANNEL ESTABLISHED.
• STANDBY FOR INCOMING PRIORITY TRANSMISSION…
• CYBERPUNK 2077 — 10.12
• REED, SOLOMON — 12.12
• SONG, SO MI — 29.12
• END OF TRANSMISSION.

Well. Intriguing, no? Fans immediately glommed onto the message as a sign that something is in the pipe: A surprise update, some new content, maybe—dare to dream, maybe—a full-on DLC release.

The CD Projekt social team did its best to keep a lid on things, but people want what they want, and what they very obviously want is more Cyberpunk 2077.

It eventually fell to global community director Marcin Momot to pour a big bucket of cold water on things. "We’re not teasing anything," he wrote on X. "This is our monthly post announcing character birthdays, which we publish every 30 days. This time we also included the game’s anniversary info, but it’s not a teaser. Hope this clears things up!"

And yes, it's true: Here, for instance, is the November post marking the birthdays of Rogue Amendiares, Johnny Silverhand, and Judy Alvarez:

And this is October, the birth month of Valerie/Vincent:

So as much as it pains me to be the bearer of bad news on this one, it looks like a false alarm: CD Projekt wasn't teasing anything, it was just making some traditional birthday posts which in this case happened to include Cyberpunk 2077 itself.

But if you want to live in hope, don't forget that CD Projekt has told us in the past that it was finished with Cyberpunk 2077, only to punk us with surprise updates when our backs were turned,. And here's something else to hold onto: The Game Awards takes place on December 11, the day after Cyberpunk 2077's fifth anniversary, and while CD Projekt co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said The Witcher 4 won't be at the show, he didn't explicitly rule out an appearance by Cyberpunk. And we all know what that means, right?

Well, no. We don't. But this guy has the right spirit, at least.

The Game Awards are once again bearing down on us, bringing with it the usual year-ending slurry of announcements, trailers, random bits of awkwardness, and other such surprises as God and Geoff see fit. Oh, and some awards too, scattered here and there amidst the sound and fury, including one for Most Anticipated Game.

This year's winner will be Grand Theft Auto 6—it won't be official for a couple weeks yet, but who are we trying to kid?—but also in the running, and a likely second-place finisher, is The Witcher 4 from CD Projekt Red. That game is a pretty big deal in its own right, and given CD Projekt's own occasional penchant for surprises (recall Keanu Reeves "breathtaking" moment at E3 2019), optimistic Witcher fans may have been hoping for a fresh look at Ciri's big adventure at some point during the show.

Sorry, folks, but it's not to be.

"I'm very happy to see The Witcher 4 nominated in the Most Anticipated Game category at The Game Awards," CD Projekt co-CEO Michał Nowakowski wrote on X. "Thanks to everyone who has already voted—your support means a lot to us. We won't be bringing any new content to TGA this year, but we're, as always, excited to watch the show and celebrate this amazing industry's great night alongside all of you."

I suppose there's a chance Nowakowski is lying to us, although I think that's very unlikely. For one thing, that's generally just not done—it's rude, and not great for your credibility either. But more to the point, things seem pretty quiet and steady-as-she-goes on The Witcher 4 front. CD Projekt reiterated during its Q3 earnings call earlier this week that the new Witcher remains "in the full-scale production phase," which has been the case since November 2024, and while a release target still hasn't been announced, it definitely won't be out in 2026—also something we already knew.

There was one small status update I found interesting: CD Projekt said that once The Witcher 4 does arrive, we won't have to wait so long for parts five and six. That too isn't really new: The studio said in 2022 that the next Witcher game, then known as Project Polaris, will be first of an all-new trilogy, and that the goal was to have the whole thing rolled out within six years of Witcher 4's release. It's notable, though, because it seemed very optimistic at the time—CD Projekt is known for a lot of things, but short development times sure ain't one of them—but CD Projekt said during the earnings call said the shift to Unreal Engine 5 is going very well, and the six-year plan is still on.

"I do believe that the next two games should be delivered in a short period of time," Nowakowski said during the Q&A portion of the call in response to a question about the new trilogy's development cadence. "Because as we have stated before, the plan still is to launch the whole trilogy within a total of a six year period. So that would mean, yes, we would plan to have shorter development time between Witcher 4 and 5, 5 and 6, and so on."

I'm not fully convinced at this point: The original Witcher came out in 2007 and CD Projekt has released a grand total of three mainline games in the years since—and that's with some pretty serious crunch baked into the process. Studio leadership has said in more recent years that it's not working that way anymore, and I really hope that's the case, but as we saw with Cyberpunk 2077, the real test will come when the pressure to meet deadlines starts to weigh heavy.

Remember when Cyberpunk 2077 launched in late 2020, and it was basically the worst videogame ever? That's obviously a gross overstatement made for comedic effect, but it was really bad—which is why the subsequent turnaround on it is so damn remarkable. We've said at least a couple times in the past that Cyberpunk's redemption arc is complete, but here I am to say it again, because yet another big milestone is now in the rear-view.

Cyberpunk 2077 has now sold more than 35 million copies, and that's a hell of an accomplishment for any videogame, but it's still way off the 60 million mark set by The Witcher 3 back in May. As CD Projekt CFO Piotr Nielubowicz explained, however, Cyberpunk has actually surpassed The Witcher 3 in one important measure: It got there faster.

"Gamers have now purchased over 35 million copies of Cyberpunk 2077," Nielubowicz said in comments released as part of today's financial report. "That's a better result than The Witcher 3 was able to achieve in the same post-release time frame."

Nielubowicz added that Cyberpunk 2077 is now CD Projekt's "main source of income," having recently received a boost from releases on the Nintendo Switch 2, Macs, and PlayStation Plus, which helped juice sales of the very excellent Phantom Liberty expansion (and really, you should play it if you haven't, it's like a whole separate game) on PlayStation consoles.

That in turn has powered a big bump in CD Projekt's revenues and profits: Nielubowicz said CD Projekt turned a net profit of 193 million zloty ($53 million), "near two and a half times more than in the past year, and nearly as much as in 2023, which is when the Phantom Liberty expansion was released." Phantom Liberty, you'll recall, was a big moneymaker for CD Projekt in its own right.

So there you have it: Geralt is still out in front, but V is catching up. For a game that once triggered lawsuits, a regulatory investigation, and a multi-billion-dollar kick in the ass that saw its valuation tank by more than 75%, that's quite a turnaround indeed.

Confirmed best PC game Baldur's Gate 3 brought CRPG stylings back into the spotlight, and more than that, proved the enduring appeal of an exceptionally reactive, player-driven story with emergent narratives and shenanigans aplenty.

But while the game's success was "an inspiration" according to CD Projekt's joint CEO Michał Nowakowski, it's not necessarily the direction development division CD Projekt Red (CDPR)'s games are headed.

Speaking to PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens, Nowakowski said "There was a lot of inspiration in what Baldur's Gate 3 did, but I think we're still sticking to what was in Witcher 3, Cyberpunk. But we don't want to just make another game like that, just with better graphics. We do want to innovate."

As for how, Nowakowski didn't have anything to reveal just yet. But he doubled down on the fact that it wouldn't resemble Divinity or Baldur's Gate: "We definitely are not going to make a game like Larian did.

"That's the kind of game they can make. But a lot of stuff with how they can interact with the world and what it does was, for sure, some inspiration to us."

Of course, CDPR has taken The Witcher in new directions before with spinoffs like Gwent and Thronebreaker. But as Nowakowski told Joshua, "we made at some point the decision that the in-house team has to focus on the key pillar games rather than doing spinoffs … maybe that's going to change, but at the moment, the way we are structured right now, we don't necessarily want to walk away from that."

I'm keen to see what the next open-world game from CDPR looks like. Cyberpunk took a while to find its footing, but it turned out pretty snazzy in the end, and it's no secret that The Witcher 3 is one of the best RPGs in the biz. It cured my open-world fatigue once; maybe the next entry can similarly tear me away from my nth replay of Baldur's Gate.

The Witcher 4 is bound to, as most of CDPR's games end up doing (even if it takes them a while), shake the RPG firmament. Especially given this time, it's got a new lead: With Ciri taking over the role of the game's protagonist, donning Geralt's old boots for her own adventure. Not only that, but the new lead has a new voice actor, with Ciara Berkeley stepping into the role in place of Jo Wyatt.

Geralt's long-time voice actor, Doug Cockle, has been enthusiastic about the choice to have Ciri take the lead—and withering towards people who need to "read the damn books". And now, in a sweet display of voice actor camaraderie, he's stated that he thinks Berkeley will nail the new role, too.

That's per an interview our friends over at GamesRadar+ did with The Witcher vet during the Golden Joystick Awards 2025. Cockle states that he hadn't met Berkeley in person until the awards themselves, but now that he has? He's sold.

"I only spoke with her briefly, just today. We exchanged some DMs a couple of weeks ago just to say hi," Cockle told the site. "She's lovely, and I think she's going to do a great job. She's got a fantastic presence in person. I don't really have any advice. I've offered to chat with her if she has any questions or anything like that, but she's a strong person. She's going to be fine."

Not that you'd expect Cockle to meet his new co-star (Geralt's still gonna pop up in there, somewhere) and go 'well, she sucks, actually'. But it's nice to see how fully on-board he's been, and is continuing to be, in the face of the sorts of griping from the usual suspects—the same folks who prompted Cockle to tell complainees to crack a spine every now and then. And hey, given CD Projekt's just getting bigger, it's going to be one hell of a sequel.

CD Projekt Red is on a big recruitment push at the moment as it scales up development of its next big RPG projects. Just last week, the Polish developer nabbed one of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's lead designers to lend their quest-crafting skills to The Witcher 4. Now, it's hired the former narrative lead of Cloud Chamber Games, the developer that's currently working on BioShock 4.

Liz Albl joined CD Projekt last month in the role of senior writer on Cyberpunk 2. Prior to this, she spent almost three years as narrative lead at Cloud Chamber Games working on BioShock 4, with her other credits including Ghost of Tsushima, Watch Dogs: Legion, and just over a year working on Monolith's cancelled Wonder Woman game.

As spotted by IGN, Albl left Cloud Chamber in August—around the time the developer laid off staff after BioShock 4 failed an internal review, with its narrative criticised by 2K's executives in particular as the publisher committed to a development overhaul.

BioShock 4 had already been in development for a decade before the review, with 2K announcing it was in production six years ago. The overhaul resulted in the removal of studio head Kelley Gilmore and creative director Hogarth de la Plante moving to a publishing role. 2K has also cancelled a remake of the original BioShock that was in development, though that occurred earlier in the year than the overhaul of BioShock 4.

Development of BioShock 4 is now being overseen by Rod Fergusson, who most recently worked as Diablo franchise lead and the head of Gears of War before that. In BioShock circles, however, he's best known as the "fixer" for BioShock Infinite; the man who went in and ruthlessly cut down Irrational's troubled sequel to get development back on track and push it out of the door in 2013.

As for what we know about Albl's new project, the answer is not very much. We do know that Cyberpunk 2 is officially in early development, and that one of its new locations will be less Blade Runner-y than Night City and feel 'more like Chicago gone wrong'. We also know that it's highly unlikely to release before 2030, meaning there is a very real chance our own society will have caught up with Cyberpunk's dystopia by the time it comes out.

When The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released in 2015, its success was so overwhelming that it's hard to imagine it would have gone any other way. But from CD Projekt's perspective, success seemed far from certain in the runup to launch. In particular, the Polish studio was deeply concerned about competition from another game released that summer, Rocksteady Studios' Batman: Arkham Knight.

The concern didn't derive purely from the fact that Arkham Knight was a hotly anticipated game. CD Projekt was more specifically worried that Rocksteady's open-world superhero game would shunt The Witcher 3 off the shelves at retailers.

Speaking to PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens, CD Projekt's joint CEO Michał Nowakowski explained the situation as it stood in early 2015: "There was a big question about the execution of the marketing, are we going to be, you know, on par with, with the biggest out there?" he said. "We had huge, huge discussions, especially with the retail in the US, but also UK, you know, the main markets, Germany and so on, because it was about convincing them that we can actually be allowed to spend money in those channels."

Nowakowski explains that retailers have different windows during which they'll lead their marketing efforts on specific games, giving it priority shelf-space. "Let's say Gamestop has, like, a window, the main window, which [they] are going to sell you for. Two weeks to someone [then] two weeks to someone else. And it's their decision. It's their call," he elaborated. "Whether they're going to give it to this game or that game, it's kind of their bet, and it could kill or elevate your game depending on the decision. And of course, they wanted to make the right one to make sure that they sold as many units as possible."

In the US and Europe, distribution of The Witcher 3 was being handled by Warner Bros. CD Projekt had already put significant effort into courting retailers around this time, touring through both the UK and Europe to present the game to places like Walmart and GameStop, often to responses like 'You guys are not Bethesda'.

To make matters worse, CD Projekt then discovered Arkham Knight was due to launch within the same window as The Witcher 3, putting the pair in direct competition. If that wasn't bad enough, Warner Bros was both distributor and publisher for Arkham Knight, meaning it had additional incentive to ensure Rocksteady's game was as successful as it could be.

"I still remember how bombed we were when we learned that Rocksteady is gonna launch [Batman]: Arkham Knight—I think it was the one with the car," Nowakowski says. "Because they were with us on one of the tours. They showed up [for] our demo. They showed us theirs. Like, oh god, these guys [are] really at the top. I mean, they're gonna just roll over us. It's gonna be tough."

In the end, fate intervened, and Arkham Knight was delayed from its initial launch window of May to June 23. "But we were afraid about those placements in the stores, especially since Warner was taking care of both, you know, their game and ours," Nowakowski recalls.

We all know what happened from there. A decade on, The Witcher 3 is still regarded as one of the best RPGs ever made. Indeed, to celebrate the game's 10^th anniversary, PC Gamer has delved deep into the game's creation, revealing stories like how CD Projekt "hacked time and space" to cast Charles Dance in its RPG, and how joint CEO Adam Badowski made everyone's life miserable by demanding the team add swimming and underwater locations to the game.

Adam Badowski, joint CEO of CD Projekt Red, doesn't look back fondly on the collectible-card romance options in The Witcher 1. "It was childish in the beginning," he says when the topic comes up. He's much more pleased with how things turned out in The Witcher 3, which did justice to what he calls "the emotional aspects of the characters from the books."

After two games in which Yennefer is barely mentioned and relegated to flashbacks, she drops into The Witcher 3 like a bomb to upset the cozy relationship you probably built with Triss in the second game. The ex Geralt never properly ended things with, and the canon love interest as book readers will tell you (it's me, I'm book readers), she complicates Geralt's love life and forces him to belatedly grow up—which feels thematically appropriate, as he retakes his place as Ciri's father figure over the course of the game.

Yet that element wasn't always part of The Witcher 3. As Badowski says, "It wasn't [there] from the beginning, but at some point we understood that this lack of kind of conflict, personal conflict—of course, there's Ciri—but there was a lack of something." As soon as someone suggested the idea of making players choose between Triss and Yennefer, they realized this was what had been missing. "This decision was made pretty late," he says, "but it was great. It was a great decision."

Romance in RPGs is a hot-button topic, with developers avoiding it for years out of fear players would react badly. When BioWare finally added romance to Baldur's Gate 2 they did so cautiously, dropping some of the romances they'd planned due to that wariness. Now romance is such a common element of RPGs its absence is notable enough that Obsidian can earn praise for downplaying it. Though even while giving Obsidian props for not including romance in all its games, our news writer Joshua Wolens gave a shout-out to The Witcher 3's handling of it, "because both Geralt and Yennefer felt like individuals with flaws and quirks."

We can argue about whether there's too much romance in Baldur's Gate 3 or not enough in Avowed, but The Witcher 3 is the Goldilocks middle, getting it just right. And on the important question of whether he chose Yennefer or Triss, Badowski came down on the side of book readers everywhere: "My choice will always be Yennefer."

CD Projekt is a game industry powerhouse. After 10 years we still can't get enough of The Witcher 3, which reached 50 million copies sold in 2023 and it has the world on tenterhooks in anticipation for The Witcher 4.

Getting to this point has not been entirely smooth sailing, to say nothing of Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous launch—a game which eventually blossomed to its full potential and landed a spot in the PC Gamer Top 100 after travelling along an exceptionally bumpy road.

Today's CD Projekt is a rough diamond that came from challenging beginnings: Art director Paweł Mielniczuk tells us that when he joined CD Projekt Red in 2006, "there were like 60 people here and [we were] occupying two rooms in this building. There's this red room on the first floor [...] and that was the common center for all the Witcher games".

In this room, which I sincerely hope isn't the Red Room from Twin Peaks, the team would work through the games from start to finish, testing and iterating upon ideas. "It was all happening in that room. Around this room, there's office space that the whole development team was [working in]. So it was super small. The whole lower part of the company was CD Projekt Blue. So [CD Projekt] was a game publishing company that, at some point went, 'Oh, let's make our own game'."

Mielniczuk said the seven years spent developing the first Witcher game came at great expense, financially and emotionally. "[CD Projekt Blue's] main business was publishing games, so a lot of people in CD Projekt Blue were really unhappy," Mielniczuk laughs. "[We were] like weird people [...] living in a cellar making some games, you know?" The assumptions were that "[CD Projekt Red] will never earn any money here" and that "This game, it's a total waste of time."

"So we had, you know, this ugly child of the company that nobody wanted until the Witcher 1 finally released after those seven years. And that was, I think, the breakthrough [...] because it instantly became very popular in Poland, [and most of] Europe."

Mielniczuk estimates that CD Projekt Blue was dismantled around the development of Witcher 3, integrating fully with Red—lifting their very own botchling curse and securing a second chance as a larger than life lubberkin.

On August 14, 2013, CD Projekt announced that veteran British actor and screenwriter Charles Dance (Dracula, Game of Thrones, The Crown) would be playing the ruthless Nilfgaardian Emperor Emhyr var Emreis—an impressive addition to The Witcher 3 cast and a role that fit Dance like a glove. At that time his character Tywin Lannister was a fan favourite for viewers of Game of Thrones, and hadn't yet been unceremoniously killed off while on the privy. Life was good.

The announcement contained a quote from Marcin Blacha, lead writer on The Witcher 3, expressing that it was a "dream come true for the team here at Red to be able to work with such an accomplished actor and magnetic personality." But according to CD Projekt's English adaptation director, Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz, getting Dance on board was akin to defusing a ticking time bomb.

In a new interview with PC Gamer, Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz explained that they "didn't really have a strong notion that Emhyr should be a AAA talent. But there was a point during the development and promotion process when we put a countdown up on our website [...] saying that some important announcement was pending [...] and then we decided not to make the announcement."

Whatever that announcement was, they needed a replacement and fast. "The clock was running, and we had to [have] something to announce by the time the clock ran down to zero," Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz continued. "And I think it was somebody in marketing or biz dev who came up with the idea that we should just get a AAA actor [...] and when the clock runs down, announce them as the big reveal.

"It was one of our colleagues in biz dev who had a contact in [the] talent management world and it was, you know, a couple of emails, a couple of phone calls, who's available, what's good? What are the roles? Well, if it's going to be a AAA talent we want to have, we want [them] to have a significant role. Not necessarily in terms of scope, but in terms of meaning for the plot, or for the world and so on and so forth. And we ended up [settling on] Emhyr, in terms of [the role], and we ended up [casting] Charles Dance."

While the exact timeframe of the countdown is unclear, Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz estimates that "it might have been [...] a clock that was running down from 48 hours. Sometime within those 48 hours, those decisions, negotiations, and communications happened [...] It went quickly enough that we were actually able to announce Charles Dance's Emhyr var Emreis, by the time the clock ran down."

Regardless of the minute-by-minute specifics, the end result is that in an incredible feat of marketing-based engineering, a miracle happened: CD Projekt got its big announcement, and we got the devastating charm of Charles Dance. "I suppose we hacked time and space in that instance to make it look all intended and smooth," Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz laughed. I'd call that a win.

It's hard to imagine a time where dark fantasy wasn't a game industry heavyweight that permeates every fiber of my being—who doesn't love tales that leave you in a moral quandary for days on end? The perceived level of complexity that you're getting into can be challenging to overcome, but over the last decade more and more games in this vein have transformed from niche outliers to something more accessible.

Baldur's Gate 3 remains one of the biggest RPG surprises of recent years. The franchise rose from a twenty year slumber, and through the power of nuanced storytelling emerged from the CRPG weeds as the undisputed champion of the genre—and, in some ways, of all genres.

But prior to that, at the time of The Witcher 3's release, the natural comparison was, of course, Skyrim, which had recently redefined the open world RPG—full of experimentation, freedom, and floating cheese.

Skyrim may have had some decidedly dark elements, but The Witcher 3 leaned into it hard—a potentially risky move at the time.

"First of all, there are always other great games on the market, secondly, you can learn from those games, but like in music videos, you need to be fresh [and] innovative. So you cannot be a copycat," explains Adam Badowski, CD Projekt's joint CEO.

"We knew that [The Witcher 3] was a completely new offer for players [but] I had a lot of worries about the game as a business [...] The whole development was expensive and challenging, plus, we had only one game in development back then, and Witcher is dark fantasy. I remember that it wasn't that popular, and I was worried if people would understand the concept of dark fantasy."

Standard fantasy and high fantasy have always been successful, but dark fantasy narratives were less common: "High fantasy was super, super well known and appreciated by players. Everyone played World of Warcraft, but something has changed after Game of Thrones."

It's impossible to deny the impact Game of Thrones has had on bringing such grand storytelling to more mainstream audiences, increasing the appetite and palatability of dark fantasy's morally ambiguous themes—even FromSoftware saw a boost with Elden Ring thanks to a whisper of George R.R Martin's name. "[Suddenly] people understood that they really liked that dark fantasy. So [Game of Thrones' success] was a great moment for me, that's [when I thought] okay, okay, there's great potential."

I am approximately eight months late to the Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 party but I am having an absolute whale of a time so far. It's both obtuse and devilishly moreish in a way that caused me to sink 20 hours into the thing in just two days, and I haven't felt this much comfort from videogame jank since I first popped a copy of Skyrim into my Xbox 360 instead of going to school.

It's managed to get its hooks into me far more than The Witcher 3 ever did despite my repeated attempts to love the game (sorry to our unofficial PC Gamer mascot Geralt of Rivia) but I'm certainly far more interested in the upcoming The Witcher 4 now that CD Projekt Red has managed to scoop up some major talent from KCD2 developer Warhorse.

As reported by Eurogamer, Karel Kolmann revealed on X that he had joined the Cyberpunk and Witcher developer along with the message "Things are happening!" Kolmann's previous work at Warhorse spanned eight years and roles like writer, game designer, scripter, and then lead gameplay designer between May and November this year. He was the lead behind KCD2's Hardcore mode as well as lending a hand in developing the game's crime and punishment system.

Now at CD Projekt Red, he's been bestowed the title of Senior Quest Designer for The Witcher 4, which does have me a little bit giddy about what kinda stuff he'll be cooking up for Ciri and co. I feel like there's plenty of transferable skills here—the two series operate on some similar ground-level vibes and CDPR co-CEO Adam Badowski has even specifically cited Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 as inspiration for the upcoming Witcher game.

"The Kingdom Come kind of simulation, it's great," he told PC Gamer earlier this year. "There's so many options, you can change the world, it's super great. And we would like to keep that, we'd like to follow this trend as well. So these are our next steps for sure, and it's kind of a similar challenge to what we have in The Witcher 3 because of the open world and storytelling here, freedom of choices."

Kolmann's near-decade of Kingdom Come knowledge will most definitely come in handy, though we'll have to wait a while to see any of it come to fruition: development on the game only kicked off in full towards the end of last year, and the earliest we can expect to see The Witcher 4 right now is 2027 since a 2024 earnings presentation told us "All we could share now to give more visibility to investors is that the game will not be launched within the time frame of the first target for the incentive program, which ends December 31, 2026." Hopefully it'll be worth the wait.

While it has long been overshadowed by The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's gargantuan success, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings remains a great RPG in its own right. In fact, in some ways it was more daring and ambitious than its bigger, beardier brother.

Most notably, none of the decisions you make in the Witcher 3 are as momentous as the game-changing choice at the heart The Witcher 2, where choosing to help one of two characters in a fight led to a second act viewed from completely different perspectives. Roughly 90% of The Witcher 2's second-act strands are unique, each with its own locations, key characters, and quests.

I've always wondered if CD Projekt will commit so wholly to an in-game decision again. But according to CD Projekt's co-CEO Adam Badowski, such an eventuality is unlikely.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Badowski discussed the changes CD Projekt made between The Witcher 2 and 3, noting that the biggest of these was structural. "In The Witcher 2, we had a very difficult structure of the game, because there are two paths. You can go one path and you won't see the other path," he says. "From the production perspective it's a waste of resources. From [the] player's perspective, it might be cool, but definitely it was [an] experiment.

Such a structure was far less feasible in The Witcher 3, the size of which made such radically different experiences prohibitive. "In Wild Hunt I knew that it doesn't work great, this kind of combination [and] construction of the game," Badowski says. "So we brought totally something new, something that supported the open world concept."

Moreover, CD Projekt's focus on The Witcher 3 was less on choices, and more on maintaining the quality of its storytelling in a much larger world. "The biggest thing was how we can deliver such a big game in the open world, keeping [the] great story of Geralt, and there were many doubts back then."

On this, Badowski notes that at the time of the Witcher 3's release players' main point of comparison for open world fantasy RPGs was Skyrim. And since Bethesda's RPGs aren't known for their narrative sophistication, there was some doubt that it was even possible to combine the two. "It was just after the success of Skyrim, so people, they were super oriented on that game, and they were comparing our concept with Skyrim and sometimes saying that it's not gonna fly. So it was [a big] moment for the company."

It's hard to imagine anyone not having faith in The Witcher 3, an RPG that has dominated the genre for the last decade. But that was the situation CD Projekt found itself in when it was trying to sell the idea to prospective partners during development.

Despite finding success with the original Witcher and its follow-up, The Witcher 3 was grander, more ambitious and certainly more expensive to put together. And not everyone was convinced a story-driven open world was going to work.

"That was the biggest challenge back then," Adam Badowski, CD Projekt's joint CEO, tells us. "Because you know, right now, it's pretty obvious for us that we can combine storytelling and a cinematic experience with the open world, but back then, it was huge. I mean, for us, for the industry. And for some people, they really didn't believe it was possible."

The studio had already shown everyone it could craft an RPG with a strong story, but The Witcher 3 was aiming for something more. "Our offer was different," says Badowski. "We will create something big, in the open world, but with solid and very cinematic storytelling. And some people were looking for other selling points."

The executives Badowski was trying to convince wanted to know where The Witcher 3 differed from other games. "And they were referring to the gameplay, and our gameplay was pretty standard in The Witcher 3. It's a combination of combat and character development, plus magic, which is kind of weak because it has to be in line with the tone of the witcher character. So in that area, it's difficult to find something super fresh."

Badowski found it tricky to sell people on it because it's a tough thing to explain in a pitch, or even with a script. And it's a big ask to get people to read a script and play both the previous games.

"I think that it's better to inspire people than to explain it," he says, "explain everything to the bone, because inspiration stays in your mind and triggers your personal excitement, personal attachment to the game."

That's also why Badowski is a big fan of demos. "It's not that popular in companies, because devs usually think that demos simply steal daytime for the whole development of the game, or that in the demos sometimes there are scripted, fake solutions. But from my perspective, it inspires everyone because you can see the chart of the game, the real game, and you can feel it. So we had quite a few individual demos before the release."

Of course, when The Witcher 3 launched, a lot of folk ended up having to eat crow, and not just from outside the company.

"The most significant moment for the company was the release, the moment when people who didn't even believe in the concept of the game were overwhelmed with the great reviews. There were high fives all the time, always screaming, shouting, 'That's another 10! Another 9! Another 10!' And that's when we became the team."

One of my fondest memories of playing The Witcher 3 was when I came home slightly inebriated with a friend and I thought it would be fun to try playing the game with each of us managing one half of the controls.

Within five minutes, I died by stumbling off a bridge that was barely a few feet off the ground and fell into the world's most shallow river. If only I'd fallen into literally any of the massive bodies of water available, I would have survived. And it would have all been thanks to CD Projekt's joint CEO Adam Badowski.

"I remember the moment when I asked a very difficult question [that felt] obvious to me," explains Badowski, "there's water, [but] where's swimming? The whole room was quiet." The team's main concern was that "they thought we'd need to cut something, so we didn't need to have swimming". Thankfully this wasn't the case.

Swimming is often quite a contentious mechanic, you either loathe it or deal with it, and I personally think it's only truly enjoyable when it's a game's sole focus like in Abzu. But, if there's accessible water and you die by dipping a toe in, that can be equally frustrating and pull you out of the experience. For Badowski, it was this "question of immersion" propelling ideas forward: "If there's water, there's swimming, if there's swimming, there's diving, if there's diving, you have to build completely new locations. And [the team] were like, that's the logic! Sometimes [as developers] we simply forget that [logic]."

Badowski explains that certain mechanics seem really obvious when creating a game, such as the classic 'game over', but he points out how GTA adds another layer to this because you don't just perish from obstacles in the open world, you also 'die' if you fail a mission—feeding into how that world works. "Here there are so many consequences and you have to [complete] every quest thinking about so many combinations because players can do whatever they want."

For Badowski, it's these consequential and seemingly innocuous aspects—including the ability to swim—that allow you to immerse yourself in an open world: "Sometimes there are quests limited by the location that's designed [in a] way that gives you this feeling of control. But for most of them, it's in an open world. So this little fact has so many consequences and production is really complex."

It's trotted out every time a game is delayed—that apocryphal Shigeru Miyamoto aphorism that a delayed game is eventually good, but a game you rush is bad forever. Miyamoto never said it but, hell, the truth is the truth. As frustrating as it can be to have something you're looking forward to punted back, we'd all rather a game be good and late than bad and on time.

Perhaps no studio has had this lesson drilled into it (kind of; its game didn't end up being 'bad forever') like CD Projekt Red. Cyberpunk 2077 is, now, an excellent game—worthy of inclusion on our list of the top 100 games you can play right now, no less. At launch? Less so. Now, the studio has extended a little social media backing to Rockstar over yesterday's delay to Grand Theft Auto 6.

One of the many venues in which Rockstar announced GTA 6's delay to November next year was X (the everything app!). As you can imagine, the announcement attracted tens of thousands of replies ranging from disappointment to anger to jokes to expressions of support. One of the supportive replies was from the official Cyberpunk account, which said nothing except to quote one of its own tweets—from October 2020 (two months before CP2077's release)—declaring that "No more delays are happening."

Some onlookers mistook the tweet as CDPR casting shade at Rockstar—a declaration that, unlike the big dogs in Dundee, the RPG studio actually managed to release its game at some point.

It didn't take long for others to point out what CDPR really meant, though: "A lot of the comments are missing what they mean by this," wrote DoughboyBJ (always trust someone called DoughboyBJ), "CDPR pushed out a game that wasn’t ready and we all know how that launch went. They are basically saying 'trust the process, so we can play the best version of GTA 6.'"

Frankly, recent events surrounding Rockstar's firing of more than 30 employees involved in union organising—though Rockstar says the unionisation efforts had nothing to do with it—don't exactly incline me toward sympathy to its leadership right now, but I get why CDPR would see a chilling reflection of its own traumatic past in GTA 6. There was, perhaps, more hype for Cyberpunk 2077 than any other game I'd ever seen back in 2020.

Now? Well, there's more hype for GTA 6 than anything. If Rockstar doesn't get this right, its blunder will be penned in the history books for the rest of time, just like CDPR's was. No wonder it's keen to see the catastrophe avoided again.