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.

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.

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.

After about 200 hours in The Witcher 3 and its DLCs, I can't say I was left thinking "There should have been more", but as it turns out we did all play a somewhat slimmed down version of Geralt's adventures.

In addition to an enormous number of bug fixes, the Brothers in Arms mod by Nexus Mods user MerseyRockoff (as well as a long list of collaborators) aims to restore and rebuild as much cut or inaccessible content as humanly possible. For the most part, we're talking about relatively minor elements: books, journal entries, item descriptions, and especially lines of dialogue that could be found in the game files but were never properly implemented by CD Projekt Red (though they certainly add up!).

There are a few cases, however, of full cutscenes and even gameplay sequences that the mod slots back into the game—and YouTuber xLetalis has made a great video breaking down some pretty key omissions from the excellent Hearts of Stone expansion that players can now experience.

The big headliner here is a scene that was cut from the Von Everec Estate section of the DLC. As you might remember, during this part of the adventure Geralt is able to witness visions of the past that reveal villain Olgierd's descent into evil and the occult, and the deterioration of his relationship with his wife. As it turns out, there was originally an extra scene, now partly restored by the mod.

It depicts a memory of Olgierd being confronted by a mob of local villagers who've grown sick of all the debauchery and violence and other assorted naughtiness. Naturally, he doesn't react well, and the implication is that he slaughtered them.

With the vision over, Geralt is attacked by the risen spirits of the dead villagers. Or rather… he isn't. They are enemies, and they do run at him, but when they reach him, they simply kneel down at his feet. Very unsettling and seemingly how they were intended to work, rather than a lingering bug.

From there, however, things do get too spotty for the mod to be able to fully restore the rest of the scene. A sequence in Olgierd's dungeons was supposed to play out next, including a vision of him murdering his wife's father, but as it stands none of that is playable—there simply wasn't enough original content to restore.

Still, that one intact section is well worth seeing, adding an extra layer of texture to Olgierd's dark and tragic story—and, as xLetalis points out, perhaps seeing that extra bit of ugliness in his past may make the story's final decision of whether to save him or not even trickier.

Beyond that, the video also shows off some minor restored elements of Hearts of Stone: a scene of Olgierd puffing on a pipe while talking to Geralt, and some lines that play during the boss fight with him at the burning manor. Neither feels essential, but they do just give one of The Witcher 3's best characters that little bit more chance to show off his personality, with moments like insulting Geralt's swordwork and pointing out that immortals don't have to worry about the hazards of smoking.

The likelihood is all of this was cut for good reason—whether to rein in some of the game's incredible scope, to prevent game-breaking bugs, or simply to establish a better narrative flow. But it's still fascinating to see a little of what could have been, and it's a testament to the sheer ambition of The Witcher 3 that over a decade later, there are still new secrets in it to be uncovered.

Dandelion sure does spend a lot of time imagining colorful new ways for Geralt to die. He also seems to know a lot of details about Geralt's sex life? Let me back up and explain what's going on here.

The Reigns series started in 2016. It's a survivor from the era when paid mobile games could still compete with free mobile games, a golden time that turned out to be a mere blink of the gaming industry's leviathan eye. In Reigns you were a king presented with binary decisions about how to rule, which you'd choose by swiping left or right. The consequences eventually led to a colorful "off with your head" scene appropriate to those choices, and you'd begin again as the next king in line.

Sequels and spin-offs became more complicated, and found homes on other platforms. There's been a sci-fi one, a Chinese one, a Game of Thrones one, and now a Witcher one. Instead of being an heir to the throne trying to navigate coronation ceremonies and diplomatic affairs, you are the Geralts who exist in Dandelion's songs—trying to stay alive long enough to achieve the three random goals you're given each run, like winning a certain number of duels or making sweet love down by the fire, which is where Dandelion knowing way too much about what Geralt gets up to at night comes in.

Eventually the ballad ends, not always in death, and your score is tallied while the quest-completion sound from The Witcher 3 plays and confetti shoots up, with a final blast based on how long you lasted. Sometimes, when you've had a real short run, the pitiful spurt of confetti comes across kind of sarcastic.

Of dairy and darkness

One of those choices lets me steal cheese from a tyromancer (that's someone who divines the future from dairy, a deep-cut reference to a Witcher 3 sidequest), which I could give to a halfling chef, making the non-human community like me more at the cost of angering the magical community. To win back their hearts I might refuse a noble's request to knock down a mage's tower for being taller than his, but doing that will annoy the human community. The three bars measuring these reputations fluctuate constantly and unpredictably, and if any get too high or low the ballad ends. Most of mine end with Geralt being hanged for fraternizing with the Scoia'tael because I maxed out the non-human bar by accident.

I've also had my blood sucked out by multiple vampires and been shot by a dryad, as well as having ballads end where I re-skilled to become a baker or retired to the country to judge beer competitions. Avoiding those endings is a real balancing act. The fourth bar measures your commitment to the Path of the Witcher, and if you spend too much time on diversions it'll drop so low Geralt abandons the job altogether. Filling it up isn't a game over, though. Instead, it triggers combat.

Combat uses a system that's new to Reigns. Where the original had a clumsy duelling minigame and follow-ups have tried alternatives like the card game in Reigns: Three Kingdoms, here it's an arcade thing where Geralt hops left and right to dodge falling claws and fists while trying to land on swords and signs. Monsters might block columns with fiery breath or a sonic attack, while landing on an igni sign can burn away a few of their attacks or a quen shield you from the next blow.

The battles feel better on thumbsticks than they do with a mouse, so I mostly played Reigns: The Witcher on a laptop with controller in hand. It's Steam Deck Verified and an obvious fit for that platform too. Most runs are over quickly and after two or three I'm ready to do something else, which seems ideal for a handheld game.

Which is why it's odd that, like the other Reigns games, there are multiple endings—and even more secret endings—tucked away at the end of a long grind. From the first Reigns there's been deep lore stuff going on, whether a devil had cursed you to reincarnate as doomed kings forever, or whatever was going on with the goddess whose appearances were accompanied by odd glitches in Reigns: Your Majesty.

To uncover these secrets you have to jump through a huge amount of hoops, unlocking specific cards and performing niche actions, but the amount of repetition needed to do that is so offputting I've never bothered. It's an oddity of the Reigns games that they're well-suited to short snacky play, but devoted to hiding stuff behind hours of experimentation and boundary-pushing.

The mild hunt

Reigns: The Witcher does feel true to the source material. Geralt's always being hassled by people who want him to be an assassin or otherwise do random stuff that's not technically witchering, and he's always trying to maintain balanced neutrality in the face of political forces trying to use him, which never ends well.

When my careful plate-spinning makes for a decent run with plenty of new crises and characters, I think Reigns: The Witcher is a pretty good time. Sometimes I unlock a between-run song puzzle, where a demanding audience member makes Dandelion construct something poetic out of inspiration cards and specific deaths I've unlocked, which is a pleasant change of pace. But then I get runs where hardly anything is new and I die because a particularly ambiguous situation upends the apple cart I've only just started spinning plates on, and then I think Reigns: The Witcher is just sort of fine.

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.

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.

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.

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 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."

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."

Andrzej Sapkowski recently wrote a prequel to his Witcher novels, Crossroads of Ravens. At an event to publicize that novel, our colleagues at GamesRadar asked the author if he'd been involved in any part of the development of The Witcher 4. And he said, basically: nope.

While explaining that the developers at CD Projekt Red did ask for advice and extra details about the setting while working on the previous games, these days apparently "it's so rare" that CDPR contact him to ask about the lore. Which makes sense, given how much the studio has added to it over the course of the Witcher games, like building Witcher schools based on an off-hand reference he threw in before regretting it.

The other thing Sapkowski had to say about his relationship with CDPR is that, "The contracts between me and the game people are excellent right now. Let's hope it stays that way." That was in reference to the lawsuit CDPR settled with Sapkowski in 2019 over royalties, with the author asserting that he'd handed over the rights for a pittance compared to the amount they ended up being worth.

The Witcher 4 is the start of a new trilogy of Witcher games, though since it only entered full production late in 2024 don't hold your breath for a release any time soon. And while Sapkowski hasn't been chatting to CDPR on the regular about it, the game's narrative director did get advance details on what Crossroads of Ravens would be about, so info from it may well creep into The Witcher 4.

Did you know digital games store Fanatical is doing comic and book bundles these days? They're worth keeping an eye on—this month, for example, they've done a whole series of really excellent value horror comics deals that I've enjoyed taking advantage of.

But to keep this on the topic of games, there's one bundle in particular I'm here to bring to your attention: The Witcher Build-Your-Own-Bundle.

It includes all the Dark Horse Witcher comics as digital trade paperbacks, as well as the recently translated original Polish comics, a Gwent artbook, and The World of the Witcher, a mighty reference guide to all the lore of the videogame series. The "build your own bundle" part just means you can choose which items you want, with the overall discount rising the more you buy. Of course, getting all of them nets you the best possible price per book.

It's only $11.99 / £10.70 to get the whole lot, which has a total value of $208.84 / £156.40. That's a huge saving, so it seems to be well worth going all-in unless you're just trying to pick up a few books to complete an existing collection.

Dark Horse has been making comics based on The Witcher videogames and novels for over a decade now, and it's pretty great at it. With its popular Hellboy series, the publisher has certainly had plenty of experience telling stories about gruff monster hunters facing grim peril, and its Witcher comics are at their best when they lean into the same kind of shadowy, fantasy-horror atmosphere.

Personally I really enjoyed the House of Glass, which sees Geralt stumble into a surreal and gothic haunted house story reminiscent of The Witcher 3's Heart of Stone DLC. If you want more recommendations, our own Jody Macgregor made a ranking of the whole series just a couple of years back, with mini-reviews of almost every book in this bundle.

You receive the comics as PDFs, which isn't as ideal as it could be—I always prefer .cbz files for their smaller size—but the image quality is perfect. Fanatical's download pages are agreeably well-organised, too. If you've bought a Humble Bundle comic bundle before, you may have found it a surprising pain to download and sort it all, thanks to jumbled file lists and incorrectly labelled books. Here, they're delivered in neat and sensible order with useful file names, so you can just bulk download them, drop them in a folder, and you're ready to go with a minimum of fuss.

I've been really converted to digital comic reading in recent years. Get yourself a tablet and a good comic reader app (I use CDisplayEx), and it can be just as good as reading physically, with some huge upsides—like not having to worry about shelf space, and being able to stock up on the cheap with bundles like this. This bundle would be a great way to give it a go if you've never tried it.

You've got plenty of time to decide if you fancy exploring the world of Witcher comics, though—the bundle is set to run until the end of November.

The first trailer for season 4 of The Witcher on Netflix is here, showcasing the new Geralt, his new team, and most importantly of all, a debut date of October 30.

We haven't previously known the release date for the fourth season of Netflix's best-known monster-killing show, so that's probably the real headline news here. For me, though, the real eye-catcher is Laurence Fishburne's big hair. That is a look.

Fishburne is playing Emiel Regis Rohellec Terzieff-Godefroy—just Regis to his friends—in Netflix's adaptation of The Witcher, a higher vampire who joins Geralt and company on their quest to track down Ciri.

Regis also played a pivotal role in The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine expansion, and to be fair he had a pretty wild 'do in that one too.

We also get a very brief glimpse at what I'm pretty sure is Danny Woodburn as Zoltan Chivay, another of Geralt's stalwart companions.

Also some undeniably phenomenal hair going on there.

The rest of the gang is here, and there's plenty of violence to enjoy, being dished out not just by Geralt but also Yennefer and Ciri, both of whom have become very handy in a fight. Jaskier seems more or less unchanged on that front: unhappy about the whole thing, but determined to stick it out, and good on him for it, frankly.

And of course, Liam Hemsworth is a bit more in full flight as Geralt 2.0 than we've seen previously. That's going to be the real point of curiosity for a lot of fans, and I would absolutely not think to judge based on this one video, but I do have to say that my initial impression is... mixed.

He looks good, yes, but the voice—what little we can hear of it—just isn't quite there. Blame that on original Geralt Henry Cavill, who was supposed to use his normal voice for the role but forgot, and ended up creating the next-best thing to Doug Cockle himself.

Fantastic hair, though.

As for what's going on in this video, the short version is that Geralt is putting together a team—or, as Netflix phrased it, a family: "After the Continent-altering events of Season Three, Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri find themselves separated by a raging war and countless enemies. As their paths diverge, and their goals sharpen, they stumble on unexpected allies eager to join their journeys. And if they can accept these found families, they just might have a chance at reuniting for good."

There will be one more season of The Witcher on Netflix, which combined with season four will cover the three remaining Witcher books: Baptism of Fire, The Tower of the Swallow, and Lady of the Lake, which concludes with what proves to be the lead-in for CD Projekt's original Witcher RPG. Filming on the final season has already concluded: Netflix previously announced that seasons four and five were being filmed back to back, and Witcher fan site Redanian Intelligence reported last week that filming has now wrapped.

Although CD Projekt Red CEO Adam Badowski says it's all a front, the grumpiness of Witcher creator Andrzej Sapkowski is legendary. This is the guy whose advice to novice writers was "Learn something that is worth doing. For example, repairing computers. That makes money. Forget about writing, it's [a] hard business." And as for his attitude towards the phenomenally popular game series? "I have no time for this."

Which, I have to be honest, I find immensely charming. Here's a man with no patience for nonsense. But perhaps even Sapkowski cracked a smile when he learnt he was getting Poland's Gold Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture, which the country's Ministry of Culture hands out to artists who have made major contributions to its heritage.

Well, with his new gold medal (which you can see up-close on the Wiki page, and which wouldn't look out of place in The Witcher itself) Sapkowski is now among the most hallowed of those ranks. He was given the medal by Polish culture minister Marta Cienkowska and, judging by the photos, immediately erupted into a gregarious bout of dancing, laughing, and merrymaking.

No, just kidding. He looks like someone just told him the restaurant's special of the day has run out. What a legend.

Still, everyone else seems very happy he's got the recognition. On X, Cienkowska tweeted (the following is machine translated) "The words 'something ends, something begins' are the title of one of your stories—and a beautiful metaphor. For although each book and tale has its conclusion, the legacy you have created never ends. It lives on—in readers, gamers, viewers, and in culture."

The Polish government itself published a tribute to "one of the most frequently translated fantasy authors" to mark the ceremony.

Also marking the occasion? Adam Badowski, of course, who tweeted that "Mr. Sapkowski’s work has influenced millions of fantasy fans around the world and inspired the next generation of artists, writers, and storytellers shaping Polish culture—us included. There would be no Witcher game without the Master!"

Netflix has released a "first clip" of Liam Hemsworth as Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher Season Four, as distinct from the "first look" we got back in May. This is our first actual scene from the season and not a little teaser, though, with Hemsworth sporting the white locks and leather armor of everyone's favorite mutant monster slayer.

The clip shows Geralt, an elf, and a dwarf squaring off with a wraith in a dark forest. Dialogue-wise, we just get a little of that Witcher pre-fight monster explaining, the sort of thing Geralt would mutter while looking at clues, but Hemsworth hits the right notes with a similar growl to original Geralt actor Henry Cavill.

The choreography of the fight is also physical and legible in a way I dig: Not so many cuts that you can't tell what the hell's going on, and some actually interesting flow to it. The fight's dominated by the specter knocking Geralt over and trying to drag him back to its crypt, before he jams his sword in the ground to slow it and then Aards his way to freedom.

Rounding out some fun deployment of Witcher signs, Geralt lures the thing into a Yrden trap so he can actually harm it⁠, and finishes it off by tearing out its heart and crushing it. The way the wraith drags Geralt along particularly caught my attention: It looked like weighty, visceral stuntwork, reminding me of old Hong Kong martial arts flicks. As far as first impressions go, I enjoyed it way more than I anticipated.

I haven't really kept up with the show since the end of Season Two, but I liked what I saw in this clip. Hemsworth also looks the part, with a requisite new season armor upgrade that looks more like the ye olde leather jackets of the games' Wolf School sets, rather than the Witcher 3 starting armor vibe of Cavill's assorted ensembles.

Of course, the show looks to have an uphill battle winning people over this season, and it's not just the casting change that saw the much-loved Henry Cavill vacate the lead role. There seems to be quite a bit of vocal discontent over story changes versus the source material in the books, as well as an often-repeated narrative among fans that these changes precipitated Cavill's departure from the show.

For me, I've just had trouble penetrating The Witcher Saga proper despite a love of the games and short stories: Whether in written or filmed form, I've always fallen off when we transition from twisted Brothers Grimm monster of the week stuff to prophecy and fantasy politics. But that's my damage: We'll find out if Hemsworth and co. can win everybody back when The Witcher Season Four releases on October 30.

Here's a monster deal sure to be of interest to any wannabe Witcher. Humble Bundle is offering six of the Witcher's RPG gamebooks—amounting to $170's worth of roleplaying tomes—for just $15.

The bundle gets you The Witcher TTRPG core rulebook, letting you play as nine different classes including bards, mages, merchants and doctors as well as the titular mercenary monster slayers. It also includes four supplements, starting with A Book of Tales, which introduces adventures that range from Kovir to Toussaint (the setting for The Witcher 3's fantastic expansion Blood & Wine) through the perspective of famed troubadour and Geralt's best pal Dandelion.

Meanwhile, A Tome of Chaos focusses on introducing new spells and magic items, while A Witcher's Journal introduces an investigation system. Finally, there's Lords & Lands, which adds playable halflings and a new noble profession for your roleplaying pleasure.

The final book in the bundle is "easy mode" which comes with a streamlined ruleset, predefined characters to play as and a ready-made adventure. You'll probably want to start with this if you're unfamiliar with TTRPGs, and may still want to do so even if you are familiar with them, as the Witcher's vanilla ruleset is not exactly the simplest to understand.

Paying $15 gets you all six books outright in ebook form, though you can of course pay more if you want to. Unlike a lot of Humble Bundles, there doesn't seem to be any price gradient here, with the bundle details stating that $15 is the "minimum" purchase.

The bundle supports Children's Miracle Hospitals—which engages with local communities to raise funds for children's hospitals in the U.S and Canada. By default, only $0.75 of the default $15 price goes to the charity, with the rest split between the RPG publisher R. Talsorian and Humble Bundle. But you can select the "Extra to Charity" option, which increases the donation to $2.25 at no extra cost to you.

The Witcher TTRPG bundle runs until August 30, and may just provide you with sufficient monster slaying until CD Projekt releases The Witcher 4, whenever that happens. We did see a tech demo of The Witcher 4 in action earlier this year, but it doesn't provide much indication of how far along the game is, and I imagine we have a good few years yet before CD Projekt's Ciri-focused adventure arrives on an incredibly realistic horse.

Everyone has a different way of going about their work. Some like to plan meticulously, colour code information and have Excel spreadsheets on Excel spreadsheets, and others, well, others have GDocs.

As it turns out, throwing ideas into an ever-growing chaotic GDoc for days on end was actually Philipp Weber's first job at CD Projekt Red (via GamesRadar). Back when he was a quest designer on The Witcher 3 before he got promoted to narrative director for The Witcher 4.

You may think that a company as big as CDPR would have to run a tight ship with everything organised to a T, but it seems that the philosophy, at least while work was underway on The Witcher 3 was a little bit more holistic.

The energy at CDPR around this time was apparently quite "scrappy" and Weber used GDocs to note down any and every quest idea he could think of. There wasn't much rhyme or reason to it, instead it was, he admits, "a little bit vibes-based."

"Do it immediately, do it fast, do it dirty," Weber says. CDPR's philosophy was to just keep the engine running and the ideas pouring out until the last possible moment. "We check it and start iterating [...] we keep that iteration going until the end—we're never happy with the result until it's too late and the game has to be out."

But CDPR's chaotic drive wasn't the only key to The Witcher 3's success. Among other things, it was also helmed by a bunch of enthusiastic fans and developers, many of whom were modders.

Back in 2013, CD Projekt ran a competition after opening its mod tools beta to the public, a competition that Weber, aka Benzenzimmern, won. "I came in with super high motivation, loving the Witcher," Weber explains. "I think the secret behind The Witcher 3 was that I wasn't an exception—that was the case for so many people." So I guess the secret sauce for The Witcher 3 was a combination of chaos, grit, and the mother of all GDocs, which I for one would really like to see.

I'm old enough to remember a time when cars were the way that new consoles and GPUs showcased what was possible with all their added power. Rounder wheels, more reflective windscreens, interiors rendered with a level of detail so granular as to seem almost obscene—these were the bellweathers by which we knew how far the videogame industry had come.

But cars have looked real good for a long while now, so we've all moved on. Now we judge ourselves by the horses: shifting muscles, taut sinews, testicles that react appropriately to weather—this is how we show off our teraflops in 2025. The Witcher 4's recent tech demo was no different, with Ciri's steed Kelpie taking centre stage as they made their way through Kovir's very, very pretty mountain landscape.

It's a good-looking horse, but don't take my word for it. Take the word of Alice Ruppert of The Mane Quest (via GamesRadar) a bonafide videogames expert, horse expert, and videogames horse expert who pored over CDPR's depiction of Kelpie with a fine-tooth comb. In summary? It's one hell of a realistic horse, my friend.

I really encourage you to go read Ruppert's full write-up, entire site, and then our very own interview with her from April, but I'll zero in on a few details to give you a taste of just how seriously CDPR is taking its horses. At one point in the UE5 demo, everything slowed down so CDPR's devs could zoom in on Kelpie's rippling muscles and shiny coat, showing off the depth of the horsey simulation it was pulling off. "I’ll be honest and admit that I got tears in my eyes the first time I watched this," says Ruppert, "out of sheer 'oh my god they’re taking the horse seriously' awe."

Which, I have to be honest, is a level of passion I'm not sure I can match for anything. Ruppert calls out a few elements of the simulation for particular praise: Kelpie's trot and canter, the way she approaches Ciri when called, and the fact that Ciri (and the demo generally) seems to treat Kelpie like a living thing with feelings rather than a summonable vehicle.

That's not to say it's a 1:1, perfect depiction of a horse as one would appear in real life. There are some flaws. For instance, Kelpie's "left fetlock is awkward and stiff in how it comes forward." Fortunately, I have no clue what a fetlock is, and if you'd asked me before I read Ruppert's site I'd have assumed it was some kind of cheese rind. Ruppert admits she's "nitpicking on a very high level here" on a demo that's otherwise "easily one of the overall most impressive and well put together game horse animations ever seen," so I think you and I probably won't notice this stuff when The Witcher 4 eventually ships.

The Witcher 3 was, you may have heard, a large game. But it was once an even larger game. When it was still cooking over at CD Projekt Red, dev brains bubbled over with designs for questlines, cutscenes, and all sorts of other stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor before it released. Naturally, when I visited the studio for The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary, I asked for all the deets on the stuff we never got to see.

Like, for instance, that one quest where Geralt would have actually joined the Wild Hunt, signing up as a rider in Eredin's army. "The biggest changes were probably regarding the Wild Hunt," says Witcher 3 lead writer Marcin Blacha, "Geralt became kind of like an insider in the Wild Hunt… and he was sailing on the Naglfar—this ship that the Wild Hunt sails—and there were some quests with the riders of the Wild Hunt, and Geralt was one of them, and he was doing stuff pretending to be one of them."

This earlier, Hunt-heavy (or heavier) version of the game had a very different ending in mind, too: one that drew direct inspiration from Mass Effect 2, then a relatively recent game. "Mass Effect 2 was a huge inspiration for the game," says Blacha, "and even initially, we had an ending that was kind of inspired by Mass Effect 2… that moment when Geralt gathers a party and goes on a suicide mission.

"It was on a Skellige drakkar you were sailing into a frozen sea, and you were supposed to fight the Wild Hunt on this drakkar." That's not a million miles off from the endgame we got, which saw Geralt face-off with Eredin on a ship stuck in a—you guessed it—frozen sea, but it wasn't quite a full-on ME2-style suicide mission. You weren't sending Ciri into the vents or selecting Yennefer to lead a second squad of battle-hardened vets. "We redesigned it a little bit, and we decided to make this more personal ending."

And so we got a game that was a little less about Geralt vs the Hunt and a little more about Geralt and his relationships with Ciri, Yenn, and Triss. A change for the better, I reckon.

Other parts of the game couldn't escape the gaze of the editor, either. Blood and Wine, the game's second and final DLC, once had a lengthy quest revolving around a hapless stableboy who pilfered a dead knight's armour and looned off to have adventures of his own. "I blame myself for it being cut out," says Witcher 3 writer Tomasz Marchewka, "it was because of the lack of craftsmanship."

It would have gone like this: an old knight forgot to take his meds, eventually meeting his end at the hands of a heart attack. A stable boy—Egg—would have found the body, and nicked the armour in the hopes of impressing some damsel or another. Off he goes to fight a monster, wearing armour that's far too heavy for him, discarding piece after piece until eventually he's standing, naked but for a sword, before a monster he never would have had a shot at killing anyway.

"So we were saving him," says Marchewka. "But it all fell apart when you saved Egg and came back to the village… because he stole [a knight's] armour, he was lynched and killed by the people in the village." Which is a very Witcher-y tale, sure, and makes sense as the kind of twist CDPR would come up with on Blood and Wine's themes of knightly chivalry and fairytale endings.

What makes less sense is a version of the DLC that would have taken out the 'blood' part of Blood and Wine—an expansion completely free of vampires. "[There were] a number of versions along the road," recalls Marchewka.

"For example, Regis—he was in and out. We had versions with Regis and without Regis." Which makes a degree of sense: Geralt's higher vampire pal Regis met a sticky end in Sapkowski's books, so bringing him back to life was a bit of fan-service on the part of CDPR. There were also versions with no Detlaff—the DLC's rogue vamp antagonist—and, apparently, "a version without vampires.

"But for a very short time," Marchewka stresses. I have to admit, I have no idea what that would even look like, given how integral vampires are to both Blood and Wine as a released DLC and to the project's original pitch: per Marchewka, when he was introduced to the project, the two bulletpoints were that it was gonna be big and it was gonna be about vampires.

Alas, Marchewka is loath to chat about that bloodless iteration of Blood and Wine, demurring with a quick "Well, let's not talk about it" when I press for details. Still, you have to wonder what The Witcher 3 would have looked like had all these ideas made it in. A lot messier and probably worse, I'd say. But man, what I'd give to know what a vampire-free vampire DLC looked like.

Yesterday brought our first proper look at The Witcher 4, thanks to a highly impressive tech demo, and the Ciri-led sequel is now CDPR's next big thing. PCG's Josh Wolens recently sat down with several of the studio's core figures to discuss the series' past and future and, with this happening around The Witcher 3's tenth anniversary, one prominent topic was how the gaming landscape has changed over that time.

The Witcher 4 will release in a very different world from The Witcher 3, and there are several high-profile examples of studios that don't seem to have kept pace with the times. Bioware's Dragon Age: Veilguard, for example, was a perfectly decent RPG, but the visuals aside it was almost like a game you could've been playing in 2015. But then there are those games that do feel like they're pushing the RPG forward, like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and perhaps most prominently Baldur's Gate 3. So where is CDPR and The Witcher 4 going to find itself?

"Bioware has changed for sure, but the industry has changed too," says CDPR co-CEO Adam Badowski. "We have a different strategy for our company. We definitely would like to continue keeping and truly understanding our core rules, how we develop our games, and of course, on top of that, we need to find new things, especially in gameplay, because there's not such a great progress when it comes to good stories.

"So here we feel very strongly at the same time, so many great things happened in gameplay [since The Witcher 3]. What are players' expectations here? And there are great games, great mechanics and plus UI [improvements]. So this is the idea for our development, and we are focusing on that, but at the same time we strongly believe in the core of what we are doing here."

Badowski goes on to say that he thinks one of CDPR's strengths is that, while The Witcher and Cyberpunk are very different worlds, at their heart are some pretty similar goals.

"So even if we have multiple games, it doesn't mean that we are focusing on one big thing, because our games are similar when it comes to the core aspects," says Badowski. "Of course, Cyberpunk is different from the Witcher, but different enough to feel that it's something maybe more for me, less for you. But I think the core, the pillars, how we make games stay the same and we continue. Maybe that's the difference, the difference between our strategy and Bioware's strategy these days."

To get down to brass tacks, then, what does CDPR see when it's looking at the likes of KCD2 and BG3?

"I love Kingdom Come because of the realism and the feeling, the sense of humor," says Badowski. Would he even say it's a little Witcher-y?

"Thank you," laughs Badowski, before going on to explain how some of the more simulation-y and systems-heavy aspects of KCD2 are the things CDPR watches with interest, because this is partly The Witcher 4's direction of travel.

"The Kingdom Come kind of simulation, it's great," says Badowski. "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. But at the same time, we would like to build very fleshy, very well-motivated characters. So it's kind of in contradiction from time-to-time. That's a great design challenge."

With Larian the influence is less direct. "In Larian's case it's turn-based so it's a different kind of game, and the way you interact with characters is totally different," says Bakowski. "We like to fully build the characters, understand the past and the future of the character motivation. That's why it takes so much time. [In BG3] there are great characters as well but sometimes your choices, because there's freedom of choices in Larian's work, it pushes you to use different tricks than ours. But I think we observe each other, and there are not that many games like that, so that's natural, yeah, and we see how players react, how fans react to those tactics."

It's a theme that joint CEO Michał Nowakowski echoes: Baldur's Gate 3 has clearly impressed an awful lot of people at CDPR, even if they're conscious that The Witcher is always going to be a different type of RPG.

"I think we're still more in the, you know, we're a big open world," says Nowakowski. "But a lot of what Baldur's Gate 3 showed was an inspiration, and to be honest there's no shame in that. I think everybody who launches games nowadays is looking back on what was done before, and is looking at what worked and what was great and how and if they can fit it into whatever they are doing.

"So for sure there was a lot of inspiration and what BG3 did, but I think we're still more sticking to what was The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk, even if we don't want to just make another game like that, just with better graphics. We do want to innovate in terms of what's available in terms of gameplay and so on. I hope when the time comes, that's going to become clear for the fans as well."

If that's all sounding a little fuzzy, Nowakowski circles back to make it clear what CDPR is not doing:

"It's a bit of an unclear answer, but to make it more clear, we definitely are not going to make a game like Larian did," says Nowakowski. "That's the kind of game they can make. But a lot of stuff with how the characters can interact with the world and what it does was for sure some inspiration to us."

Well, here's a good bit of timing. Just a couple of weeks ago, we were telling you about the original Polish The Witcher comics coming out in English (and about Geralt's fringe looking like a cartoon mustache). Now, they've available in a new Humble Bundle—and you can get them for just a dollar.

The Witcher X Cyberpunk 2077 bundle offers up a whole load of comics in PDF from publisher Dark Horse, mostly based on CD Projekt RED's videogame universes, though with the Polish comics as well, and some direct adaptations of Andrzej Sapkowski stories. Also included are world books for both, and an artbook full of all the gorgeous portraits from Gwent.

Altogether, it's 25 books worth $438 / £323.50—so the all-in price of $24 / £17.80 is, as usual, a steal. The next tier is $12 / £8.90 for 6 items, and though it's a slightly random smattering of the books, it's enough at least to give you a good flavour of Dark Horse's stuff and see whether you'd want more in the future.

And then for a measly $1 / £0.74, you can get just the classic Polish comics. It amounts to six issues, translated to English, mostly adapting the original short stories but also featuring an original tale by Andrzej Sapkowski himself. A little slice of Witcher history for less than a coffee seems like a good deal, and the retro comic art has serious charm.

I've not read a lot of the books in the bundle myself, but I did really enjoy volume 1 of the modern Witcher comics, House of Glass. The atmospheric Mike Mignola cover sets you up perfectly for a moody, scary folktale that feels perfectly in line with the feel of the games. I'm a big fan of Dark Horse generally, too—when it comes to these kinds of licensed comics, I think it's got a fantastic hit rate.

The files being delivered only as PDFs rather than CBZ or EPUB files isn't ideal—it means the collection will take up a lot of space, and depending on the device you read on, it may be a little laggy. But it should mean nice, crisp quality, and if you're new to digital comics, PDFs do have the advantage of being easy to open and use without downloading any new app.

By my count, the bundle will be available until June 18, so if your interest has been piqued, make sure to grab it before then—and set aside some time for downloading and organising it all. In the meantime, I'll let you know if I find any other good ways of killing time while we wait for The Witcher 4…

We got a fresh glimpse of The Witcher 4 during Epic's State of Unreal livestream today, showing a merchant having an incredibly unpleasant time at the hands of a manticore, and, oh, CDPR cinematic director Kajetan Kapuściński actually playing some Witcher 4.

It must be said, it looks bloody gorgeous. Ciri and her horse—Kelpie, not Roach—have found themselves in Kovir, roaming around taking monster contracts and doing general Witcher stuff, but in Unreal Engine 5 this time.

Our hardware team is cooking up an analysis of the tech on show, but my layman's opinion is that it looks swish as hell: Ciri's cloak deforms and rustles convincingly, the Koviri town Ciri rides into to conclude her contract is filled with life and people, and CDPR is giving us all what we want with realistic third-person shoving.

The demo feels a bit like a repeat of that Witcher 3 preview from way-back-when, the one where Geralt rides into Novigrad to claim the reward on a monster contract. After investigating the bloody aftermath of the manticore's attack on the merchant, she rides Kelpie back to the guy who hired her to give him the bad news.

The twist is, of course, that when this guy gave Ciri the contract he told her he wanted news on a delayed salt shipment, and it didn't take our witcheress long to figure out he was actually concerned about the smuggled goods hidden in the cart. A pretty classic Witcher turn in the tale: the kind of thing that would have Geralt heave a world-weary sigh as he decides whether to help the guy out or not.

We don't get a look at The Witcher 4's dialogue system, alas—the camera flies away from Ciri and the contract-giver's chat to show off some fish just when it looks like things might be reaching a decision point—but we do get quite a lot of Ciri's new voice actor, Ciara Berkeley, who's replacing Jo Wyatt from The Witcher 3.

In the parts we hear, Berkeley does a great job—channelling an appropriate level of witcher-like exasperation without sounding like she's doing a knock-off Geralt or Witcher 3 Ciri. She's older and more experienced, having been doing this monster-hunting lark for a while now, and that comes across in the bit of Berkeley we get.

If I wasn't excited before (I was), I am now (even moreso). It feels like CDPR is drilling down into the sumptuous open-world feast that was The Witcher 3, but expanding and enhancing it using its last 10 years of experience and technological development. "We are making this game to be the most immersive and ambitious open-world Witcher game ever," said CDPR's Sebastian Kalemba on stage. Traditional marketing hype, sure, but I'm inclined to believe him.

It's not exactly news that Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 both grapple with heavy-hitting themes—but there are a few stand-out moments that can really crawl under your skin. For me, just about all of ol' 2077 was a bit of an existential nightmare, though it was one I was thoroughly enthralled by.

Speaking to our friends at GamesRadar about the Bloody Baron and Sinnerman questlines—which cover themes of miscarriage and domestic abuse in The Witcher 3, and crucifixion in Cyberpunk 2077, respectively—The Witcher 3's senior quest designer (now narrative director on The Witcher 4) Philipp Weber says that no-one in the studio takes grappling with such themes lightly.

Weber insists that CD Projekt Red doesn't "do heavy things for the sake of edginess … We do heavy things if we have something meaningful to say, and then we also dare to go there." He also adds that "the Bloody Baron, for us, really is the benchmark". In regards to Sinnerman, Weber freely admits that there were "people in the studio who had problems with it," though he argues that's part of the point:

"I would say that if you never have that discussion, you're probably not making art, if there's never a question of 'maybe we actually have to be brave, dive deeper'. Maybe there's something that could also touch people the wrong way. Are we ready to do that? And I think those are discussions that we have to this day, but I think it's important to have them, because otherwise you're never able to do something like this."

It's an interesting line to walk. I'm personally not sure if I'd want every single game I play to be made by devs pushing themselves to dance around cultural lines in the sand and harsh themes—sometimes you just want to play a silly little shooter and see a number go up, and not everything has to be an R-rated miseryfest. All artforms have their escapist fantasies and their challenging texts.

But even when I think of the memorable pieces of art from my childhood, it was often memorable because it did brush close to some of those lines. Avatar: The Last Airbender wouldn't be half the show it was if it shied away from Firelord Ozai's abuse of Zuko, or Aang's rage at the air temple's destruction, or the fact there is no war in Ba Sing Se—and that was a show made for kids.

Conversely, games that do shed their harsher elements tend to have lesser stories for it. Dragon Age: The Veilguard's story suffered, in part, because it was thoroughly sanitised and felt more like The Avengers than anything else. I rarely felt challenged by the story so much as I was served it on a silver platter, with a shot of Gaviscon to wash it all down with.

I suppose it's all anchored in what you're trying to do. At the very least, I can agree with Weber that if you never have hard conversations, you're probably missing some sort of trick. And it's hard to argue with the results, given how tremendously impactful The Witcher 3 has been on the whole of gaming culture. There's a reason we threw a whole feast of interviews during its 10th birthday last week.

The Witcher games are one of the clearest examples of improvement over a series in videogame history. No backsliding here: The Witcher was a mess, The Witcher 2 was genuinely quite decent, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was a masterpiece. The Witcher 3's success put CD Projekt Red on Sony's speed-dial, but it had other consequences as well.

"It gave us confidence that we can deliver a truly ambitious and engrossing RPG of a big scale," says Michał Nowakowski, joint CEO and member of the board, speaking to PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens. "And that we can punch above our weight and we can get head to head with the big ones. I remember, I was like, really, really afraid of the standard that Dragon Age: Inquisition's going to set," Nowakowski recalls.

While the two did duke it out for RPG of the Year awards ("I thought it was a fantastic game," Nowakowski says of the competitor), The Witcher 3 was such a smash it changed expectations at CD Projekt Red. "That gave us confidence," Nowakowski says. "Maybe in many ways even too much confidence looking back, to be honest, because I think that was the beginning of a bit of magical thinking for the company, which only stopped after Cyberpunk."

Or as Adam Badowski, CD Projekt Red's other joint CEO and member of the board puts it, "We turn from underdog to the company that is visible in the industry."

The idea of magical thinking brings to mind BioWare magic, the idea that a troubled videogame will inevitably come together during the final stage of development because that's what happened last time. And while the concept's been torn apart repeatedly, it persisted because so many videogames do come together at the last moment. Even a classic like Thief: The Dark Project wasn't fun to play until it was almost finished.

"I do remember, for The Witcher 3 specifically, seeing a version of the game that was put together, I think it was like February, 2015?" Nowakowski recalls. "I remember I walked up to Adam and said, 'How are we in a good shape? Because that looks really not that great.' You know, like, 'Don't worry. We're gonna make the final push with the patch. That's gonna be a day-zero patch.' I remember talking to some of the key tech people, and they were tired—exhausted, to be honest—but it's OK. We're gonna make it happen. And they did. Of course there were a lot of patches afterwards, but the whole thing was like a force of nature. Lots of chaos, and a lot of final-moment efforts over there, without I think proper planning."

The fact The Witcher 3 came together in that final push didn't help the way the studio thought about things. "Everybody felt I think for a few moments that whenever something's going on, we're gonna have a magic fairy at the end that's gonna come down and sprinkle some dust, and things are gonna be OK," Nowakowski says. "I'm of course exaggerating, but there is some truth in that. So that's a negative change. The positive change was that confidence, which I think helped us to build the ambition, which I still think is a big value of the company."

Cyberpunk 2077's development demonstrated both the benefits of ambition, and the risks of overconfidence. Even as the studio got bigger, Nowakowski says, "A lot of things were developed in almost isolation, as weird as it may sound, so we sometimes didn't see the actual effects of how it actually interacts until it was put together." If those things developed in isolation don't magically come together, you end up with a game full of disconnected systems, and sidequests that feel like they don't mesh with the main questline. Which is to say, you end up with Cyberpunk 2077.

The Witcher games were developed in a similar way, Nowakowski says, but the issues that resulted were easier to fix. "It was probably never fine," he says, "but it worked when the scope of the games were smaller. Like for Witcher 1 and 2. But I think at The Witcher 3, we could already hear the boat is creaking a little bit."

Following the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, the studio worked to tear down that isolation. "I don't want it to sound like it was all chaos, you know, burning cart on fire, because that would also not be true," Nowakowski says. "We had great producers, and there was a lot of planning involved that made sense." But the processes at CD Projekt Red in need of addressing finally were, "and that's a big change that happened after Cyberpunk."

When you're spending $81 million to make a game like The Witcher 3, and $320 million on Cyberpunk 2077's launch version, you don't get to be the underdog any more. It can be hard to let go of the idea you're the upstart rebels disrupting an industry and approach work more responsibly, though. "It was cool to be underdog," says Michał Platkow-Gilewski, VP of PR and communication. "Yeah, it's sexier."

There's no worse feeling than going into a presentation and only being made aware of how underprepared you are after you've finished. I've felt that pit in my stomach a few times, but knowing that the CEO and studio head of CD Projekt Red has experienced this same kind of nightmare fills me with at least some comfort.

Towards the beginning of The Witcher 1's development, Adam Badowski, CDPR's co-CEO and studio head, alongside other team members, showed a demo to BioWare co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk.

"I presented the demo, and this demo wasn't great," Badowski says. "Afterwards, Ray and Greg ask the question, 'Okay, so what do you want to achieve?' We said that we would like to be the biggest, the best RPG team in the industry. We would like to create the best RPG game ever." That's one way to make an impression.

At this point, CDPR only had 15 people in the team, with the hope of expanding to 35 in the not-so-distant future. Regardless of how hardworking everyone clearly was, it was undoubtedly an awkward moment around the table. After a bad demo, the realisation that it was only a small team working on this project, and the declaration that despite all of this, they wanted to make the best RPG ever. All BioWare could muster up was a "We'll call you back".

But luckily, the lasting impression must've been a good one, as eventually BioWare did get back in contact with CDPR. "They were super supportive," Badowski says. "Our first engine was from BioWare."

The engine that they ended up getting was the Aurora Engine, which powered BioWare's Neverwinter Nights series of fantasy RPGs. But those at CDPR still had their work cut out for them. "We wrote 80-something percent of the code," Badowski says. "We had no multiplayer, we removed so many, so many elements from the engine, and the render was completely new."

So I guess the lesson to be learned here is just to back yourself, no matter how bad things may be going. Yes, the demo that Badowski showed to BioWare may not have been the greatest showcase of The Witcher 1, but it did the job. "The lack of experience and the lack of understanding sometimes helps with your ambitions." Wise words from Badowski.

While it was The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that brought CD Projekt RED worldwide fame, the studio had already created a brace of The Witcher games before then, with the original monster-slaying RPG of the trilogy released back in 2007.

The Witcher was built on BioWare's Aurora Engine, which was most famous at the time as the engine that powered the studio's own Neverwinter Nights series of fantasy RPGs. By using this engine The Witcher let players jump into the superhuman shoes of Geralt of Rivia in a story that, in the wider Witcher Saga timeline, takes place roughly five years after The Lady of the Lake, Andrzej Sapkowski's fifth book.

CDPR's original The Witcher release was incredibly ambitious, especially for such a young studio, but a result of that was a series of bugs, unoptimized systems, and a general roughness of finish. CD Projekt RED, as we've now come to expect from the studio, though, was not satisfied with that and followed up with an Enhanced Edition of the game that upgraded the original experience in a host of ways.

The Witcher: Enhanced Edition completely rewrote and re-recorded over 5,000 lines of dialogue, added in over 200 new animations and a NPC character differentiation system that randomizes the look of many characters and monsters. It also reworked the game's inventory system to make it easier to use and manage, as well as deliver a smorgasbord of technical improvements to make the game run better and be more fun. Simply put, it was a massive overhaul and one that made The Witcher a significantly better game in every way.

Which is why when I saw that the censorship-free Director's Cut version of the Enhanced Edition is now available for just over a pound in the United Kingdom, and just under a buck fifty in the United States, I thought I would bring it to the PC gaming community's attention. This is the definitive version of The Witcher as CDPR intended, one that currently has over 57,000 'Very Positive' reviews on Steam, and it is now half the price of a cup of coffee. Basically, I find it incredibly easy to recommend.

This version of The Witcher also comes with a series of bonus items, too, including: An interactive comic book, an in-game D'jinni Adventure Editor, an additional five hours of gamplay in two new adventures, the game's official soundtrack, a dedicated 'Music Inspired by The Wicher' album, a suite of 'Making of' videos, an official game guide, and two maps of The Witcher's world. Basically, for the new low price, it's a huge package.

One word of warning, though. While The Witcher plays well today, and does share some systems and, in general, the same flavour as later instalments in the series, gamers should not go into it expecting it to play just like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, as it has some different combat and gameplay systems. That's not to say it isn't good, though, and with the ability to choose from over 250 special abilities, one of the game's coolest things is that you can spec out your Geralt to best suit your style of play.

What I would say is, if you start playing The Witcher and find yourself bouncing off it due to your familiarisation with The Witcher 3's combat and systems, then stick with it for a few more hours; soon it will feel surprisingly familiar and empowering.

CDPR would eventually follow up The Witcher with a 2011 sequel and, as you can see in PC Gamer's official The Witcher 2 review, 'it's an AAA RPG with an indie soul, and a charged, exciting adventure you can really sink your teeth into, admire, and for the most part, love'. It's a great game and, in my opinion, something any fan of The Witcher should play. But, why start at the sequel when the original game is so cheap? Exactly.

There are two things I know about Andrzej Sapkowski: he wrote (and continues to write) the original Witcher novels, and he's a legendary grump. In fact, if I search our own website for the author's name, I find stories about him advising young writers to instead learn something "That makes money" like PC repair, saying he "never played" and does "not intend to play" The Witcher games, and other such things that seem like the hallmark of a—honestly, quite charming—grouchy author.

But when I sat down for a chat with CDPR co-CEO Adam Badowski, I was told something alarming: Sapkowski might not be quite as curmudgeonly as he puts on.

"He's a very intelligent guy," said Badowski, "and as a writer, he created kind of a persona. In person, he's a great guy. Very knowledgeable." In fact, Badowski says he hangs out with Sapkowski regularly: "We are friends. I visit Andrzej regularly. We go for dinner, have great conversations."

But don't get it twisted—grouch or no, Sapkowski isn't secretly a huge player of the games. "He was very clear about what is his area, [and] what is just licensed," said Badowski. "He's all about the books. That's it. He doesn't play games.

"He's a very smart person, so he knew everything about our game and about its success, but he tried not to comment on it… Those two worlds, in his opinion, should be disconnected."

Which means we're probably not due a Sapkowski-penned novelisation of Blood and Wine anytime soon, but on CDPR's side the devs still hold the books in reverence. "As true fans of the books, we truly take care with the whole lore," says Badowski. Referencing Sapkowski's latest Witcher novel—the first in over a decade—he points out that CDPR is going out of its way to make sure whatever it makes coheres with any new lore the author has set down: "We're updating everything, we are not making different, alternative paths… Everything is coherent. If it comes to responsibility, we feel responsibility for the whole heritage of Andrzej Sapkowski."

I got my first look at The Witcher 3 at E3 2013 (say that three times fast), and dutifully explained to PC Gamer readers that although Geralt may be a pretty wild guy and also a kind of hunter, that's not what "The Wild Hunt" meant. Truth be told, the term was new to me, too.

A decade and change later and The Witcher is now one of the world's most-recognized fantasy series—even my mom knows about the Netflix show, although I'm not sure if she watched past the first episode about the wizard with a sex tower.

The Witcher 3 is also one of the games PC Gamer has celebrated and covered the most in its 30-year history. We've got a special, sometimes strange relationship with the game (you may have heard about our tub obsession). For The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary, here's a brief history of that relationship.

The review: A time when PC came second

Cast your mind back to the distant past: 10 whole years ago. It's a long time in PC gaming terms. Steam Greenlight was still around, no one was talking about 'extraction shooters,' and even though we thought of CD Projekt as a PC developer, it didn't come as a big surprise to us that console review copies of The Witcher 3 were available before PC review copies.

"While review copies of The Witcher 3 were sent out for the PlayStation 4 more than a week ago, PC code is still missing in action, despite being pre-loadable on Steam," we wrote at the time to explain why we didn't have a review yet. "Bandai Namco tells us that this is because a big day-one patch hasn't been finalized on PC in time for today's review embargo, but will be ready for worldwide release next Tuesday."

(If it seems strange to see Bandai Namco mentioned there, it's another sign of how much has changed: Back then CD Projekt relied on Bandai Namco and Warner Bros to help publish physical copies of its games in Europe and North America, respectively.)

These days, it's more often the console versions that reviewers have to wait for while a day one patch is finalized and certified. How far we've come!

When we did publish our Witcher 3 review about a week after the console-focused outlets, we gave it a 92%. That's a very high score for us, although it was one notch below the score that appears on our Metal Gear Solid 5 review from the same year, which brings me to…

A brief FAQ about our 2015 GOTY pick

What game did PC Gamer award Game of the Year in 2015?

Metal Gear Solid 5 was our 2015 GOTY.

Did anyone argue that it should be The Witcher 3 instead?

Yes, they did.

Did anyone point out that it was kind of odd to give The Witcher 3 a 'Best Singleplayer' award even though MGS5 was also a singleplayer game, mostly?

Yes, I think a few people mentioned that.

PC Gamer also declared Death Stranding GOTY in 2020. Are you in love with Hideo Kojima?

Disagreements over how much to praise or not praise Kojima games has been one of the top causes of hurt feelings at PC Gamer in my time here. (Not joking.)

Do you regret not awarding The Witcher 3 GOTY in 2015?

Speaking for myself, I like that we chose to celebrate the systems-driven design of MGS5. Our GOTY picks often do align with popular opinion (Baldur's Gate 3), but there wouldn't be much point to picking a staff GOTY if our method were to try to predict what the most people will agree with, which would be better accomplished with a poll. MGS5 won on its merits, as determined by the PCG team at the time, and that will always be the best we can do.

(But I'm certain some of us who were around then would argue harder for The Witcher 3 if we did 2015 over.)

Was MGS5 PC Gamer's most controversial GOTY pick?

We picked Spelunky in 2013 and people were pretty mad about that.

The Top 100: From GOTY snub to #1

It may not have won our 2015 GOTY award, but it wasn't long before The Witcher 3 became PC Gamer's top game of all years. We publish a new list of the Top 100 games every year, and in 2016 we put The Witcher 3 at the top, unseating Mass Effect 2 and previous champions like Skyrim and Half-Life 2.

"Wow! Our game in top spot over all these amazing games on the list... I'm a bit lost for words," said Witcher 3 game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz at the time. "It means a lot for us, proving that all the hard work that we’ve put into making The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and both expansions was time well spent."

The Witcher 3 stayed in that spot until being unseated in 2019 by Divinity: Original Sin 2 (thanks to its Definitive Edition update). Original Sin 2 was unseated by Disco Elysium in 2020, which was finally usurped by Baldur's Gate 3 last year.

In our current Top 100 PC games list, published last year, The Witcher 3 sits at #6.

And now, the tub

We were just goofing off, really. We couldn't have known that we'd one day have a small but real connection to Henry Cavill soaking in a tub by candlelight.

It was Phil Savage, current Global Editor-in-Chief of PC Gamer, who started it—you can read his Tub Geralt explanation for the full story, but I'll summarize it here. It's not super complicated: We just started overusing a screenshot of Geralt in the tub in articles about The Witcher 3 because it seemed funny to do that.

People on Twitter noticed. Some of them were delighted. Others were mad about it. So we kept doing it.

If asked why we kept posting the tub image, I'd sometimes say that we simply didn't have any other screenshots of The Witcher 3, which once prompted a PR person to email me a press kit with more screenshots. We didn't stop.

For some, the gag was a political statement, and we did receive some angry messages about "double standards." I just enjoyed keeping the bit alive, but I do like to believe that Tub Geralt brought good things into the world:

• CD Projekt made a Tub Geralt statue and sent it to us
• And now you can buy your own Tub Geralt figure
• Someone made a Tub Geralt cake
• The first season of the Netflix show included a tub scene, and maybe they would've done that anyway because Geralt does in fact bathe, but the showrunner clearly knew it was a thing before the series aired
• Henry Cavill said that he tried to put his feet up in the scene but it didn't work (and he thought it "might have been a bit much" anyway)
• Someone made a PS1 demake of the tub scene

When "hot tub streams" became a thing on Twitch in 2021, the opportunity was not lost on us, nor on CD Projekt. With Netflix, the developer streamed Geralt cosplayer MaulCosplay reenacting the tub scene in advance of WitcherCon.

For our part, we streamed a loop of The Witcher 3's tub scene for hours, occasionally playing clips of Geralt dialogue from a soundboard. (Yes, one of us was manually playing sound clips for hours.)

We archived the stream on YouTube. Behold:

And don't forget Big Geralt!

A lesser-known running Geralt joke came about after modder Votislav posted a stretched-out Geralt face from The Witcher 3's files. We dubbed it "Big Geralt."

If I'm being honest, I like Big Geralt more than Tub Geralt. He's so serene, and he still appears sometimes when we write about ultrawide displays.

More of PC Gamer's best Witcher 3 coverage

We've written a lot about The Witcher 3 over the past 10 years. Here are a few more highlights:

• Our 2023 ranking of all the Geralts, which of course includes Tub Geralt and Big Geralt, as well as "Gerlat," a typo I frequently make
• The time writer Austin Wood wound up in an Atlanta sports bar with Geralt voice actor Doug Cockle
• Our feature on the making of The Witcher 3's best quest
• A breakdown of 30 little touches that show The Witcher 3's amazing attention to detail
• Faces of Novigrad, a series of Witcher 3 portraits by former PCG editor Andy Kelly
• And then there's everything we're publishing this week in recognition of The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary, for which we sent PCG's Josh Wolens to Poland to talk to 14 members of the RPG's original development team.

10 years on from its release, The Witcher 3 is unequivocally a phenomenon—one of the bestselling games of all time that turned CDPR from a relatively small studio that makes niche RPGs to one that excites a level of interest comparable to, well, Bethesda.

But if you think that success was easily come by, guess again. When I sat down with CDPR devs to talk about their memories of working on the game that would light the touchpaper on the studio's meteoric ascent, they mostly remembered a whole bunch of challenges.

"That was a very tricky period for the company," says CDPR co-CEO Michał Nowkowski of the very, very start of The Witcher 3's development—before the company had even released The Witcher 2. "We just went off the crisis that was 2008, 2009, and I was really deeply involved with, like, making sure we don't fall apart." The world economy was circling the drain and CDPR was struggling to stay afloat in the turmoil: "The early days were quite—for me, personally—focused on 'How do we escape annihilation?'"

The release of The Witcher 2 put CDPR "in a better shape, but not in a perfect one," but it wasn't exactly smooth sailing from there. The studio's big ambition to evolve the closed hubs of The Witcher 1 and 2 to a huge open world proved to be a stumbling block more than once.

"We didn't know exactly how it's going to be done," says Kajetan Kapuscinski, who worked as a cinematic artist on The Witcher 3. "Maybe this lack of knowledge was kind of a blessing at this point, because the scale of the game, trying to make an open world game, created new challenges that we couldn't have imagined beforehand."

Those challenges were, well, pretty much everywhere. CDPR had to figure out how to integrate monster contracts in a game where players could stumble across and kill their bounty before they even picked up the quest, and how to lay out quests where a player might pop into a dungeon through the back entrance and read all the carefully placed journal entries out of order. Above those challenges was the big picture: How on Earth would they make entirely different quests influence each other when they had no idea what order people would do them in?

Even studio head (and CDPR's other CEO) Adam Badowski got in on the fun when he pointed out that, since the game had all sorts of bodies of water in it, they were gonna have to put swimming in. "'I asked a very difficult question," says Badowksi, "'there's water, where's swimming?' The whole room was quiet. 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."

For a little bit, the devs scrabbled around to figure out how to cut enough of the game that they wouldn't have to put swimming in and generate—in effect—a whole new underwater open world. Eventually they opted to let Geralt go for a splash.

There were other issues, too. "I remember this conversation with one of the programmers," recalls Kapuscinski, who played a key role in creating the dynamic, cinematic dialogue scenes. "I was asking, 'Okay, could I make Geralt, you know, move two steps to the right?' He was like, 'No, it's not possible.' That's where we started." The devs were, all throughout the creation of the game, having to invent their way around problems that, perhaps, weren't quite apparent when they first decided to put Geralt in an open world.

It never really got easier. Witcher 3 quest designer Blazej Augustnyek says that when the team felt like it had pretty much finished, "I remember, I think it was someone from the board saying, 'Yeah, this plays great, but the world is empty. There's nothing but quests.'

"It turns out, in an open world, you have to have other stuff, right? So we created this little strike team." That strike team had the task of filling The Witcher 3's world with "meaningful content," most of which you'll probably remember as the question marks strewn across the world map. Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, concerns that the game was overstuffed—just too big—led devs to cut questlines like the one that would have seen Geralt join the Wild Hunt itself as a spy.

Still, it all paid off. The game came out and, as you're probably dimly aware, proceeded to become one of the biggest games of all time. "It opened the door to conversations with everybody as well," says Nowakowski. "It's not like nobody wanted to talk to us before but, you know, once you have Witcher 3 in your portfolio, it's a little bit different… I mean, we launched Witcher 3—PlayStation [was] working on the next console—Mark Cerny comes down to Warsaw to talk to our engineering team and saying he's very impressed with what we did, and he couldn't believe we managed to cram that game in the PS4.

"And then we have a private, whole-day chat with Mark Cerny, the architect of PlayStation, talking about what we would need in the next PlayStation that could help us make it even better. That was something very new and fresh for us, that was not the kind of attention we were used to." Not bad for a studio that started its game worrying about whether it would be able to pay its staff.

There's so much to love about The Witcher, but Doug Cockle really is the cherry on top. He's just a very nice lad, and quite the character even when he's not portraying the monster-hunting grump. Ever since CD Projekt revealed that Ciri would be The Witcher 4's protagonist, he's also been incredibly supportive, even though it means he's (partially) out of a gig.

He's gone to bat for Ciri again in a recent Fall Damage video from Dexterto (cheers VG247), where you can also see him reacting to memes, player reviews and tweets, while also educating gamers on matters of the heart.

At 1:24, he reads a tweet posted during The Game Awards reveal, bemoaning the "entire Game Awards chat spamming 'woke' because the Witcher 4 has you playing as Ciri".

"It's not woke," he says. "There's nothing woke about it. It's a cool character from The Witcher and they're going to focus on that character. I think that's awesome. We can't just have Geralt for every single game for The Witcher ad nauseum out through eternity. Besides, we've seen the end of Geralt's journey. Blood and Wine was supposed to wrap up Geralt's journey. I celebrate Ciri; I celebrate her being the protagonist."

Cockle goes on to advise the impotent Ciri-haters to read the books. "If you read the books, then you understand why CD Projekt went down this avenue—there's a whole rich world of stuff to explore with Ciri that they didn't do when they put her into The Witcher 3 because the story was about Geralt. But she hints at it. If you think it's woke, read the damn books. They're good, first of all. And secondly, you won't think it's so woke anymore."

Unsurprisingly, I completely agree with Cockle, though I am so incredibly tired of "woke" still being this pejorative spat about by the most unimaginative, toothless nerds. It simply means you're aware of injustice and bigotry. It's like the absolute bare minimum for not being an ignorant muppet. So we should celebrate accusations of wokeness. It's a lovely (if accidental) compliment.

Granted a female protagonist isn't woke, because acknowledging the mere existence of 50% of humanity is a million miles away from being alert to systemic injustice.

Anyway! While I'm really looking forward to playing as Ciri, who's a flipping badass, I still hope we'll hear more of Cockle's voice and see more of Geralt down the line, as more than just a cameo. Cockle's just such a great performer, and Geralt's a beloved character for good reasons.

You also may have noticed that it's The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary. And since we're still utterly obsessed with one of the best RPGs ever made, we've been celebrating the milestone with videos, features and interviews. I look forward to doing the same in another 10 years (as a corpse, naturally).

It seems hard to conceive now, given we've had three games (and some assorted DLC) with Doug Cockle's dulcet tones behind the deadpan features of Geralt of Rivia, but there was a time where CDPR was struggling to find out what everyone's favourite witcher would sound like in The Witcher trilogy.

Speaking to English adaptation director Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz, PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens assumed that Cockle might've been the obvious choice—a notion Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz was quick to dispel: "Not by any means was he the obvious choice, no.

"I don't know if you know how Geralt of Rivia's voice is described by Sapkowski in the books, but it's essentially described as something along the lines of 'harsh, metallic, almost inhuman' and so on … To try to find somebody with a vocal quality that would answer all of those qualities, wasn't really our thing from the outset."

Turns out, while adjectives like harsh, metallic, and almost inhuman make for an evocative description when your imagination's doing all the work, it's a bloomin' hard thing to base a voice casting off: "It's not something that you can do if you want gamers to identify with a character."

So what did the studio want for Geralt? "A badass voice." That's a little easier to narrow down, though "There were some negotiations between us and the marketing department of our North American publisher as to what the nature of the voice should be, what the accent of the voice should be."

After whittling down a list of around two-dozen voices from the studio they were working with, Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz says they'd narrowed it to five candidates. "We went through that short list of five on a conference call," he adds, before revealing that: "There were some who would have preferred him to have sort of a Texan accent, because that was what they thought of as 'badass'."

While I openly and dearly grieve for an alternate universe in which Geralt was a rootin' tootin' wild west ranger (thus making Henry Cavil do a similar twang in the live-action adaptation) I can't say CDPR made the wrong choice.

"In the studio we were of the opinion that what we wanted was, yes, a badass, but something of an everyman. Which, to me, meant (and because of the importance of the North American market) we would go with an American accent, but a standard American.

"Geralt is the straight everyman to everybody else around him … What Doug did in reading the casting sign for the voice was [just that]. He was a badass everyman who would be a foil to all of the emoting going on around him in that world. There is an underlying warmth to his timbre and his tone, which is a little bit counter to the idea of a hard-boiled hero, or anti-hero, in this case, but yeah—Doug was the best at being normal."

Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz explains, though, that Cockle's voice acting wasn't locked in fully until the second game, where they were able to gain a "more established" studio. "I remember actually having a couple of conversations with Doug over the phone between the Witcher 1 and Witcher 2, and he was kind of surprised that he was going to have to audition for it again."

Still, "they had their own casting department, and they had their own casting ideas. The recasting that we did for the Witcher 2, it wasn't a thing where we just wanted to cast off the past … It was just a new opening for us." Despite all that, though, Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz notes that "Once again, for very similar reasons, Doug won out." And the rest is gravelly, deliciously-textured history—well, not quite history, since we'll be seeing Geralt again in The Witcher 4.

The Witcher 3 is perhaps one of the most memorable RPGs of its era—we certainly like it—but, like all games, it took a lot of time and money to make. CDPR didn't spin it from the fabric of dreams, and while co-CEO of the studio Michał Nowakowski says the Witcher 2 definitely sold enough to fund the next game, they still had to go around doing pitches and making deals.

That's per an interview with PC Gamer's own Joshua Wolens, who talked with Nowakowski about the game's 10th anniversary for our Witcher 3 anniversary week.

"A few years back," Nowakowski explains, "Skyrim had launched, and Game of Thrones was picking up on HBO. So every presentation we ran ended up with the words 'Skyrim meets Game of Thrones' … That was a very nice line that landed with everybody who saw it, and they remember that."

But even the power of a potent elevator pitch couldn't convince some of the industry's pickiest retailers. "We spent those two years talking to distributors, talking to the manufacturing plants, talking to the retailers. We made a few tours around the US. We went to Arkansas to meet the Walmart people—to Dallas to meet the Gamestop people—and so on and on and on.

"And some of them, especially the ones who were a little bit more experienced, they very much openly said they don't believe [in us]."

Not with any malice, though, Nowakowski is quick to emphasise: "They liked us, they liked the vision and ambition, but … I still remember there was a guy, he was ex-Gamestop, but he was at Walmart, and we were in the HQ of Walmart, and he said: 'I like you guys, but it's just not gonna happen. You guys are not Bethesda.'

"'You don't have the history of games like that. The last game you made was a very nice game, but it was not that size. Not gonna happen'." Oof. Said guy very well might be eating humble pie right now, but we live in a seemingly random and capricious industry—sometimes a hit just comes outta nowhere, defying all conventional wisdom.

Speaking of pie, Nowakowski says he'd made a bet with said rep that's gone un-fulfilled: "I remember I made a bet with him that if we sold well, I was gonna fly over to Arkansas and he was gonna buy me dinner … That never happened, although I think he kind of still owes me that dinner."

Still, Nowakowski doesn't bear any grudges, and even he admits that The Witcher 3 was, like a lot of ambitious games, a tough sell. "He was a super smart guy. And to be honest, I'm not really surprised [he said that] … He was really knowledgeable about the industry. And if I were in his shoes, a very experienced buyer, I maybe would've judged it the same way."

Mind, we've seen where "very experienced" businesspeople have gotten the industry lately, and it's nowhere good. Regardless, CDPR's pitches eventually landed, because you're sitting here and reading this article about one of the decade's most important RPGs—and on its 20th birthday, no less! But it's humbling to remember a time where it was not so, and Geralt's third adventure was but a lonely pitch in an elevator, waiting to be born.

10 years on from its original release, The Witcher 3 still casts a shadow as enormous as its sprawling world.

At the time, it felt like an unbeatable, landmark achievement for the genre. Sure enough, though RPGs have flourished in the decade since, I don't think anyone has yet matched its combination of rich and mature storytelling, expansive open world adventure, and lovable, nuanced characters.

Its release hit videogames like a meteor strike. The series had always been quietly successful and well-regarded, but with The Witcher 3, its popularity exploded, firmly lodging Geralt and friends in the global public consciousness.

A decade on, those characters are as recognisable as ever, and represented across TV shows, comics, game crossovers, board games, and more.

Celebrating the game's birthday, then, doesn't feel like looking back on an aging classic. It feels like reiterating a passion that's never waned—and that only threatens to grow even more as we look ahead to the upcoming release of long-awaited sequel The Witcher 4.

And we're not celebrating it alone. We've visted CD Projekt RED for a marathon series of interviews, talking to 14 different developers who worked on the game about their experiences, how it got made, what didn't make it in, the impact it had on the studio, and even some hints as what we can expect from The Witcher 4. Watch out for more on that very soon.

We'll be posting articles all this week, and collating them right here for your reading pleasure. So without further ado, scroll on and enjoy.

A video tribute

Why we're still playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 10 years later

Midas explores what makes the game irresistible to revisit in this deep dive video, as part of our new Why We Play series.

Making the hard decisions

Remembering The Witcher 3's toughest choices (and the objectively correct answers)

Featuring some of the most brutal decision points in gaming, The Witcher 3's story puts you through the philosophical wringer. Luckily, Wes has figured out what all the morally correct choices are.

Our favourite characters

The best Witcher 3 characters

First published back in 2019, our ranking of the best heroes, scoundrels, and weirdos in The Witcher 3 remains objectively true today.

Our original review

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt review

Shaun's original review still encapsulates what we love so much about this landmark RPG.

The pain of pitching

"You guys are not Bethesda": During development, The Witcher 3 devs were told by a Walmart rep "I like you guys, but it's just not gonna happen"

It's easy now to imagine that the game was always going to be a smash success, but the truth is that back in 2015, CD Projekt RED still had a lot to prove. Including, apparently, to Walmart.

Finding Doug Cockle

Doug Cockle wasn't the "obvious" choice for Geralt in The Witcher—but he kept winning out because he was "the best at being normal"

Did you know our favourite monster hunter almost had a Texan accent?

PC Gamer's 10 years with The Witcher 3

A delayed review, a GOTY controversy, and a Big Geralt: Our strange 10-year relationship with The Witcher 3

You've seen Tub Geralt, but do you know Big Geralt?

The difficult development of The Witcher 3

The Witcher 3's development took CDPR from "How do we escape annihilation?" to having Sony on speed-dial

Making a once-in-a-generation game? Kinda difficult, as it turns out.

10 years of Tub Geralt

Celebrating 10 years of posting that one image of Geralt in a bathtub

We may have gone overboard posting one particular image of Geralt over and over and over again.

CDPR's megalomaniacal pitch to BioWare

BioWare's first impression of The Witcher 1 was a bad demo, followed by CDPR declaring that they wanted to 'create the best RPG game ever'

Sometimes you just have to back yourself, even if all you have is a bad demo.

Ten years! How many times in the last decade have we fetched that frying pan, whistled for Roach to give us a lift, sliced drowners in half, and used our Witcher senses to track a blood trail to a monster's lair, only to find a tragic story at the end of what seemed like a simple hunt?

The Witcher 3 was a shoo-in for the canon of all-time PC RPGs as soon as it released in May 2015. A decade flew by in an instant, and not just because the passage of time is a haunting reminder of mortality for those of us without witcher mutagens keeping us spry for centuries.

It's hard to believe The Witcher 3 is 10 years old becuase it feels like few games have bested it since. The writing, voice acting, and world still rival games being released in 2025.

As part of our Why We Play video series, we're revisiting The Witcher 3's greatest strengths and some of our favorite moments, from the Bloody Baron's questline to the beautiful sunsets and wild winds of Velen.

You can also watch The Witcher 3 10 Years On: What Made It A Masterpiece? on YouTube. Keep an eye on PC Gamer all week for more celebration of The Witcher 3's anniversary.

Did you know that the actor who plays the brilliantly horrible Dedra Meero on Star Wars show Andor, Denise Gough, was also the voice of Yennefer in The Witcher 3? Don't feel too bad if not—it seems like she didn't know either.

In a new interview, Eurogamer asked her if she knows anything about production on upcoming sequel The Witcher 4. Needless to say, she does not.

"I don't know any of this," she says, looking baffled. "Like I didn't know what I was doing, I'd never done a videogame before."

She says she only really became aware of the significance of her role in The Witcher 3 after the fact, when sound engineers on film sets would recognise her voice and ask her if she was Yennefer. "And I was like, 'who's Yennefer?'".

Ironically her Andor co-star Ben Mendelsohn seems more aware of the game series than she does.

It's not necessarily an unusual situation. Due to the secrecy around major game projects, the often disjointed way dialogue is recorded (sometimes broken up over months or even years), and recordings frequently happening in a different country to where the studio is based, it's surprisingly common for actors to have very little context for what they're doing. Their work is often concluded years before a game even releases, too, creating an even bigger gap between them and the finished product.

All of which is to say, I certainly wouldn't take this as evidence of Gough being unusually unaware or dismissive of the series—and certainly regardless of what she understood about the wider game she was taking part in, her performance in The Witcher 3 was absolutely brilliant. Still, it is quite funny to imagine her recording probably 100 hours of incredibly plot-important dialogue for the game with no clue what all this talk of magic and monsters was about.

This is a trend that seems to be changing, at least. Partly because of games being taken increasingly more seriously as a medium, but also partly because of the rise in the use of motion capture performances rather than actors contributing purely via voice work. It's hard to imagine the cast of Baldur's Gate 3 ever forgetting their character's names, for example.

When it comes to The Witcher 4, it is interesting at least to know that she hasn't been approached to reprise her role yet (unless this is a clever bluff). Yennefer's story, like Geralt's, certainly felt concluded in The Witcher 3—but given her important relationship with Ciri, who's taking the leading role in the sequel, it's easy to imagine her playing some kind of role, even if only in flashbacks.

Of course, chances are pretty good that they're simply not far enough along in development yet to be formally casting roles. The game's still a long way off yet—it won't be out until 2027 at the earliest, according to CD Projekt.

CD Projekt said in January 2024 that AI "can help improve certain processes in game production, but not replace people," a mushy sort of statement that's difficult to pin down to any real stance. During today's FY 2024 financial presentation, however, joint CEO Michał Nowakowski got a little more specific on the topic, saying the studio is not using generative AI on The Witcher 4 or other in-development games. Not because the results are usually dodgy, but because of potential legal entanglements.

"I think we mentioned before that last year, we set up a team that’s investigating the potential use of AI solutions in our future products, including development of our own customized AI models," Nowakowski said in response to a question about the use of generative AI in CD Projekt's future games. "And we have several research projects underway. However, they are really not necessarily focusing on generative AI.

"Gen AI, to be honest, is quite tricky when it comes to legal IP ownership and so on, and many other aspects. So when it comes to implementation of any gen AI in the actual games, we really have nothing happening when it comes to Witcher 4 or any projects in the near future."

CD Projekt is hardly the first company to be put off by legal concerns surrounding generative AI: In 2022, for instance, Getty banned the upload and sale of AI-generated images over concerns that the algorithms used to create them may have been trained on materials they're not legally entitled to. Valve expressed similar concerns when it rejected a game featuring AI-generated art from Steam in 2023.

"The introduction of AI can sometimes make it harder to show a developer has sufficient rights in using AI to create assets, including images, text, and music," Valve said at the time. "In particular, there is some legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models."

The use of copyrighted material in training AI, generative and otherwise, has become a very big issue, beyond the scope of this story—thankfully PC Gamer's Jacob Ridley has a really good rundown of what it's all about, complete with some outstanding, absolutely not gen-AI art. But the short version is that massive, multi-billion-dollar AI companies claim they can't survive without taking advantage of material they don't have the rights to, some artists and journalists who actually create things are pushing back, and while it's usually a good bet that big corporations will ultimately get their way, questions abound for now and the potential for headaches is real.

And yes, AI-generated art kinda sucks. That's a very relevant point too.

The use of gen AI in The Witcher 4, Cyberpunk 2078, or whatever lies in CD Projekt's future isn't completely off the table: If the question of rights and ownership is adequately settled, "we may look at it," Nowakowski said. "But there's nothing happening with gen AI specifically."

Speaking of things that aren't happening soon, CD Projekt also said today that The Witcher 4 won't be out until sometime in 2027 at the earliest.

Last year, Andrzej Sapkowski finished writing another Witcher book, marking his second return to the series. Though he declared he'd finished the Witcher saga in 1999, he returned to it in 2013 with Season of Storms, an interquel mostly set between existing stories, and left the door open for more books set before or during the saga. This new book, called Crossroads of Ravens in English and Rozdroże Kruków in Polish, will be a prequel.

According to the press release from English-language publishers Gollancz and Orbit, it's about an 18-year-old version of Geralt. They say that most people spend their 20s figuring out who they are and their 30s trying to tell people who they are, but who knows anything when they're 18? You're barely a person yet.

So it'll presumably be a more naive Geralt, not even "of Rivia" yet, who sets out from Kaer Morhen on his first mission in Crossroads of Ravens. During that mission he'll "discover monsters, traitors, some new friends and some familiar faces, and just how deeply feared and despised Witchers can be."

"In Rozdroże Kruków," Sapkowski said, "I return to the roots of Geralt's journey—not the fearless monster slayer we know, but a young Witcher just beginning to understand the burden of his destiny. Imagine Geralt, but younger, with fewer scars and a bit more haughtiness. This is a story of growth, of idealism meeting harsh reality, and of choices that forge a legend. It's about finding your place in a world that's constantly challenging you to be more than you thought you could be. As this new story finds its way to readers across the globe this year, I can't wait for them to walk alongside a younger Geralt—experiencing the trials that forged him and the journey that set him on the road to his destiny."

It'll be released in English, and more than 19 other languages, on September 30. The translation is by David French, who translated six of the previous eight Witcher books into English. The remaining two, The Last Wish and Blood of Elves, will be reprinted with new English translations by French next year.

Doug Cockle, voice of Geralt of Rivia in CD Projekt Red's trilogy of Witcher games, has returned to his role this week in Netflix's animated movie adaptation Sirens of the Deep. He told me that getting into Geralt's voice is like "slipping into a warm bath" but also like a muscle he's done a lot of training on. Sirens of the Deep may just be a warmup then, because he also confirmed that he's going to be involved with The Witcher 4.

"I can confirm that Geralt will appear in The Witcher 4," Cockle told me in an interview, reiterating what CDPR also confirmed after revealing its first trailer for the game back in December, at the end of which we heard Geralt's voice, implying would turn up somehow. "I just can't say exactly in what way or how much," Cockle added.

Now, Cockle's said this before. Back in August he said "Geralt will be part of the game," caveating the same thing: that he wasn't sure to what extent and in what capacity.

Apparently he got a bit of a finger-wagging from CDPR, he admitted later, for running his mouth before it had gotten to do its official reveal. We learned in November that The Witcher 4 is now in full production and then the first proper trailer for The Witcher 4 turned up at The Game Awards in December. Presumably he's gotten the thumbs up to be confirming things this time around, since he's not really saying anything that CDPR didn't already back in December.

"I'm thrilled," Cockle said of finding out that Ciri would become the new protagonist for the series. "I can't wait to see what they do with Witcher 4. I'm excited to go on Ciri's journey with her."

But don't go reading into that statement too literally and get Doug in trouble again. I imagine he probably means "go on Ciri's journey" in a metaphorical way. As far as we know for now.

A new announcement on The Witcher 3's Steam page made me think "oh that's nice" before my fingers suddenly started aching, the sky grew dark, and this wizened form crumbled into dust o'er the keyboard. As of May this year The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, one of the finest PC action-RPGs there is, will be a decade old.

I realised this because CDPR has announced The Witcher in Concert, a tour that it characterises as "a celebration of the 10th anniversary of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt." The tour will kick off at Gamescom in Colorne on August 20, 2025, before other dates in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. Further concerts in North America and Poland will be announced at a later date.

Tickets can be bought at the official site, which says the concerts will "bring to life the open-world RPG's timeless score with a live orchestra performance." The musicians will be accompanied by visual elements and gameplay clips while the original soundtrack composed by Marcin Przybyłowicz has been freshly arranged under his supervision. Folk band Percival, co-composers and contributors to several beloved songs, will be special guests.

The visuals apparently makes it an "immersive concert" which feels a bit tautological, though my favourite part of the marketing is when CDPR describes the game's soundtrack as a "sonic marvel to hear for the first time or the hundredth." Why not literally blow your own trumpet?

The blurb also points out that attendees should expect spoilers for the game which, of course, you'll have had well over 10 years to play by this point. Perhaps more pertinent is that, as the game is for an adult audience, certain venues will have age restrictions on who can attend.

Well, that's me feeling old for the day anyway. It also brings into sharp relief just how long the development cycles for this type of game are becoming, with The Witcher 4 only just announced late last year, and unlikely to be in our hands before 2026 at the earliest. No wonder The Witcher 3's director ended up leaving CDPR to pursue his own dream vampire RPG, which hopefully won't suck.