After years of waiting, The Witcher 3 gets detached from the card game that’s the core experience.
Isn’t that nice? Now we can play the entire game without risking ourt hard-earned gold in card duels against suspiciously cunning shopkeepers.
Ok, I’ve been corrected that this is not in fact true. The Witcher 3 story minigame is still attached to the card game launched with, but now there’s a second card-based RPG coming. Hopefully it’s story is better integrated with the core gameplay.
Yeah, you heard that right. The long-awaited singleplayer mode to the standalone Gwent game is now it’s own thing, titled GWENT: Thronebreaker. It’s reportedly going to provide around 30 hours of gameplay and story, but cut out all that pesky travelling and slashing, now it’s all going to be resolved by playing Gwent. Geralt certainly would approve. This time the leading royal figure (each The Witcher game needs some) is going to be Queen Meve, who is a fairly important (and badass) character in the books, but I don’t think she’s ever featured in the games beyond a mention here or there.
To be fair it kind of reminds me of Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, where epic battles are also resolved by a silly minigame supported by some RPG mechanics. But hey, I hear the standalone Gwent is pretty cool, so the story campaign is likely to be pretty snazzy as well.
There’s no release date given yet, but it’s supposedly going to come this year. We’ll be watching.
PS: I’m still miffed Gwent in the games is nothing like it was in the books, where it’s a straightforward card game like poker, not a CCG.