WAKE THE WHITE WOLF
If one company really came into its own through all these challenges, it’s CD Projekt Red, with the Witcher series. The Witcher is a hugely successful series of books in its native Poland—and around Europe as a whole—but was little known when an obscure development company bought a license to BioWare’s Aurora engine and tried to bring the stories to the world.
Skipping ahead, The Witcher 3 is an amazing experience. It’s a glorious looking world. The writing is touching, detailed, nuanced, with varied characters. It’s one of the best games ever made, never mind one of the best RPGs—cementing creators CD Projekt Red as being on the absolute top-tier of modern development, even above BioWare in most estimations. However, at least part of what makes it so impressive is having seen the stumbles and triumphs on the way to making it happen. The first Witcher game, for instance, was so poorly translated as to be nonsensical, requiring a whole Enhanced Edition to come vaguely up to standard. It also featured some deeply unpopular mechanics, like representing hero Geralt’s many trysts as collectible cards—as if the ladies in his life were nothing but Pokémon to be captured and catalogued. Or, less socially relevant but just as annoying, having to collect increasingly expensive books in order to take on quests that Geralt should have been more than capable of doing on his own with just his sword.
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, meanwhile, was proof that, more than any other company in recent memory, CD Projekt had read every single complaint about the first game and fixed it, and had the ambition to take the series further than anyone could have expected. Of its three acts, there are two variants of Act 2 that take Geralt to opposite sides of the game’s central war. It still had sex scenes, but here they’re choreographed affairs designed to say something about the characters involved—parts of the story that contribute to, rather than distract from the experience.
Looking back, the first two games are less The Witcher 3’ s predecessors as its betas—the games CD Projekt had to make so that it would be able to create the Witcher experience it had dreamed of so long ago. At the moment, it looks like there won’t be another Witcher game, simply because the company has done what it set out to all those years ago. Now it’s working on the futuristic Cyberpunk 2077— an RPG that’s been in development for years now, and is still likely a couple more away still.
The fir st two are less Witc her 3’ s pre decessors as its be tas