How The Witcher became a gaming smash hit
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I’m going to begin this week’s Pushing Buttons with a personal plea to game developers and publishers: could you stop announcing huge news in the hours before (or just after) my newsletter deadline, please!? I basically had this week’s missive nailed down, and then CD Projekt Red went and confirmed the next game in the Witcher series, so now I’ve gotta talk about that. There are almost no details about the game yet – just confirmation that it’s being made (in Unreal Engine 5, for the tech nerds). But this is still a big deal, because The Witcher 3 in particular is one of the most interesting and beloved (and successful) fantasy games ever made. It’s sold over 30 million copies; the series has topped 50 million in total.
If you’ve never had the pleasure, The Witcher stars a grizzled and fairly indifferent white-haired monster-hunter called Geralt. He is an outcast, a sword-for-hire who’s lived a long and interesting life – more of an antihero than your traditional wide-eyed, worldsaving naif fantasy protagonist. Geralt doesn’t have the power to save the world the Witcher drops you into. It is a world at the mercy of idiot kings and their wars, drunk nobles, criminals both petty and organised, and a whole menagerie of aggressive creatures that happily rip peasants apart. This ain’t a happy place, and you can’t make it better – but you can get to know it, quite intimately, and as Geralt you can at least make something of a difference.
The reason The Witcher has stuck in my memory is its moral ambiguity, and the fact that you are no doubt a powerful character, albeit one who is not omnipotent. Geralt makes mistakes and reflects on his choices. He has failed relationships and intriguing regrets and all the other trappings of a life. And he’s not the only interesting character in this series; most of them have some gnarly qualities, and few are straightforwardly evil. I’m not saying The Witcher handles everything with nuance and subtlety – there is one quest in The Witcher 3 where you basically have to fight an aborted fetus, which is absolutely not the pinnacle of taste. But it has more bite than most games. Considering its narrative spans 100 hours or more, it’s admirable that it manages to be interesting for almost that entire time.
The next Witcher game will be the fourth: Polish developer CD Projekt Red’s history with The Witcher began in around the late 90s, when it bought the rights to Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy novels. (The 73-year-old writer remains famously uninterested in the video games that bear his creation’s name, by the way – and seems quite annoyed that he doesn’t profit from them.) The first Witcher game came out in 2007, when I was a baby journalist: I reviewed it at the time and remember it as a slightly shonky but nonetheless interesting action-RPG, with fiddly combat, a surprisingly rich story and – of course, infamously – a series of collectible cards with nudie ladies on them that you acquired by completing “seduction quests” with various female characters. (Gotta catch ’em all, I guess.) I never would have expected at that time that this game, not to mention this developer, would become one of the world’s most successful.
Another interesting wrinkle here is that this next game will be the studio’s first since Cyberpunk 2077, a game whose launch in 2020 was, famously, an absolute disaster. Despite years in development, extensive crunch andthe presence of Keanu Reeves as a prominent character, it launched in an absolute state. And even after the technical problems were (very slowly) solved, the game remained a depressingly cliché-ridden and unambitious take on the ideas of cyberpunk that felt inescapably adolescent. I wonder what creative lessons (and workplace-environment lessons) CD Projekt Red will have taken from thatexperience.
I wouldn’t expect this game to come out before 2024, by the way. Still, that gives you time to play through the rest of them in preparation. I spent nearly 200 hours on The Witcher 3 and its expansions and stilldidn’t finish it, so there’s plenty for you to get lost in.
What to play
I have been looking forward to paranormal Japanese ghost-punching action game Ghostwire: Tokyo for a long time, and it’s out this Friday. If you have ever spent any time in Japan’s mesmerising capital, seeing this eerily deserted version of it will give you feelings, especially as you explore the stories (and meet the abandoned pets) of the people who used to live there. This is actually an endearingly old-school game: no padding, just an extremely good gameplay idea (fighting ghosts with magic) executed brilliantly and with great visual flair. Beware, though: this game is seriously spooky. I’m of a nervous disposition and it is creeping me out.
Available on: PC, PlayStation 5 Approximate playtime: 15-20 hours
What to read
Players of the spectacularly nerdy PlayStation racing sim Gran Turismo 7 are rather upset with changes to the game that make the most desirable cars inordinately expensive, all but necessitating that players pay real money for in-game credits to acquire them. Given that the game already costs £70 (and the grind for new cars was harsh even at launch, as the Guardian’s review pointed out), it’s understandable that people are miffed.
An open letter organised by advocacy group Color of Change calls upon Twitch to do more to protect Black video game streams from racist abuse – particularly “hate raids”: co-ordinated harassment events where people flood a streamer’s comments with the intent to cause harm. The letter calls out Twitch’s Black history month events as “performative” and calls for better human and algorithmic moderation, alongside a commitment from Twitch to racial equity at the company.
Mega-publisher EA has decided to cancel EA Play, its annual games showcase that usually happens at the same time as E3, the games industry’s bombastic show-and-tell event in June. This is interesting because it further undermines E3 itself: even when big game publishers desert the show, they still hold their own events on its schedule, in the summer. It looks like the gaming news could be more evenly spread throughout the year in future.
Two more investigations into alleged workplace toxicity and emotional abuse in the gaming industry this week – one from GamesBeat on Ori creators Moon Studios, and one from People Make Games on three different auteurled game studios.
What to click
GTA V is back for a new generation – how will it fare in the 2020s?
Tunic review – recaptures the lost magic and mystery of video games
Saudi Arabia expands its sportswashing ambitions to the world of gaming
Question Block
Last week, reader Amanda Forde wrote in asking for recommendations on games to play with kids. So instead of answering a new question this week, I’m pulling together some of your brilliant suggestions. Thank you for writing in with them – and do subscribe to this newsletter and hit reply to send me your questions for future editions!
Super Mario Maker 2, suggested by Tom Walker – “simple enough for my five-year-old son to make a relatively complex level himself … he likes challenging me to be able to complete his levels so that we can upload them”
The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, suggested by Michel Blake, who played it with her niece: “It’s so different from their usual iPad fodder, even my brother (not a gamer) was impressed at the storytelling, and they ended up chatting about all sorts of things as a result”
Super Smash Bros, suggested by Tom Madge – “Once all four of us got our heads round the controls, it became a massive go-to game for us. So much fun and variety and just throws up loads of hilarity”
Unravel 2, also suggested by Tom Madge – “Me and my seven-year-old had a lovely time a few weeks back playing together. It really felt like we were on a journey, collaborating to figure out the ingenious environmental puzzles. A real treat”
Overcooked 2, suggested by Ky Purnell (and others!) – “Has probably been responsible for more fun arguments than any other game we’ve played. Four-player mode often sees me turning into Gordon Ramsay, swears included”
And a general tip from Matt on how to get the whole family enjoying games where there’s a skill imbalance– “a reliable trick is ‘kids against adults’ or even ‘the whole family against dad’. Works a treat for Bomberman, Boomerang Fu and Smash Bros”