Considering Cyberpunk isn’t even finished yet, I’m going to take this one with a metric ton of salt.

But will there be intense Gwent playing?

The story and atmosphere are what set Witcher apart from other games. Gameplay is great, but it hasn’t been the driving force of any Witcher game.

I liked W3 a lot, played through the base game and both DLCs several times, spent 700 hours in the game. However, considering the trends in the games industry (except for Larian/BG3) right now, I don´t have particularly high hopes for any future AAA releases in general.

I realize it’s a different game, but I remember feeling a bit let down when I saw that first cameo by Keanu Reeves in the trailer for Cyberpunk. It felt like a distraction, just a marketing gimmick. The guy tends to just play himself and he’s casted as such. I didn’t feel I’d be able to play something an get as immersed as I’d like with him in it. So I admit there was a bit of schadenfreude with the ensuing outrage over the unplayable state of the launch game (and subsequent versions for what felt like a long time). I understand the game is a lot of fun now but I can’t bring myself to play it.

This is a bit unfair of me because I did enjoy Witcher 2 and 3, never had much issue with the combat as a lot of others do. I remember sending bug reports and feature requests in on W3, I liked it so much. It was also kind of refreshing to have a Polish developer so big on the stage. I played through the base game only one time, got my endings, and more or less forgot how the story went by the time I was ready to play the DLC, so I never finished those. All in all it was a great game, the only lacking part being the custom endings with the weird still image treatment. I think the modularity of it, the crafting of my own story and then just kind of seeing a slideshow at the end like at a funeral made it very immemorable, in a counter-intuitive way.

I read this article–and of course they’re trying to sell a product: to make money, to pay the investors and folks up top, and to recoup the cost of paying the folks down below–but this article is just so on the nose. Is this how we sell other people on our games now? I guess it works. Clearly, it works. But this hype piece is just buzzword after buzzword, like some kind of zodiac reading. It can apply to any AAA game, but with apparently two years to go until much more is revealed, what else do I expect? It’s just to get the money pumping.

I clearly have some bias against CDPR for whatever reason. Maybe I don’t agree with how they’ve prioritized marketing over craft with Cyberpunk. But I’d like to see a return to form from them with this, if Witcher 4 is actually all that necessary. I guess we’ll find out.

Maybe I’ll actually use potions and battle fluids this time…

I have never been a huge fan of the combat for the series. I put 2 hours into 2, 20 hours into 3. It’s just too slow for me due to how it prioritizes animation.

I definitely prefer more responsive combat over fancy animations. I don’t expect 4 to do that, I’m not really the target audience.

If it does, I’d love to give it a shot.

Hopefully they will improve the combat this time, W1 combat is unique but janky, W2 is pure jank, and W3 is functionable but really janky as well.