A parkouring post-apocalyptic open-world isometric RPG inspired by Thief and made in collaboration with a team including former Witching folks from CD Projekt RED is a confusing pitch (open-world RPG inspired by Thief?), but one with interesting elements. That’s the broad idea of Seven [official site], which developers IMGN.PRO (them lot behind iffy Sean Bean horror Kholat) announced this morning.

At the moment they don’t have much more than some words and concept art to show, and I can’t imagine what the game will actually be like, but it might pique your interest.

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No massively intricate and complicated fantasy RPG is complete without spending four hours selecting the mods you want to layer on top of it first. CD Projekt Red know this and have just released The Witcher 3 [official site] mod tools in partnership with Nexus Mods. This means not only can you grab the tools from Nexus, but their mod manager – which has been a mainstay of Bethesda modding for years – now supports The Witcher 3 as well.

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In a move that can only mean they’ve been receiving my daily letters recreating The Witcher [Official Site] for someone whose heart will only recognise games pre-1995, CD Projekt Red are teaming up with the company behind Cyberpunk 2020 to bring The Witcher to tabletops.

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Wednesday is Free Witcher 3 [official site] Day, and this week is due to bring the last of its sixteen planned freebies. What oh what could it- oh, no, it won’t be coming this week. Still, developers CD Projekt RED have announced what the final titbit will be, and it’s a good’un: a New Game+ mode.

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Many games suffer from a little bit of distance. You play them and they seem great, but once the novelty has faded, so has part of their soul. I’d say Dragon Age: Inquisition is a good example there. It’s a game I enjoyed, but it’s also one I’ve not really thought about since its credits rolled.

With The Witcher III: Wild Hunt [official site] though, the scale of CD Projekt’s accomplishment still hasn’t fully sunk in, and probably won’t until the next big RPG that doesn’t live up to the many, many amazing bits of design that game offers. I’m of course talking of the big stuff, like its sweeping plot and open world. More though, I’m thinking of the details; the smaller stuff, like how the scripting system is advanced enough to stop a fight after a specific comment of “Wait, you’re Geralt?!” or the exquisite attention to detail on even the smallest of quests. It’s CD Projekt’s masterpiece; the Witcher experience they’ve been working towards since getting the license all those years ago.

And now it’s been out for a while, let’s look at some of the more spoilery bits.

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There has been a lot of discussion recently in games about historical accuracy. We ve seen a number of articles debating the absence of people of color in The Witcher 3 as well as essays criticizing Apple s decision to remove games featuring the Confederate battle flag from the App Store. Most of this discussion treats historical accuracy as something close to gospel, beyond reproach or change. There were never> people of color in the medieval, Eastern European milieu from which The Witcher is drawn. There were always> Confederate battle flags in the American Civil War. For most people, using never and always with regard to history seems natural. If any field of knowledge can offer such certainty, it must be history, right?

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With the hearty patch 1.07 out the door, CD Projekt RED are getting back to business as usual with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [official site] – issuing small items of DLC and working on the expansion packs. Today is Wednesday so another freebie has arrived, and this week’s DLC is very much business as usual for a witcher – killing the heck out of stuff.

The fifteenth and penultimate free DLC doodad for Witcher 3 is a set of extra finisher animations for Geralt to murder people in gruesome new ways.

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Things have been quiet on the witching front these past few weeks, the trickle of free DLC for The Witcher 3 [official site] paused while developers CD Projekt RED worked on a big old patch. Over the weekend, they and released what they’ve been up to.

Patch 1.07 has brought a stash to store items in, a new movement option, performance improvements, inventory changes, and, yes, fixes for naughty horses. Sunday also brought the fourteenth free DLC, an alternative outfit for Ciri that’s a touch more sensible for a monster-hunter pursued by ice dogs – though only a touch.

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The Witcher 3 [official site] brings to a close one of the strangest trilogies in games. Unlike a series like Mass Effect, where the first game’s design laid a foundation for each subsequent instalment, The Witcher series completely reinvented itself at every turn. Yet despite the way CD Projekt Red lurched from one design to another, the series also retained an undeniably unique and consistent identity.

How much of The Witcher series’ evolution was by design, and how much was improvised? It’s hard to say, even for the CDP veterans who oversaw Geralt’s video game odyssey from beginning to end. I know because I asked.

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An entirely objective ranking of the 50 best PC RPGs ever released. Covering the entire history of computer role-playing games is a daunting task and attempting to place the best games in such a broad genre in any kind of order is even more daunting. Thankfully, we are equal to all tasks and below, you will find the best fifty PC RPGs of all time.

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