I must confess, since finishing Siege of Dragonspear the other week, I’ve not actually fired up any RPGs. It’s not for want of them to play. I’m particularly looking forward to finally trying Final Fantasy IX, which I missed back in the day, and Beamdog’s recently announced interquel, Planescape Torment: The Nameless One And A Half. (It’s very similar to the original, only now whenever someone asks “What can change the nature of a man?” a furious little goblin pops onto the screen to yell “#notallmen!”)

The problem has simply been timing – not having a nice satisfying chunk of time to really settle down for an epic experience. So instead, I thought I’d take a look at a few speed-runs, and see how fifty hours suddenly becomes a minute and a half… provided you don’t include the hundreds of hours to get to that point. Here’s a few of them I dug up to make your completion times look like crap, from RPGs old and new.

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Distribution platform GOG have been running their Insomnia Sales for quite a while now – where limited numbers of games are discounted round the clock until allocations run out. New games with new deals then pop up, and so restarts the cycle where you get loads of bargains and a distinctly lighter wallet.

The Sleepy Sheep Insomnia Sale is now underway, bringing with it an abundance of deals and “a number of games never before seen on GOG.com as well as the best-ever deal on our crowning jewel – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.”

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The Witcher 3 took home two awards last night at the 16th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards, including the coveted Game of the Year prize. Her Story, after winning big at the IGF Awards hours earlier, captured a further three trophies. Comes see the full list of winners and nominees below.

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This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites a developer to help him put their game up on blocks and take a wrench to hack out its best feature, just to see how it works. It s about the sweat, grease and genius behind the little things that make games special.>

Here s a question: How do you solve a problem like Geralt? There he is, stern and stalwart, everyone s favourite low fantasy drifter. A man of rank bogs, blasted no man s lands and rugged islands. A man who isn t much of a laugh, or awfully fun to have a drink with.

But what if you want to extend his world, and expose him to new adventures? That s what last October s expansion to The Witcher 3 [official site], Hearts of Stone, aimed to achieve, but it had to get Geralt doing things he d never normally do. So how did CD Projekt manage to get him drunk and dancing at a wedding, robbing a bank, and appraising fine art? Their solution was deft.

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What is the best open world game of 2015? The RPS Advent Calendar highlights our favourite games from throughout the year, and behind today’s door is…

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt!

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The first expansion for The Witcher 3 [official site], Hearts of Stone, let Geralt into new areas of the game’s map (and is pretty great, says Cobbo). Expansion number two, Blood and Wine, will be a larger affair visiting a whole new area of the Witching world, the France-y Toussaint. And what does Toussaint look like? A lovely place for your summer hols, going by the first two ‘screenshots’ (they look touched-up to me).

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I am the worst Witcher. Don’t get me wrong – I’m very good at the actual hunting and preparation part of the monster-slaying business, so it’s not all bad, but when it comes to the actual killing part, I am terrible. Rolling around in circles and trying to time attack animations just right is my least favourite part of The Witcher 3 [official site], a game that unexpectedly stole my heart. I’m over the moon to see the Hearts of Card mod, which replaces all combat with rounds of its card game Gwent.

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Oh boy, am I conflicted. Fallout 4 s main plotline requires that I do this thing> and as far as things> go, it s a pretty major thing> and a major thing> that you d expect someone with the maternal instinct of my character Halle to crack on with straight away. The trouble is, rather than doing this major thing>, for at least an hour now, she, and when I say she , I mean I , have been poking around Sanctuary, scrapping anything that glows yellow so I can salvage enough materials to build a house big enough for me and my Minutemen companions. I had largely avoided Bethesda s drip-feed of Fallout 4 pre-publicity but when I somehow found out that the game had settlement building, I think I might have involuntarily passed a little wind in joyous anticipation.

That’s because I ve felt a similar rosy inner glow while hanging around other hubs and houses in many other games I ve played. I think it s easy to underestimate the value of having a home base option, especially in open world games where there is a free-roaming element, but it’s a part of why I love certain games.

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One nice thing about digital sales is that no one ends up injured, arrested, or killed. If you want The Witcher 3 half-price, hey, don’t sweat it: GOG’s Thanksgiving-y sale lives entirely inside computers, so all shall be well as long as you don’t accidentally sit on your laptop. I’m not sure why it’s named the ‘Only On GOG.com’ sale when TW3 is the fanciest bargain there and is definitely not, you know, only on GOG, but hey! Also on sale: old Star Trek, Dungeons & Dragons, and Warhammer games.

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The Northern Kingdoms of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [official site] is a realm ravaged by war, pestilence, and greed. And, try as he might, Geralt continually finds himself trapped between the political maneuverings of the Northern Kingdom’s most ambitious contenders. So it’s easy to forget that Geralt’s true calling in life is as a monster slayer. Lucky for him the Northern Kingdoms has no shortage of monsters.

While some of these beasts have enjoyed plenty of spotlight in other fiction, CD Projekt Red have dug deep into their own Eastern and Northern European ancestry to bring to life a mythology underrepresented in the echelons of generic fantasy creatures. We’re all familiar with dragons and vampires, but what about the lesser known beasts that bloody Geralt’s blade? The leshen, alps and botchlings? I’ve rounded up some of my favorite monsters from the Witcher series and the legends that inspired them so that we can contrast their depictions in the game, while getting a mythology lesson at the same time.

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