Nendoroid has unveiled its own spin on Geralt of Rivia, complete with his now iconic bathtime pose. Due in September this year, this slant on the White Wolf comes with a range of accessories, and is priced at ¥4,815 pre-tax via Good Smiles (which XE loosely converts to £31.50/$44.85 before shipping). 

For that, expect a pair of steel and silver swords, a hand of Gwent cards and, of course, a wooden bathtub. As you'll see in the images below, the Butcher of Blaviken is as handsome as ever in Nendoroid form, however an interchangeable face plate depicts his veiny potion overdose look which is never not scary.   

Check him out:  

Nendoroid Geralt joins the likes of Portal 2's Atlas, The Flash and Mario. 

Of course, developer CD Projekt RED once sent us a statue of The Witcher series protagonist bathing with his favourite magazine. In case you'd forgotten, that looks like this:  

Will this meme ever end? I hope not. 

The Witcher 3 is one of those RPGs that people just keep on playing and keep on modding. Our roundup of the Witcher 3's best mods include some projects that are still ongoing and totally rework combat and leveling into a different sort of RPG, while other mods are hellbent on making the game look like it did in early demos. To that end, a recent mod called E3 UI and HUD promises to restore The Witcher 3's interface to what it looked like in 2014, a year before CD Projekt finished the game. Overall it makes the menus and map a little more flavorful and less utilitarian, which could be a nice change if you already know The Witcher 3 like the back of your hand.

Some details about the mod, from its Nexus page: most of the menus now have an animated background, the HUD has unique Xbox button icons styled after the 2014 demo's, there's a new font, unique loading screens for traveling within a region to different signposts, a monster tracker that shows the beast you're after if you're on a monster hunt, and an integrated live bestiary. The map offer the biggest change: it now looks hand drawn and most of the icons are gone by default.

There are some options that come with the HUD as well: the new (old) map and minimap can be disabled altogether, as can the animated backgrounds, and there's a toggle to turn on the map legend if you need help finding a particular destination or point of interest.

"You may also have noticed the missing level indicator on monster no matter whether you have scaling on or off," the mod page says. "This is an intentional design decision. There was no level indicator at E3 and as faithful e3 fanatics we are, we kept that. We suggest to just play with enemy scaling on, as this is (in our opinion) the prefered way to play anyway. However there is a way to roughly know if an enemy is too high leveled for you to fight : if an enemy name is red, that means he's much higher than you and you probably should run away from the fight. If the name is E3 brown, feel free to wreck him."

Installing the mod is as simple as unzipping the files into the Witcher 3 directory and making a quick edit to an input settings file. You can download the mod, and see more screenshots, at its Nexus Mods page here.

Literature’s had a pretty good run, much of it without any fancy graphics and animations and particle effects to bolster the words. Games love text too. Text is cheap. You can paint a picture of galactic chaos or epic history in about the same time it takes to type ‘and then something cool happened’, without having to spend the next week designing armour and creating 3D characters to act it out. Yet despite centuries of practice, most games still haven’t worked out how to present all this (which let’s face it, is often there more for the writers’ satisfaction than our actual enjoyment) in a punchy, satisfying way. What works? What doesn’t? Let’s take a quick look at some of the ways games have handled books, letters, codexes and more. 

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Even when you don’t affect a world that much, it’s nice when it pretends. News stories are one of the best and cheapest ways to both highlight your achievements, and reframe them in interesting ways, from acts of heroism to outright terrorism. Human Revolution wrapped them in one of the sleekest packages for this—the Picus Daily Standard. At once a chance to see what was taking place out of your sphere, and see the effect of your adventures on the world. While even a few years later, the futuristic look feels distinctly retro compared to iPad news apps, to say nothing of whatever direct-brain interfaces we’ll likely have by the time of Deus Ex’s dark not-too-distant-future, Picus keeps it pretty, keeps it punchy, and above all, keeps it brief. 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Ah, but when it comes to eBooks, things aren’t so smooth. Look at this. Even the original Kindle would wince at these datapad layouts, complete with non-slidable panels, slow refresh rate, poor quality fonts and typography, and non-consistent use of glows. Sure, it’s readable, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to, even before factoring in that in the wasteful future of Deus Ex you apparently need a new device for every Wikipedia entry. The crappy quality of this design only stands out more amongst Mankind Divided’s otherwise superbly rendered future, where everything you encounter seems to have emerged fully formed from the brain of a maverick product genius. This, meanwhile, feels like a first attempt at customising Twine. 

Fallout 4

In the not-too-distant future, who needs books? We’ll have computers! Specifically, ghastly green teletype machines that would be tolerable for simple acts like opening doors, but could be much more of a nightmare if the cast of Five Nights At Freddy’s occasionally popped up for a jump-scare. The horrible font. The clackering of the text. The endless pages that try their best  to tell stories of post-apocalyptic horror, despite being locked in an interface that would make even a hardened wasteland explorer decide that whatever happened probably doesn’t matter that much. Even accounting for the 50s vibe of the rest of the game, these are hideous technological throwbacks that knife their own storytelling in the back. The closest they come to being appropriate to the setting is that in using them, the living definitely envy the dead. 

Skyrim / Ultima

What’s an RPG shelf without a few strangely short books that probably don’t need hundreds of pages and a stiff leather jacket? While RPGs have always been wise enough to realise that most players will accept this deviation from reality, it’s still interesting to look at the differences between these two great franchises. Skyrim for instance clearly assumes that all of Tamriel’s readers are half-blind—or possibly playing on a television screen—leading to very slow-paced tales on glorified flashcards. Ultima meanwhile wanted you to squint. But at least Ultima had the advantage that unless a book was specifically screaming ‘crucial plot element’, it was most likely to be flavour, sparing you tediously flicking through shelves in the hope of finding a boost to one of your skills. At least both franchises keep their tongues firmly in their cheeks, whether it’s The Elder Scrolls’ obsession with the Lusty Argonian Mage, or Ultima’s fine line of joke books, occasional explosive booby-trap pranks, and the revelation that wise Lord British, founder of Britannia’s favourite story is “Hubert the Lion”. Can’t sleep without it, apparently... 

Mass Effect

A controversial one here, perhaps, but Mass Effect is one of the games where the built-in Codex arguably makes the world less enjoyable. The game does a fantastic job of introducing everything that’s actually important without relying on it as a crutch, with the dry writing and endless unlockable pages of SF guff coming across as homework rather than a gripping read. Do we really need to know, for example, the origins of every last whiffle-bolt supplier on the Citadel? No. It’s just not that important. Save it for the design bible and tie-in books.

While there are a few interesting flourishes, including Codex entries based on what the universe thinks rather than necessarily the actual truth, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy it is not. And ironically, it shows the difference itself, in the form of Mass Effect 2’s fantastic Shadow Broker DLC and the unlockable files within, which actually do give you a chance to peer at your party’s dirty little secrets. Jack’s secret love of poetry. Miranda’s online dating life. Tali’s repeated installation of a suit tool called ‘Nerve Stim Pro’. Oh, the blackmail opportunities...

Dishonored 2

Dishonored is a great example of how just a little thing can really annoy. Its text isn’t difficult to read, the font is pretty well chosen, if not exactly conveying the sense of a written document in the same way as many other games with this level of texture and detail, but does it really have to sway back and forth while you’re reading? There’s a time for ambient animation to breathe life into a scene, and a time to make the player feel slightly sea-sick. No. Scratch that. True for the first, not so much for the second. Swish… swish… it’s an effect applied to all the menus and other data screens and really contributes to making reading the lore an unpleasant experience. A shame, because that lore is actually interesting. Dunwall and Karnaca are two of gaming’s best cities, and their depth and backstory is fascinating. If you can stand to actually read it.

The Longest Journey and Life Is Strange

I'm bundling these together because they do the same basic concept—the primary text in the game is our main character’s diary. This serves several purposes, including offering a potted version of the story if you dip away for a while and forget things, but most importantly giving us a direct look inside their head. It’s a technique that only works if you actually like the main character, but fortunately that’s not a problem for either series and its charismatic leading ladies. In particular, it’s a way of bridging the gap between our perception of the game, as an untouchable god-figure, and theirs, as someone for whom all these moral decisions are actual life-changing events. Simply seeing the game from that perspective is enough to make everything carry that much more weight, and it doesn’t hurt that they’re fun reads too.

The Witcher 3

What separates The Witcher from most in-game codexes is its sense of character, with everything being described from the perspective of in-game poet, lover and occasional sidekick Dandelion. The nature of the game also rewarded taking the time to dip into the Codex, given that for a travelling monster-slayer, knowledge is power, and never took away from the fact that while us as players might not know our drowners from our necrophages, Geralt himself was always able to be a reliable source of information and provide the condensed version.

Realms of the Haunting

Here’s a retro classic, sadly not helped by the low-resolutions of the mid-90s. Nothing damages the mood of an otherwise well-made document like peering at it through a letter-box and finding it more poorly compressed than an old JPEG from a lost Geocities page. It’s not quite as bad blown up to full screen though, and even with its technical problems, it demonstrated how to write documents that actually fit the world and contributed to the lore without feeling like extracts from the design bible. Most took the form of letters between the characters, their identities not always immediately obvious, and turning the relatively simple battle between good and evil at the heart of the story into an epic tale of Faustian deals, ancient cults, doomed love, and a deep mythology stretching between multiple worlds. The visual look certainly didn’t hurt, with everything presented as aged pages, hand-drawn maps and messily scrawled journals. And if you didn’t like them, you got to burn several of them as part of a puzzle. Splendid.

The Neverhood

Of course, if you really, really want to make sure nobody misses your game’s lore, there’s always the Hall of Records—aka The Place Where Basically All The Game’s Backstory Is, as carved onto the walls of a corridor that takes about five minutes to trudge through even if you ignore all of the words. Oh, and when you get to the other end? You have to walk back, obviously. You know it’s good stuff when even a game’s own wiki states, and we quote, “it is suggested by most not to read all of it.” Truly great literature. Who could ask for anything less?

But of course, these are just a few cases. Which games have convinced you to pause saving the world to flick through a good book, and when has that background just been so much blah? It’s fun to get lost in backstory, just as long as the writers aren’t too obsessed with their own lore.

Oh, snap! It's yet another PCG Q&A, where every Saturday we ask the panel of PC Gamer writers a question about PC gaming. You're also very welcome to share your thoughts in the comments below. This week: which game actually lived up to the hype?

Jody Macgregor: The Witcher 3

I hated the first Witcher game, and although the second one's an improvement in a lot of ways I still thought most of it was dull—apart from the bit where you get drunk and wake up with a tattoo, obviously. So when glowing reviews came out for The Witcher 3 I ignored them. There was plenty of other stuff to play in 2015: Tales From the Borderlands, Rocket League, Life is Strange, Pillars of Eternity, Devil Daggers, Her Story. I was busy.

It took a solid year's worth of articles about how incredible every aspect of The Witcher 3 was, from the side quests to the potion-making to the characters to the wind in the goddamn trees, before I finally caved and tried it. Everyone was right, it's now on my "best games of all time" list, and I've become one of those people who says you should turn the music down so you can hear the wind in Velen. There's an entire subreddit devoted to whinging about games journalism's never-ending love affair with writing about The Witcher 3, but without that constant praise I wouldn't have pushed past my disinterest to give it the chance it deserved. And now I've become one of those people who won't shut up about The Witcher 3.

Samuel Roberts: Metal Gear Solid V

Not everyone will agree with this one, but I've lived through multiple Metal Gear hype cycles (MGS2 and MGS4 most memorably), and this is the one game that really deserved it. While this Metal Gear has the worst story in the series by far, it's also a superior stealth game. With its suite of upgrades and repeatable missions, I easily played MGSV for over 100 hours, and I have no doubt I'll reinstall it someday. 

Chris Livingston: Portal 2

I think the original Portal was a near-perfect experience. You learned to play as you played and each test chamber increased in complexity at a rate that was challenging but never frustrating. It was funny and surprising and satisfying, and short enough that it didn't have time to wear out its welcome. When trailers for Portal 2 began appearing, I was just as excited as anyone else, though I wasn't really expecting to love it in the same way. More complex, more characters, more story, more puzzles, more more more. I just couldn't imagine it matching the original, which proved (to me at least) that less is more.

It definitely lived up to the hype, though. Portal 2 is amazing, funny, challenging, surprising, and every bit as brilliant as the first. Maybe it's still true that less is more, but that doesn't mean more is less.

Jarred Walton: Half-Life 2

Piggybacking off Chris here, Half-Life 2 was an incredible follow-up to one of the best (if not the best) games of the '90s. The original Half-Life surprised the hell out of me with ways it changed the first-person shooter. After playing a ton of Quake and Quake 2, story seemed to be an afterthought, but Half-Life revolutionized the genre. Okay, the Xen levels at the end almost ruined it, but I still wanted more.

And then I waited, waited, and waited some more. Daikatana proved that games too long in development could suck, and HL2 felt like it might be doomed to the same fate. But with the addition of the gravity gun and physics, plus a great setting and story that made you care about the characters, it exceeded its source material in every way. I'm still holding out hope for HL3, naturally, but those are some massive shoes to fill.

Tom Senior: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I was dangerously excited when a new Deus Ex was announced. I was hyped to the extent that it would have really stung if a new Deus Ex fell well short of expectations. Human Revolution had a few problems, but it was exactly the atmospheric cyberpunk playground I wanted and the art direction added a new dimension to the Deus Ex universe. Due to the technological limitations of the era the old Deus Ex games struggled to show art or architecture (apart from that silly Earth-in-a-giant-claw statue at the start). Human Revolution decided that everything would be gold, and full of triangles, and its depiction of futuristic augments was gorgeous. I would quite like a pair of Jensen arms.

Human Revolution really got Deus Ex. It had hacking, vents, and intricate levels. But it also had something else, something new: retractable arm-swords. Not many people would look at the groundbreaking masterpiece of Deus Ex and think 'this needs retractable arm-swords', but Eidos Montreal had the vision to make retractable arm-swords happen. I will always respect them for that. 

Andy Kelly: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

I remember the buzz around Vice City vividly. Every time I saw that stylish advert on TV, the one with 'I Ran' by Flock of Seagulls, I got a tingle of excitement. Magazines were full of gushing previews, treating every morsel of information like it was the biggest scoop since Watergate. And then when it came out, it was everything I dreamed it would be. A bigger, more detailed city. An incredible soundtrack. More fun and varied missions. A better story. An all-star cast. HELICOPTERS. Being able to fly around a city of that size back then was a genuine thrill.

GTA III was great, but it felt like an experiment in places; a concept for what a 3D Grand Theft Auto game could be. But Vice City was the first time Rockstar really nailed it, and laid a solid foundation for the 3D era of their world-conquering series. The '80s (or at least some exaggerated, romanticised version of it) has begun to saturate pop culture to an annoying degree lately, so I can't see Rockstar returning to that setting. It's too obvious. But I would like to see Vice City again in a different, more contemporary era, perhaps showing the bleak, faded aftermath of its hedonistic '80s heyday.

Andy Chalk: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

The first time I saw this teaser I made a noise like a ten-year-old opening the latest issue of Tiger Beat. Then I saw this teaser, and I pretty much hyperventilated and passed out. I knew in my heart that DX: Human Revolution couldn't be that good, because Deus Ex was lightning in a bottle: Ugly, clunky, with terrible voice acting and a ridiculous, incoherent story, all of which somehow got smushed together into basically the best game ever made. How do you fall down a flight of stairs and land in a bed of roses twice? 

But then Human Revolution came out, and it was that good. Not perfect, and I will never not be mad about those boss fights. But Adam Jensen is the perfect successor (predecessor, I suppose) to JC Denton, I loved the visual style (including the piss filter) and the music (because it's not Deus Ex without a great soundtrack), and the whole thing just felt right: Not as off-the-conspiracy-theory-hook as the original, but big and sprawling and unpredictable—a legitimate point of entry into that world. It took more than a decade to get from Deus Ex to Human Revolution, and it was worth the wait. 

There is a long history of religion in games, and RPGs provide a good space for conversations about faith that could have felt flippant in other genres. In The Witcher 3, religion is more than just window dressing. Set in a world outgrowing magic, the game depicts religion in varied ways: tackling philosophy, corruption and misconception, while allowing room for players to interact with gods, decide peoples' fate and support or condemn religious practices.

Geralt's own beliefs, or lack thereof, are notable, as he must regularly interact with religious characters. Geralt is magical, yet likely wouldn't describe himself as a magic user, and has a distaste for certain elements of the practice. Despite this, Geralt can be played as a supporter of religion (and his aversion to magic isn't so strong that he wouldn't date a sorceress or two). 

Magic is often used as a way of portraying seemingly religious rituals within games. Think of Yuna's summoning of the spirits of the dead in Final Fantasy X, or the magic used to resurrect characters in World of Warcraft. Magic rituals are performed repeatedly in Skyrim, another game that, similar to The Witcher 3, uses standing stones as a source of power. The Witcher 3's own Places of Power are quite similar to those we see today at Stonehenge or Avebury.

Also of note is that Geralt recharges himself by meditating. While meditation today does not have to be directly linked to religion or belief, meditation has been a core aspect of multiple religions, from Buddhism to Christianity, since ancient times. Geralt's relationship with religion and faith is a constant foil to his character, a reflecting point that the game repeatedly dwells on. The Witcher 3 repeatedly asks us what we believe by challenging Geralt's own beliefs. 

Matters of faith

The Witcher 3 presents us with many different forms of belief. The Church of the Eternal Fire, for instance, is depicted as civilised but corrupt, operating with near-medieval cruelty. For the Church of the Eternal Fire, religion is all about appearances. Sitting at the highest peak of the city of Novigrad, in a wealthy neighbourhood, the church is ever-so-subtly painted gold. You can't go into the building yourself, so there's no way to know what kind of rituals go on in there. By separating the church itself from the player, the organisation gives off a feeling of inaccessibility. It's clear that Geralt isn't welcome, and if the multiple scenes of people burning at the stake for being magical don't get the point across, the sneering remarks of the rich churchgoers do. 

It’s telling that the majority of quests in which you interact with members of the Church of Eternal Fire are negative. There's corruption, fanaticism and racially-motivated murder, not unlike the Crusades carried out by the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages.

A roadside priest tasks Geralt with burning the bodies of dead soldiers in one of the first quests to include the Church. On the surface, this seems like a standard 'go here, do this, come back for a reward' quest. However, when one of the bodies turns out to be not quite dead, it's revealed that the priest is actually getting you to burn the evidence of his illegal fisstech trade. If you confront the priest and refuse to accept his bribe to look the other way, you're forced into a three-on-one fight, but with a larger reward if you win. Maybe this is the game suggesting this is the ethical choice to make, but the implication is the same: corruption and organised religion go hand in hand in the world of The Witcher 3.Quests that revolve around folklore are more open-ended. In Velen, rituals are common roadside occurrences, frequently featured in quests that ask you to protect people during acts of worship, or participate in them yourself. 

In 'A Greedy God', Geralt comes across a destroyed building which is now the site of worship for a local deity (imaginatively called the Allgod). Villagers are complaining that the Allgod has cursed them for not providing adequate offerings. With a little digging you discover that the assumed deity is actually a sylvan living in a cellar underneath the worship site, greedily scoffing the villagers’ offerings. Sylvans are traditionally woodland spirits or deities—relations to the Roman god of woods and fields, Silvanus (not to be confused with the Blizzard character of a similar name). 

This quest is often described as funny, yet your options for what to do once you've discovered that the deity is a monster scamming his way into obesity aren't great. If you kill the sylvan, you gleefully tell the villagers that you have righted the wrongs against them. They were being fleeced after all, and now they’re free! The villagers react badly to this—they think they’ve been doomed and rush off to organise a group prayer session.

If you tell them to check the cellar below, you'll later discover they followed your advice, confronted the sylvan, and are now all dead. The only way to please both parties is to threaten the sylvan but not kill it, effectively maintaining a lie, but keeping everyone alive. The game doesn’t comment either way, so we're left wondering: is that a positive result? Have you saved anyone or really achieved anything? Does Geralt even care? 

Making a believer

In 'Defender of the Faith', Geralt is asked to fix a series of shrines that have been vandalised. There’s little reason for you to actually do this quest—it doesn’t add to the overall story of the game—but as Geralt is told by the villager who hires him, if he doesn't help out, the local children will grow warts and the dogs will get the mange. 

Geralt doesn't want to go out of his way, and that's understandable for a man with a policy of 'live and let live' when it comes to religious practices. And besides, this isn't strictly Witcher-work—he's not a religious repairman. As it turns out, though, the true villains of this quest are the worst monsters of all… students from Oxenfurt Academy quoting Nietzsche and Marx ("Religion is the opiate of the masses!"). 

It's clear that Geralt thinks this is a waste of his time. "Sheesh, students!" he exclaims, rolling his eyes. Yet he never truly condemns the belief aspect of this quest. Here we get to see both extremes of an argument about faith: from an elderly woman who believes that wooden shrines will ensure good health, to students who think destroying said shrines will force the locals into a life free of superstition. This quest lays the foundation for a conflict that reemerges throughout the entire game: the pagan beliefs of down-on-their-luck villagers, against the more atheistic views of their well-off counterparts.

Despite making a fantasy RPG about magic and belief, at times it feels as if CD Projekt Red thinks the majority of its audience are sceptics. Stories of villagers sending their children to mysterious witches in the middle of a swamp, in the hope it will bring them good fortune, are presented as being wildly superstitious. The Ladies of the Wood are at the heart of one of The Witcher 3's most beloved series of quests, presented as a terrifying reality in the shape of an old wives' tale. The fact that the Ladies are proven to be horribly real, and that they eat children while dancing naked around a cauldron, feels like a smack in a doubter's face. 

The Witcher 3 does this time and time again: showing us something completely fantastical, allowing us to revel in doubt and suspicion, before pulling back the curtain and revealing it all to be true. Geralt is often sceptical of the problems he's brought in to solve—"A ghost is ruining our water supply!" "A villager has turned into a werewolf!" "The witches in the swamp are eating children"—yet they're all real. It's as if we’re being told to look closer into what we assume is the stuff of fairytales. By comparing the natural wildness of pagan belief with the rigid cruelty of organised cults, we're being shown that not everything fantastical is fantasy and not everything reputable is respectable. 

Despite having a sceptic for a protagonist, The Witcher 3 depicts religion in a surprisingly even-handed way. It portrays a medieval church that's clearly meant to resemble historical realities, and pagan belief systems that replicate both fairy tales and real-life rituals. We're never given a clear sense of who or what to believe, which unlike the many RPGs that have come before it, leaves the choice up to us. 

Geralt of Rivia is set to make his first appearance outside of the Witcher universe later this year, according to CD Projekt Red's head of community. Marcin Momot tweeted earlier today that our favourite bathtub dweller could step into another "upcoming game", without hinting at what that game might be.

Fighting game Soulcalibur 6—the first in the series to come to PC—seems to be the favourite. CD Projekt Red already has a relationship with that game's developer Bandai Namco, and the series has a history of pulling in characters from other universes, including Star Wars.

A couple of more left-field suggestions are flying around, including Monster Hunter: World. Developer Capcom is willing to work with other teams to bring in familiar faces, and even though the game is already out it is technically "upcoming" on PC.

Other potential homes for Geralt include Final Fantasy 15, which has shown it's no stranger to crossovers by parachuting in Gordon Freeman and a bunch of weird Sims 4 costumes.

Whatever it is, it may just be the last time we get to see Geralt in the flesh: CD Projekt Red has said it has no plans to pick up his story again, although it may return to the Witcher world some day.

Where would you like to see him pop up? While we wait to find out, check out our roleplay of Geralt in a winery tycoon game.

The Witcher series of books are getting a Netflix adaptation, and back in December we learned that producer and writer Lauren Hissrich will be Geralt's showrunner. Hissrich has previously executive produced Daredevil and The Defenders for Netflix, written episodes for both shows (and for The West Wing, in the early 2000s). Thanks to her Twitter feed, we can put together a few new tidbits about the show, how it's shaping up, and which familiar characters we can expect to see. And yes, we'll get the most important out of the way first: Roach is in.

Hissrich wrote brief descriptions of The Witcher's major characters. Geralt is "stoic" but also "soft-and-squishy-in-a-tiny-place-in-his-heart-that-he'll-never-reveal-until-maybe-the-end-and-even-then-it-will-just-be-a-hint." Yennefer is fiery and proud; Triss Merigold is spunky and idealistic; Ciri resilient and relentless. We can also expect to see Jaskier (who we know as Dandelion in the English adaptations), Geralt's vampire buddy Regis, Emperor Emhyr var Emreis, and some characters who aren't in the games.

Those include Cahir, Vilgefortz, Milva, and witcher-killing bounty hunter Leo Bonhart. That's a pretty full cast.

Hissrich pitched the main storylines of the first season to Netflix on December 13th, and posted an example of just how many revisions it took to get from outline to completed pilot. "On Feb 23rd, I finished the first draft of the pilot," Hissrich tweeted. "It's 78 pages, which is a little too long, but I'm not ready to cut anything else yet!" This is what that writing process looked like:

The Witcher series is obviously still some time away from filming, but it's moving forward. Now we wonder: who's going to play Geralt?

This article was originally published in February 2018.

With a population of 30,000, the free city of Novigrad is the cosmopolitan heart of the Northern Kingdoms. Geralt of Rivia’s search for his adoptive daughter Ciri brings him here during the events of The Witcher 3, and he finds a city plagued by organised crime, religious zealotry, and bitter class division.

The city sits on the northern shore of the Pontar, at the point where the river empties into the Great Sea. While monster attacks are a problem for most settlements in the region, Novigrad is protected by impenetrable stone walls designed by architects from the Oxenfurt Academy. The city has no stationed army, but is watched over by the Temple Guard: a militant arm of the Eternal Fire with a reputation for abusing its power. Those great walls may keep monsters out of Novigrad, but it has plenty of its own.

Like any bustling metropolis, Novigrad is divided into distinct districts. And as you wander its streets, from the slums of Harborside to the mansions of Gildorf, you see a wonderful variety of faces; faces that reflect their surroundings and give the city its character. I recently walked the entire length and breadth of Novigrad, and the following portraits are of the people I met along the way, offering an intimate glimpse of life in the free city.

Located in the eastern part of the city, The Bits is an overcrowded district in the grips of extreme poverty. Ramshackle stacks of dilapidated houses lean over narrow, muddy side-streets, and it’s not uncommon to find yourself being attacked by desperate criminals. You’ll find thugs, beggars, and assorted ne'er-do-wells hiding from the Temple Guard here, but there are also flickers of humanity, including a school for orphaned children.

Putrid Grove is similarly impoverished, but has become a haven for non-humans and magic users, who live under the protection of Francis Bedlam, the King of Beggars. In his sanctuary you’ll see elves, dwarves, and humans living together, and mages plying their forbidden trade. This is the only place in the city where people on the fringes of society can live in peace without being hounded by the Eternal Fire's witch hunters. “They call this place the Putrid Grove,” the King of Beggars tells Geralt. “But it’s the rest of Novigrad that’s putrefied. This here’s the last bastion of normality, sanity, reason.”

Outcasts can also be found in Farcorners, a patch of farmland just outside the city walls. Although not completely safe from the prying eyes of the Eternal Fire, magic users and non-humans can find some safety here. Geralt meets a fugitive mage called Remi Villeroy, who fled with his family after the witch hunts broke out. Novigrad may seem like a shining beacon in war-ravaged Velen, but for some folk, life there is just as tough as anywhere else.

Of course, for others, life in Novigrad is sweet. Gildorf is the city’s most affluent district, elevated above the grimy slums below—both literally and figuratively. Here the wealthiest citizens live in opulent villas, relax in Sigismund’s Bathhouse, and engage in all manner of hedonism at the Passiflora, Novigrad’s finest brothel. There are no beggars or cutthroats here; just strolling nobles clad in fine, colourful clothes and a huge contingent of Temple Guards to keep the riff-raff at bay. Compared to The Bits, it’s like a different city.

Gildorf is also notable for its connection to Temple Isle via St. Gregory’s Bridge. This is the religious heart of the city, home to the Great Temple of the Eternal Fire. At the base of the tower, whose flame can be seen burning for miles around, you’ll find crowds of worshippers praying and priests giving passionate sermons. And, of course, the Temple Guard is out in force, making sure order is kept in this most holy of sites. But that hasn’t stopped Whoreson Junior, one of the city’s crime lords, buying a townhouse on the island.

Not every upper class citizen hides away in prestige districts like Gildorf, however. You’ll find the well-to-do mingling with the mucky rabble in the city centre—particularly around Hierarch Square. This busy marketplace throbs with life, with merchants, craftsmen, conmen, beggars, bankers, thieves, and nobles merrily rubbing shoulders. Just off the square is the famous Kingfisher Inn, a cosy tavern whose resident bard, the beautiful Callonetta, frequently brings patrons to tears with her songs of romance and adventure.

Industry is also an important part of city life, and some areas of Novigrad are devoted to commerce. Harborside is where ships come in from the Great Sea, bringing goods from faraway lands for merchants to sell in town. You can also find captains here who will, providing they have the coin, take travellers to places like the Skellige archipelago. The Golden Sturgeon is a rowdy dockside tavern popular with sailors looking to drink their shore leave away, including fist-fighting champion Georgius ‘The Piledriver’ Georg.

A network of canals runs through Novigrad, where locals will often be found fishing. And they sell their catch in the Fish Market district, a hub of merchants trading in fish and other goods. Traders are also present in Glory Lane, a district where Geralt can meet the master blacksmith Éibhear Hattori. Districts like these keep Novigrad’s economy alive, and provide a wealth of jobs for the common folk, even if the working conditions are often grim.

And all that money has to go somewhere, which is where Novigrad’s many banks come in. The Novigrad branch of the dwarf-owned Vivaldi Bank is on Hierarch Square, where Florens and Orens can be exchanged for Crowns, and loans can be taken out. Vimme Vivaldi runs the branch, who also happens to be one of the city’s most talented gwent players. While many dwarves are outcasts in the city, Vivaldi’s status and wealth protects him: an example of the injustice and hypocrisy that is sadly commonplace in Novigrad.

Novigrad is a remarkable place, with a rich culture and history that videogame cities often struggle to convey. Before I took this tour through its streets, I’d been in the city dozens of times before while playing The Witcher 3, but never really stopped to admire just how much thought and craft has gone into its construction. It’s evident in its design, and the design of its citizens, that CD Projekt RED’s artists and writers thought about the city as a real place, rather than just a cardboard set for the player to run around in.

I’m also impressed by how much personality the people have, even though you only catch a distant glimpse of most of them when playing the game normally. It was only when I made use of NVIDIA’s Ansel screenshot tool to take a closer look that I discovered this hidden world of detail. These faces say as much about the city as the streets and buildings, and I feel like you could write entire stories about every random NPC featured in these portraits.

So the next time you’re in Novigrad, get off your horse, switch off the HUD, and go for a long walk. You’ll be amazed by how much detail you miss when you’re busy questing and fighting, and how real the place feels when you really think about its layout and the people you see around you in each district. It's amazing to think that this hyper-detailed city is just one small corner of The Witcher 3's vast world, and it explains why the game took three and a half years to make. I can't wait to see the futuristic cities CDPR builds for Cyberpunk 2077.

A look at some our recent Game of the Year winners—Spelunky, Metal Gear Solid V, Dishonored 2—suggests that baked-in narratives are less important to us than personal stories plotted by physics and AI. That's broadly true, but not to the total exclusion of videogame storytelling, of characters and dialogue and, to give an overarching definition of what we mean by 'story' in this case, 'sequences of events which may be influenced by the player but are not authored by them.' The setting, the conflict, the reasons characters act (through us) and the consequences for those characters. You know, stories. 

Some say games are bad vehicles for this kind of storytelling, full stop. Others argue that while the stories in games are often bad, it's the fault of the storytellers, not the medium. And yet another camp argues that games are the greatest storytelling medium of all time. In listing our favorite stories, we will resolve exactly zero of these contradictory views. Unconcerned with theory for the moment, we just want to celebrate the stories that stuck with us, and recommend a few games for those who love to be told a good tale. Here are our favorites, as picked by regular PC Gamer writers Samuel Horti and Richard Cobbett, as well as the whole team:

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice 

Hellblade is an important game, not just because of the subject matter it tackles—a young woman’s struggle with psychosis—but also because it proves that modern-day audiences are willing to listen to developers that want to tackle difficult themes.

Pict warrior Senua is on a journey to retrieve her lover’s soul from the depths of the Norse underworld of Helheim, and she’s prepared to go up against the gods to do it. Her battles with towering, undead Vikings mirror her struggles against her inner demons, and through sparse writing and long, lingering close-ups of Senua’s face you really feel her pain. She bares her soul to the player, and it’s utterly moving.

The inner struggle is the one the game wants you to focus on, but there’s still subtlety on the surface, too: you can look back at the end of it and think about how Senua’s outward journey reflected her inner torment, making connections that weren’t obvious at the time. 

The Thief trilogy 

The first Thief game tells a neat noir story complete with dry narration from a cynical protagonist and a femme fatale who hires him for a dangerous job. The end result of its tangled plot has him stealing from a god of chaos and changing the world. Thief grows from a simple mash-up of hard-boiled fiction and steampunk into something much more complex. Over the course of the next two games it explores the religious consequences of a god's death and the Mechanists who rise in his absence, and by the third game follows those explorations of chaos and order by focusing on corruption within the Keepers, the group dedicated to balance Garrett left behind at the start of that first game.

There's a neatly cyclical quality to the three Thief games, which end where they began—not just with the Keepers, but with a scene of a child being caught pickpocketing. Only where once Garrett was the kid, now he's the adult deciding the fate of that child. So many videogame heroes get dragged back again and again, long after their story is done, so Garrett having such a complete arc is a pleasant rarity. The reboot's Garrett could never live up to it.

What Remains of Edith Finch

The overarching tale of the Finch family is full of intrigue, but it’s the individual stories of each family member that stand out. Returning to the family home as the titular Edith, you poke around the abandoned house, slipping in and out of the memories of the various characters as you gradually piece together a moving tragedy.

Each is told as an inventive mini-game. You transform into a shark, chop fish on a production line and listen to poetry while flying a kite. The simple mechanics provide the perfect window to learn about the personalities of each family member. These vignettes are moving, and deceptively layered and rich, changing your perception of what you’ve heard before while also advancing the overarching plot. The game offers a masterclass in environmental storytelling, too, with each object in the house giving you a new insight into the family.

Quite simply, it’s the pinnacle of the first-person narrative game genre, and toppling it will take some doing.

Mafia and Mafia 2 

The first two Mafia games each contain their own compelling stories, built from familiar cinematic influences—but the first is my favourite, telling a more sympathetic tale of cab driver Tommy Angelo being drawn into the criminal underworld, before finally trying to escape it. The cutscenes look like they're being acted out by Gerry Anderson puppets by today's standards, but it felt like careful attention was paid to the writing, cinematography and use of music in Mafia's story—plus the smoke effects are still nice. The shock ending, which we won't ruin here, ties into Mafia 2 in an utterly dazzling way. 

Mafia 2, meanwhile, focuses on Vito Scaletta and his best friend Joe some years later. Vito gets into the mob to clear his family's debts, following a memorably boring sequence where you work at the docks, doing legitimate and repetitive work until you choose to walk away. The story ends somewhat abruptly, though some might argue that elevates its closing moments, but the friendship between the two main characters is what I remember loving about Mafia 2, as well as believing this story was actually taking place across two decades.

Her Story

You’d think that if you take a murder mystery, chop it into bits and deliver all those parts in the wrong order then the resultant story would be a mess. And in most cases you’d be right. But not in Her Story. You flick through a database of police interviews with a young woman, pulling up clips by searching for keywords and watching them on a battered CRT monitor. Each video reveals a piece of the jigsaw, and it’s your job to slot them all together in your mind.

The minimalist presentation wouldn’t work without astonishing acting and tight, punchy writing. Through a single screen the game depicts more drama than most blockbuster movies. Each clip you watch changes your mind about the case, and then the next clip makes you realise just how wrong you were again.

It’s a showcase of ambiguous storytelling done right. Even if you watch every single clip, and therefore know what every jigsaw piece looks like, the overall picture will still be blurred by your own interpretations and preconceptions. It means different things to different players, and you learn something new every time you play.

Bioshock 2 

While it’s the first game that gets all the attention for its fantastic concept, it’s Bioshock 2 that’s secretly the high point of the series. Under Jordan Thomas and his crew, a story once primarily about a city became a story of its people. The victims of Rapture. The next generation, emerging as butterflies from a cocoon of poverty and deprivation. It told real stories of people who followed a dream, only to realise that they were in service to someone else’s. And then of course there was Eleanor—Lamb of Rapture, and far superior as a character than Bioshock Infinite’s Lamb of Columbia. Through actions rather than words, you guided her nascent morality in a world where morality was routed in human concern rather than big plot twists, as the ‘dadification’ of gaming arguably reached its zenith. This wasn’t your story. It was your merely your privilege to begin hers.

To the Moon

An emotionally draining game that has caused many a tear to drop on our keyboards. To the Moon's premise seems overly complex at first: in the future, a company can travel into your mind and implant new memories in a way so that present time-you believes them to be true. But really, it’s a story about one man’s dying wish to visit the moon, hence the title.

The game take’s place inside the memories of that man, called John. You travel backwards through his mind step-by-step. So at the beginning of the story you pick up mysteries, and as you go back in time those mysteries unpack themselves piece by piece (wait until you know what that rabbit means—you’ll weep). It never hits you over the head with anything, which means you feel clever for picking up on its nuances.

But its intelligence is not what sticks with you. The memorable bit is the game’s exploration of love, loss and regret, all three wrapped together in something that’s a comedy one minute (it’s seriously funny in places) and a tragedy the next.

Realms of the Haunting

This obscure British gem has enjoyed something of a resurgence of late, and justifiably so. While the script is more than a little on-the-nose and the basic concept is a fairly stock haunted house setting giving way to a fairly stock battle between good and evil, it’s not really the plot itself that makes ROTH so special. It’s the details, some of which may actually contain the devil.

Few fantasy or horror games have presented such a wonderfully fleshed out world—the sense of stepping into something bigger than you could ever comprehend, with every scrap of it meticulously detailed and woven into a grand tapestry. Ignore the relatively primitive 3D engine. The joy of ROTH is in the descent to understanding, dealing with powers, and the moments of compassion that emerge from it, like being faced with a trial from a seemingly implacable god willing to bend the unbreakable rules of his domain because your situation is so dire as to have drawn his impossible pity. It was a world that dripped with fantastical history long before the likes of Dark Souls were a glint in their creators’ sadistic eyes, and remains a beautiful obscurity that badly deserved its sequel.

Grand Theft Auto IV

GTA IV dialled back the wacky, fun stuff of San Andreas—military jets, jetpacks, getting fat from eating burgers—in favour of a sober story set in a stunningly realistic interpretation of New York, Liberty City. This meant that, as an open world game, GTA had less moments of large-scale, thrilling chaos than we'd eventually see in GTA V, but the flipside of that was a more interesting story. GTA IV is a pretty sincere tale—and it has a few thematic links with Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption, which also has a protagonist who can't really escape his past life. 

Niko Bellic, an Eastern European veteran who comes to Liberty City to start again, soon finds himself dragged back into a life of killing. The tragedy of Niko is that you sense he knows it's the one thing he's best at. It's melodramatic but effective—a daring effort to bring GTA into the modern age with a more dramatic story.

The Yawhg

The Yawhg is coming, and it isn't going to be good, and that's all you know. This fantastic little game sends up to four players around town to prepare for that coming disaster, and each simple decision—teach the king your seductive techniques or let him flounder?—can lead to terrible things at the end of the brief adventure (or rarely, something good). The writing is concise, unembellished, and biting; simple fantasy tales that may end with stolid brutality or newfound wisdom, whether you spend a week drinking in the tavern or meditating in the garden.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc 

Danganronpa stands out from other visual novels because, rather than a game about making decisions, it's a game about making deductions. You play as one of 15 students trapped in an elite school where the only way to graduate (read: escape) is to kill a classmate and get away with it by lying and framing your way through a murder trial. If anyone pulls it off, the remaining students will also be killed, so everyone has a stake in every trial—doubly so if you've grown attached to the victim or the prime suspect. 

The process of collecting, considering and presenting evidence makes for a far more interactive experience than merely navigating dialogue, and the trials work because Danganronpa has colorful and interesting characters you won't want to see die. They look like one-note caricatures at first glance, but you start to see different sides of everyone as antagonist Monokuma ratchets up the stakes with unique twists. It becomes clearer and clearer that everyone has something to hide, and the dread of suddenly losing a favorite character, or accusing one of murder, should not be underestimated.

A Mind Forever Voyaging

When did games get so political, people demand. Well, try 1985, with one of the most beloved text adventures not to involve hitchhiking around the galaxy or exploring an underground kingdom. A Mind Forever Voyaging is interactive fiction doing something that no other medium could do—to put you into a world, and let exploration tell its story. Yes, in many ways, this was the first walking simulator—its setting, a Matrix style recreation of a small American town, and you a sentient computer program charged with stepping into progressive simulations of the future under a popular senator’s Plan For Renewed National Purpose. Needless to say, it doesn’t go well. Over the course of the game you experience America’s collapse around you, complete with now familiar sites collapsing into decay and your own family becoming victims of an oppressive theocratic regime. Can you stop it, despite your only presence in the real world being as a scrap of data on a computer?  

Mass Effect 2

A solid space romp from start to finish. A lot of RPGs struggle to sustain forward momentum for more than a few hours at a time, but Mass Effect 2 does it for 30, constantly nudging you from one point in the galaxy to the next by presenting you with a series of interesting missions, each containing its own short story. It gets the balance just right between exposition and action, with enough big set pieces to keep you on your toes.

The characters are the glue holding it together. The series has some of the best personalities you’ll find in games (and Garrus might just be the best NPC of all time). Walking around the Normandy after a mission to hear the quips of each crew member in turn is a joy, and you can dig even deeper into their personalities in the companion missions, which provide some of the best moments in the entire series. Learning more about them, and forming these personal ties, lends more weight to the overall plot. Even though you might not care about the Geth or the Reapers or the fate of humanity, you care about your crew, and whether they make it out of the game’s bombastic ending alive.

It also has the benefit of being able to incorporate the decisions you made in the first game, which makes for a richer, more personal tale. It’s an excellent space opera that Bioware struggled to better in both Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda, and a game against which all their future titles will rightly be measured.

The Witcher 3 

What can we say about The Witcher 3 that hasn’t already been shouted from the rooftops? The Bloody Baron quest alone warrants its place on our list. To focus just on that would be a mistake though, as barely a moment goes by without a reminder that CD Projekt are playing in a different league to almost every other RPG studio out there. It’s in the plots, which effortlessly merge myth and fairy tale and fantasy. It’s in the humour that underlines everything. It’s in the cheeky imagination of a studio as happy to have you chase after a missing stone phallus as your long-lost adopted daughter. But mostly, it’s about seeing this wonderful world through the practiced neutrality of Geralt himself—a man who can’t stop his compassion and sympathy bleeding out through his stoic front, no matter how much it might make his life easier. What many games demand long cutscenes to tell, this one often handles with nothing more than a subtle eye animation, or an obvious opinion held back. The Witcher 3 tells great stories, but it’s how they all weave together and filter through their star and his unique perspective that really makes them special. 

Analogue: A Hate Story 

Investigating an abandoned spacecraft inhabited by untrustworthy AI is a videogame staple, and it's been done well (most recently in Prey). Analogue: A Hate Story is different. For starters it's a visual novel rather than an immersive sim, and also it's an exploration of the societal pressures on women in Joseon-period Korea.

The spaceship Mugunghwa (named after South Korea's national flower) is a multi-generational slower-than-light colony ship whose inhabitants, over the centuries, regressed to a feudal society that somehow collapsed 600 years before your investigation begins. In other games like this you might read emails about changing the passwords on the armory—in Analogue the logs tell the story of competing dynasties in a society where women are forbidden from learning to read and write (but do so anyway). It's historical fiction wrapped in sci-fi trappings that bounces the two off each other, you and your new AI companions examining and reacting to the text as you go. It's about how the past isn't as far behind us as we like to think, and has a thematic richness that honestly puts a lot of other games to shame.

Oxenfree 

Here are the ingredients: a spooky deserted island; a group of quirky teens who are better at banter than any of us; a mystery involving radio frequencies. Saying any more than that about Oxenfree's story is tricky, because it's a twisty one. Fortunately it's not just a great story because it will surprise you, but because of how it's told, which is in naturalistic dialogue any Kevin Williamson movie would be proud of. Characters talk over each other freely and you can interrupt them as well—when you make a dialogue choice you're never sure if Alex, the protagonist, will save it for the next gap in conversation or blurt it out immediately. 

So many games have a scene where somebody interrupts someone else, but what actually happens is that character A stops abruptly, there's a significant pause, and then character B jumps in with a line obviously recorded in a different session, possibly in a different country. Oxenfree doesn't do that. Its dialogue has a flow that you can get caught up in, so you're already engaged even before its plot uncurls and rears up in your face.

Soma

What does it mean to be alive? Sci-fi stories have grappled with the thought for decades, largely telling the same sad story over and over again. Who would’ve thought that the developers of the classic Amnesia: The Dark Descent would follow up with one of the most gripping, mind-bending, horrifying takes of all in Soma? Maybe it just took inhabiting the body of a character inhabiting a dead body to give the premise the punch it’s been needing. Its optimistic ending is the biggest surprise, given that you’re repeatedly confronted with puzzles that risk the lives of junkpile robots also harboring a human consciousness inside them. They might look like rusting mounds of metal plates and bolts, but they’ll also tell you they’re happy and don’t want to die. What if a human with their guts hanging out told you the same thing? Renegade and Paragon alignments won’t help you. 

Deranged monsters roam the halls (and you can turn them off now), but they too are confused, semi-conscious beings in unfamiliar bodies. They’re mostly a sideshow to the main attraction, the underwater research station built to harbor the remnants of humanity after a comet devastated the surface. In order to discover who you really are and save whatever you can of humanity on a glorified USB stick, you’ll need to descend to places without light or life in some of the most oppressive, uncomfortable underwater environments this side of Bioshock. But for every plot twist Rapture holds, Soma has two, and they’re all going to make you feel like shit. 

A statue depicting Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher 3 taking a bath will, for some reason, be produced by specialists Dark Horse in the near future. The company, which has made The Witcher merchandise in the past, displayed an early example of the statue at the New York Toy Fair last week, which Polygon attended. 

It's an unusual concept. Normally when an RPG hero is depicted in statue form, they are wielding a sword or riding a steed – in other words, the same kind of things they're generally shown doing in screenshots. Dark Horse's decision to depict Geralt having a bath is an odd one, but I'm happy to see video game merch that pushes the envelope.

According to the Polygon report, CD Projekt Red and Dark Horse are still "a little on the fence" about this statue. A release window wasn't announced, and the colour scheme isn't finalised. So it might be a while before you can actually purchase one – though why you would, is anyone's guess. 

Polygon has a bunch more images of the statue over here. Compare and contrast with this Bathtub Geralt statue we were sent in 2017. Quite why we were sent this, I'm still not sure. 

...and then compare it to this screenshot, taken from 2015's The Witcher 3.

And that screenshot again:

...and again...

...and that's enough.