Turbulent winds howl as rain batters the weathered precipices. Wolves can be heard in the distance, likely feasting on a carcass less fortunate than they, while miles away regular farmhands sit around a table, guzzling Viziman Champion as they wager their own boots to break even in Gwent.

Away from it all, stood atop a sequestered crag, Geralt of Rivia patiently awaits the sunrise after completing his contract. The world is quiet here: "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead," Sylvia Plath writes in Mad Girl's Love Song. "I lift my lids and all is born again." Such is the case in The Witcher 3.

If you've recently finished the Witcher Netflix series, which revels in its confidently kitschy adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski's illustrious saga, then you're probably wondering where to go next. The Witcher was commissioned for a second season before its inaugural one even aired, but there will likely be at least a year between the two. But you're already hungry for more: where's all the good food?

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CD Projekt's excellent role-player The Witcher 3 just hit its all-time concurrent player record on Steam - more than four years after the game first launched.

The reason? We'd bet a coin it has something to do with Netflix's well-received The Witcher series, which launched over Christmas.

CD Projekt community manager Marcin Marmot highlighted The Witcher 3's surge in popularity on Twitter back on 29th December - and noted that more people were now playing the game on Steam than at launch.

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CD Projekt and The Witcher author and creator Andrzej Sapkowski have inked a new rights deal for the fantasy franchise.

On the day of the release of The Witcher on Netflix, The Witcher video game developer CD Projekt announced the agreement, which grants it new rights and "confirms" the company's title to The Witcher IP as it relates to video games, graphic novels, board games and merchandise.

Here's the blurb:

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We know Ciri, Geralt's adopted ward, will play a large role in Netflix's The Witcher series when it premieres later this month. Now, a new casting report suggests an unexpected book plotline connected to her may be coming to the screen.

Warning, there may be spoilers ahead!

A new report has revealed an actor cast in the role of False Ciri.

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I'd forgotten how funny The Witcher 3 is.

I laughed a lot while playing this game. I feel like an idiot telling you what amused me because it makes me look simple - but it's the random things people would say. Things like a boy running past me and declaring, "You're grey like my grandma," or the plague cart guy suddenly realising, "Fucking hell that stinks!" I snorted when the guy I took a dive for, in a boxing match, called me a prick afterwards, and I'm still laughing remembering the person who passed me and farted.

I don't want to paint the game as a crude comedy - it's nothing like that - but what I want to get at is how refreshingly unfiltered it all is. The Witcher 3 isn't the fantasy costume party you've been to so many times before. It's a world, like our own, where hard work makes hard people who ain't got no time for pleasantries, and it feels so real because of it.

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Netflix has revealed the episode titles for The Witcher, among other teases.

The Henry Cavill-starring show is set to launch its first season on Netflix, and ahead of time, Netflix took to Twitter to reveal the titles of the first eight episodes.

Alongside each title is a brief description and a gif of its logo, and it's the descriptions that give us an idea of the events and themes the show will touch on.

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Xbox Game Pass really is the gift that keeps on giving. Tonight at X019, Microsoft has announced more than 50 new titles headed to the service in the coming months.

From a collection of Final Fantasy games and The Witcher 3, to indie gems like My Friend Pedro and Phogs, it looks like there's a little something for everyone on the way - and a bunch of new games have even arrived on Game Pass today.

And, separately, Phil Spencer has said a cross-platform Final Fantasy 14 is coming.

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We've not even been graced with Season One of Netflix's live-action take on Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher novels yet, but already the series has been renewed for a second season.

The news comes directly from showrunner Lauren Hissrich, who revealed on Twitter earlier today that "Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri will be back for more adventures... in Season Two."

"I could not be more proud of what the amazing cast and crew of The Witcher have accomplished," Hissrich continued, "and can't wait for the world to dig in and enjoy these stories with us."

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Think back to the first moments of Witcher 3, just after the tutorial section in the witcher keep. Geralt and Vesemir, talking naturally together on the road to Vizima, subtly lay out the backstory, reiterate the mission to find Yennefer and indulge in some playful repartee - the writing feels seamless and uncomplicated, as though it arrived fully formed onto the pages of a performance capture script. According to lead writer Jakub Szamalek, however, it did not.

"I actually checked how many times I edited the dialogue in that scene," he recalls during our interview at Spanish sci-fi festival Celsius232. "I think it was over 120. Sometimes these were minor edits, changing one sentence, but sometimes it was rewriting the whole thing. We did a lot of that: writing something, playing it, tweaking it, scrapping everything then re-doing it. It is just inherent to the process. There are so many moving parts when you're working on a video game, it's unavoidable." It turns out, constructing the narrative behind Witcher 3 - one of the most ambitious and enormous open-world games ever made - was not easy.

Szamalek joined the writing team at CD Projekt Red in May 2012, a few months after pre-production on Witcher 3 had begun. At this point writers Sebastian Stępień, Marcin Blacha and Arkadiusz Borowik had already started to create a master document, a 60-page manual which contained a story synopsis, descriptions of the parts of the Witcher world the story was set to explore as well as background information on the key characters and concepts. The next step was transforming the treatment into a game script. This involved dividing it into smaller parts focusing on the three main hubs - Novigrad, No Man's Land and Skelligeand - then subdividing into quests, writing the dialogue and detail, and linking to other quest and character documents. "It was like a set of Russian nesting dolls," jokes Szamalek.

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Stationary, uniforms, maybe a new laptop - that's what we'd usually expect to see in a Back to School sale. Not for GOG, though. Instead, the cheeky focus is on parents who now have some extra time on their hands to game again.

And there are some serious timesinks available for cheap in the GOG Back to School sale. Massive RPGs, engrossing sims and gripping stories are all well represented, with savings of up to 90 per cent up for grabs.

Of course, as we're dealing with CD Projekt here, you can find the entire Witcher series on sale. If you're still yet to play the latest entry, you can get The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Game of the Year Edition for 10.49. This complete version of the game comes with all previously released DLC. That's both the Hearts of Stone and the Blood and Wine expansions, as well as over a dozen smaller content packs.

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