The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition
Next-gen before their time? There's an elite selection of technologically advanced titles that appear towards the tail-end of any given generation, where developers are upping their game, experimenting with the kinds of techniques we'll see in the era to come - and it's typically on PC where we tend to get these nascent next-gen experiences. CD Projekt RED's The Witcher 2 - released in May 2011 - is one such release, a game that required a radical process of re-architecting before arriving on Xbox 360 almost a year later. But what made The Witcher 2 so special, how did it push PC hardware and can even today's mainstream graphics tech handle the game's legendary ubersampling?
Of course, the profile of The Witcher 2 is especially heightened at the moment with the recent series release on Netflix generating unprecedented interest in Geralt of Rivia's escapades - but it's not just the story and the world presented in these games that has driven their popularity. Starting with The Witcher 2, we've seen CD Projekt RED deliver some hugely ambitious, game-changing technology. The fact that the studio targeted PC - a format 'apparently' in decline back in 2011 - was remarkable in itself but without explicitly targeting mature (ie old) console hardware, CDPR pushed its game to the next level. Alongside titles like Far Cry 3, Battlefield 3 and Crysis 3, the PC showcased visuals much closer to those we would see in the now current generation of console hardware and it did so two-and-a-half years before they would arrive.
The Witcher 2's next-gen credentials are first established when it comes to characters and environments. In 2011, CDPR's new showcase pushed geometry count beyond the capabilities of the consoles meaning that edges on models were much smoother than the average AAA game, and the amount of detail on models (represented by real geometry instead of just textures) was much higher than typical high budget releases. Take the opening scenes of the game in the Timerian Dungeon - if you look across many of the surfaces and individual assets, you see almost unprecedented levels of detail. Outdoor scenes thick with undergrowth and dappled lighting look even more beautiful.
The Witcher: Enhanced Edition Director's Cut - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)
If someone enjoyed Netflix’s live-action Witcher series and it made them want to try the games, where should they start? Following the show’s debut in December, I’ve had pals who sorta fell out of games pop up asking that to me, some sort of professional opinion-haver. Should they start at the beginning of CD Projekt Red’s series? Skip to the end? Are the older games archaic? Is it easy to pick up the plot? I have opinions! Skip the first two and start with The Witcher 3, I tell you. But what would you recommend?
I have spent the winter holidays making a list, checking it twice, trying to find who is naughty on ice. But unlike the popular red-clad demon of the north, my list is reserved for terrors, demons and critters larger than 4 feet tall. I m talking about cold monsters. They re very chic this week. You see, while Nic has been battering majestic species of endangered giganto-moose in our Monster Hunter World: Iceborne review, I have been working hard to catalogue the frostiest freaks this side of video gaming. Here you go, the 8 coldest monsters in PC games.
Humble's Winter Sale is in season, and along with deals on thousands of games it's a great time to toss a coin at The Witcher series on the Humble Store. From now until January 23, you'll find The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and its Game of The Year Edition (which includes its two expansions) for 70 percent off. That makes The Witcher 3 $12 and the GOTY Edition $15, a nice savings, especially if you missed Steam's last sale.
Expansions are on sale as well: you can save 60 percent off The Witcher 3 expansions Blood and Wine ($8) and Hearts of Stone ($4), or get them bundled together for $10. You'll also find The Witcher Enhanced Director's Cut and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition for 85 percent off, which means you can pick them both up for less than $5 combined.
Obviously, it's great time to get into The Witcher games if you never played them, and you'll have plenty of company—thanks to the success of The Witcher series on Netflix, The Witcher 3 recently attracted more concurrent players on Steam than it even had when the game first launched.
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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Matt Cox)
I have no doubt that “Toss A Coin To Your Witcher“, the hit song from the Netflix Witcher series, is destined for greatness. It’s got 11 million views on YouTube. Children are chanting it in the street. The music industry is reeling. Before I came along, though, nobody had grabbed a lute and played the song at impoverished Mordhau players. I expected adoration, and that I might inspire songs of my own. Legends about the brave vanguard of pop culture.
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?
The popularity of The Witcher Netflix series is bringing more people to the games than ever, with The Witcher 3 breaking its record for concurrent players on Steam just last week, nearly five years after release with over 100,000 players. It's safe to say that Henry Cavill's Geralt of Rivia carries the same magnetism as Doug Cockle's, the grumpy charmer we know and love.
But why not make the two things we love into one thing we love? Toss a coin to your witcher and toss aside your aversion to the uncanny: we're making a monster—a monster hunter by plastering Henry Cavill's face and body on The Witcher 3's Geralt.
And we're going to do it right.
We've already written about the Henry Cavill face mod for The Witcher 3 before, but there's been a steady stream of 'retextures' in its wake. There's also a couple body mods, a sword mod, an armor mod, and plenty more to consider. Let's sift through them all and find the best Henry trimmings for our baked Geralt.
Adnan did the difficult work of shaping Henry's face and body, but something's wrong the way the light hits it. The furrowed brow, eyes, and cheekbones make our boy look like a damn wraith rather than a macho monster hunter with poison coursing through his veins. This is a great foundation, geometrically speaking, but the retextures are where the magic happens.
A big no-no for me. Our guy is still looking like a weird stunt double. Yian hasn't done much to Adnan's work, though the big draw for this mod is the Hearts of Stone option. If you want to make sure Geralt's runic face drawing fits on Skele-Cavill in the HoS expansion, this is a decent mod to have around, but it's still a little too damp and—I can't quite articulate what's wrong here—inverted? Like one of those hollow-face optical illusions where a concave mask has the appearance of a convex face that follows you where ever you go. It's creepy is what I'm saying.
Score: Specialty face-tattoo/Mustache removed with CGI
Now we're talking. Easily my favorite face for the purposes of The Witcher 3. This face darkens Henry a bit by ironically making him paler, which highlights the stubble and contours of his face for a more natural, witchery look, and adds a Striga scar to fit Henry comfortably into the game's timeline. This is the face texture to use.
Geralt's hair is a bit longer in the show than the hair the game starts with, so I recommend going with something long as soon as you find a barber. To really accentuate those locks while keeping our beloved hair physics intact, try out CraniumJ's alternative long hair mod. It's glossier and more responsive to wind.
It ain't a perfect recreation, but we'll take it for now. Dimkich's steel sword mod aims to recreate one of Geralt's Netflix blades for use in The Witcher 3. It's not the most detailed model, a bit too simple with the color and geometry, but at a glance it looks familiar enough.
This mod's a must, as long as you're willing to forgo the specialty looks and stats the game's armor provides. ReplicantPolice's Viper Armor nails the look of Netflix Geralt's studded leather getup.
If you'd prefer to keep the lovely in-game armor around and just swap out a sigil, Jatodude1's alternate amulets mod will suffice. It changes Geralt's pointy wolf pendant into the show's flat, circular version, and it's supported a good spread of popular armor sets. Ciri and Yen also get new amulets based on the symbols used in the show.
While there's no dynamic Cavill face mod that looks applies corpse paint in the lavish layers the show goes for as his toxicity increases, we can at least make his eyes turn black and light veins pop around his eyes.
Cavill doesn't grow much facial hair in the Netflix show, but throughout a playthrough of The Witcher 3, a beard is an inevitability. Problem is, slapping a new face on vanilla Geralt doesn't automatically change where hair is gonna sprout from. This beard mod from Skaters122 replaces the Mutton Chop facial hair with a beard custom built for Henry's square jaw.
And there you have it. He doesn't animate as well as vanilla Geralt and Cockle's VO is a bit less strained and deep than Cavill's, but we've successfully melded two worlds into one—a conjunctions of spheres, if you will. We're only a few weeks out from the show's release, too, so expect even more Henry mods to trickle out from now until Netflix stops changing Geralt's outfit. With a second season of The Witcher already confirmed, we'll at least get a few more years of this good stuff.
The Witcher: Enhanced Edition Director's Cut - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Lauren Morton)
Since Netflix’s Witcher series was released last month, there’s one particular part of the show that has followed me around the internet like a certain very persistent bard. Jaskier (who you know as Dandelion in CD Projekt RED’s Witcher games) sings a silly song at the end of episode two about Geralt’s exploits. The lyrics are, frankly, corny. It is not a masterpiece. But boy howdy it is catchy. There are memes and animations and, naturally, someone had to create a mod to add the song to The Witcher.
We reported over the weekend that more people were simultaneously playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt than were playing it when it first released—which, in case you'd forgotten, was all the way back in 2015. And it's not as if it slouched out the door back then, either: According to Steam Charts, its peak concurrent player count in May 2015 was an impressive 92,268.
That number has continued to climb since the weekend, and today the nearly five-year-old game set another new mark, surpassing 100,000 concurrent players for the first time ever. Breaking into the top five games on Steam is probably out of reach (although I wouldn't count anything out at this point) but muscling past Destiny 2 is impressive enough all on its own.
See for yourself:
This sudden resurgence in popularity, as we noted previously, is almost certainly attributable to the success of The Witcher on Netflix, and curiosity about the game has been easy to indulge thanks to ridiculously good sale prices on The Witcher 3 on Steam and GOG, and free time to sink into it over the holidays. (The fact that it's an outstanding RPG is probably a factor too.)
Those numbers will inevitably decline; even if all the newcomers play it from start to finish, an aged singleplayer RPG isn't going to maintain a player base the way a free-to-play game in active development will. But it's a remarkable testament to how far The Witcher has come since we first encountered it as an oddball RPG in 2007—something Lauren dug into recently with a look at how the series' handling of sex and relationships have evolved from the first game to the last. (Trivia bit: The "romance cards" in the initial Witcher release in North America were censored, while those in European nations were not. The release of the Director's Cut edition made the uncensored cards available everywhere.)
The Witcher 3 is back to its usual price on Steam, but on GOG, the Game of the Year edition is still $15.
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.
