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.

Loot boxes remain a contentious issue in videogames. Having impacted the industry significantly in 2017, politicians have called for tighter regulation, while some analysts have questioned the profitability of single-player games going forward. The enduring success of The Witcher 3 against last year's highest-selling games, however, suggests players remain invested in solo adventures. 

In November, CD Projekt Red CEO Adam Kiciński proposed its long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 will include online elements to ensure its long-term success. With this in mind, I ask the developer's co-founder Marcin Iwiński where he and his team stand with loot boxes—suggesting the controversial mechanic has dominated the conversation around single-versus-multiplayer games in the last 12 months. 

"'Conversation' sounds way too nice to describe what was happening last year. I would rather call it community backlash," says Iwiński . "And this time around, it wasn’t just the hardcore community, there were a lot of really pissed off gamers out there and they decided to speak up. Where we stand is quite simple and you could see it with all of our past releases—most recently The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and GWENT. If you buy a full priced game, you should get a big, polished piece of content, which gives you many, many hours of fun gameplay. 

"The definition of ‘many’ may vary on a title-by-title basis, but in our case it was always 50-60+ hours of the main story-line, with up to a couple of hundred of hours of side activities—if you really wanted to max out the title. To me, this is a fair deal. You get what you paid for, plus we are always trying our best to overdeliver. There is no better PR than a happy gamer recommending your title to their friends."

Iwiński continues: "Then there’s additional paid content. What we call Expansions (not DLC, mind you). Things like add-ons way back in the Baldur’s Gate era. We released two Expansions like that, and each of them was a meaningful piece of content delivering many hours of new story and gameplay. Finally, there are the DLCs. For us, they’re small pieces of content which should be available for free (and that was the case with TW3).

"The above covers full-price titles, but there’s also free-to-play territory. Here we have GWENT, where you can buy card kegs and some vanity items. Again, the deal is simple—you can play the game for free and craft your desired card collection this way, or decide to spend money and get card kegs. The choice is yours, and the only thing you pay for is time and convenience." 

Iwiński emphasises the need for transparency from developers, and that information about their games should be readily available to players. Players can then make well-informed decisions with their money, and if they buy a full-priced game, says Iwiński, they should get "numerous hours of gameplay and a significant amount of content" for their cash.   

"The moment they feel you are reaching out for their wallet in any unfair way, they will be vocal about it. And—frankly speaking—I think it's good for the industry," Iwiński adds. "Things often look great from a spreadsheet perspective, but decision makers often aren’t asking themselves the question of 'How would gamers feel, or is this offer a fair one?'. Gamers are striking back, and I really hope this will change our industry for the better." 

Referring again to The Witcher 3's long-term success, I ask Iwiński if CD Projekt Red will or at least would be willing to return to The Witcher world, even if there are no plans for The Witcher 4 as yet.   

"We’ve devoted a big part of our lives to The Witcher and it means a lot to us, so we’re definitely not abandoning this universe," Iwiński says. "If you miss your favourite characters—give GWENT a go. If you’re a fan of storytelling, there’s Thronebreaker coming out in the near future. However, in terms of big RPGs, it’s time for Cyberpunk 2077."

On that point, I ask how CD Projekt Red deals with the hype and excitement brough by a single-word, six character-long tweet.  

"It’s a huge responsibility and a lot of pressure," says Iwiński. "We know we need to deliver. And we will."

'Crunch,' in modern parlance, is a period of unhealthy overwork during the lead up to a game's release. But in the not-too-distant past it could have also described the nature of the work itself: a crunching and culling of excess data, enough to squeeze the whole game onto a DVD or two and comfortably onto a 100GB (or smaller) hard drive.

Game sizes have always been limited by their delivery medium—Myst was famously made possible by the introduction of the CD-ROM drive—but in 2004, when dual-layer DVDs were introduced, it was already too late for the PC game shelves at retailers. Steam launched around the same time, and as broadband snaked further into the suburbs and beyond, no physical medium could keep up with downloading. Games were allowed to grow, and grow, constrained only by users' bandwidth and hard drive space. That's resulted in 100GB-plus games that wouldn't even fit on a Blu-ray disc, never mind a dual-layer DVD.

That's causing grief for players who don't have access to speedy internet connections, or who haven't recently upgraded their storage in a pricey SSD market. It's especially bad for those stuck with data caps, a maximum data allotment per month that, if exceeded, results in extra charges. Broadband Now has catalogued 210 internet service providers that impose data caps.

For PC gaming to get better for those with poor internet service, either games will have to get smaller (or at least stop growing), or our selection of ISPs will have to get better, providing quality, uncapped service to more customers. After speaking to a few game developers, I can say confidently that the former isn't going to happen. The upper limit of game sizes is only going to increase. 

What's taking up all the space? 

Audio contributes a great deal to file size, but it hasn't been the primary contributor to the growth of game sizes in general. The resolution (sample rate) of audio will depend on what sounds the developer is reproducing—Tripwire, for instance, uses 44kHz audio for weapon sounds, and 22kHz audio for speech—but that was already the case back when it released Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45, one of the first third-party games to release on Steam. 

The use of 5.1 surround sound audio over mono or stereo audio has been one reason games are getting bigger, but the simple inclusion of more audio has probably had a greater effect. We expect voiced characters and high fidelity audio far more than we once did.

Video, on the other hand, has broadly increased in resolution—from 640x480  cutscenes way back when all the way up to 4K—which has notably increased its footprint on game sizes. Video can be heavily compressed, though. "1500x compression factors are not unheard of," says Stardock lead developer Nathan Hanish, pointing to the H.264 codec. So while high-quality audio and high-resolution video have helped bulk up games, they alone can't account for the leaps in size we've taken since 2000.

One element does check all the boxes for exponential growth: textures. Like video, textures are increasing in resolution, except unlike video they aren't fond of being compressed. Images can be heavily compressed—as with jpgs—but artifacting would be noticable. And regarding Hanish's specific work on Stardock games, "[DirectDraw Surface] images have to use a GPU friendly memory layout," he writes. "They only use local block compression, and thus yield at best an 8-to-1 compression." 

On top of that, textures are also growing in complexity. "In 2005 you had a texture, just a texture, which is what later people would call a diffuse texture, but it's just a texture," says Tripwire Interactive president John Gibson. "And then in the next generation, you have a diffuse texture, a normal map texture, and usually a specular—like a 'shininess' texture. So not only are you using a higher-resolution texture, because video card memory increased, and computer memory increased, but you also have three of them for every object."

Those objects—their meshes—are increasingly complex, too. A breakdown of Tripwire's games tells the story. In the mid-2000s, Red Orchestra 1 released at 2.6GB, which players thought was awfully big at the time. ("People would complain if we did a 100 megabyte patch," says Gibson.) Sound only accounted for 327MB of that release, and environmental meshes and textures weighed in at 1.4GB. Jump to Killing Floor 2, which released last year, and sound now accounts for 1.1GB of the whole. Environmental meshes and textures? 17.4GB.

"One of the quickest ways to make your game look better is to up the texture resolution," says Gibson. "Content will be authored at a very high resolution no matter what game you're making, and then you res it down to what will fit into memory. And as memory expands, people keep doing higher and higher resolution textures."

The same trend can be seen in Stardock games from 2003 to the present, beginning with Galactic Civilization 1: Ultimate Edition, which was largely bulked up by Bink video files. In 2011's Galactic Civilization 2: Ultimate Edition, textures grew to snag about 15 percent of the total filesize on their own. In 2015, Galactic Civilization 3's textures grabbed another five percent to become 20 percent of the total size. And in Stardock's latest, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, textures account for 60 percent of the total file size, says Hanish.

Textures aren't the only culprit, of course. Some games have no 'textures' in the 3D rendering sense in the first place, and some are very heavy on high-res video and can attribute the bulk of their size to that. Everything else has been growing, too, including executables, geometry, redistributables, and so on. But "textures have grown exponentially and represent (by far) the largest absolute and proportional area of growth—at least for Stardock products," writes Hanish, so if you want something to blame, look to the mossy rocks, the peeling wallpaper, and the freckled faces.

Why are some games so much bigger than others? 

Game sizes can be confusing. Why, for instance, are The Witcher 3 and Rainbow Six: Siege both 50GB despite one being an open world RPG and the other being a multiplayer shooter? Such comparisons indicate that the 'scope' or 'size' of a game, as we perceive it in terms of 'a world' or 'hours of story,' has little bearing on install size. Vast plains built of terrain geometry and repeating grass textures appear bigger in our heads than they actually are on disk, while a complex gun model that's physically small in-game may weigh more than we know.

NBA2K17 is 66GB, for instance, a hefty install size. Why would a game that takes place within NBA arenas be bigger than the entire world of The Witcher 3? For one thing, every player from every team is modeled and textured to a high degree of fidelity, whereas The Witcher 3 probably contains far fewer unique bodies and faces. And as Hanish pointed out when I brought up the topic, there's likely a heap of motion-captured animation data in NBA2K17. 

There are other questions. How much video is included? And audio? And is it compressed? Titanfall was a big game after install—48GB—because it included uncompressed audio to lessen CPU load. We can assume that from Respawn's point of view, accommodating dual-core CPUs would increase the number of satisfied customers more than a smaller install would have. 

Why not just compress everything?

That 48GB Titanfall install was 'only' a 21GB download, though, meaning it was heavily compressed. So why don't more games do that? An educated guess: it was only the fact that Titanfall's large install size was mostly audio that made it possible to compress it to 21GB in the first place.   

It's those pesky textures again. We've established that textures have been the biggest contributor to the overall increase of game sizes, and as Hanish said, textures can't be too heavily compressed. Unfortunately, they also can't be heavily compressed during download and then transcoded at install time, because that process "is extremely CPU and memory intensive and must really be performed in the studio," says Hanish (adding later that "some flavors of dds are much more intense than others to transcode").

That's not to say that compression doesn't occur (Steam itself compresses games and decompresses them after download, Gibson tells me). Nor does it mean developers don't take pains to decrease download sizes. It just isn't practical for every type of data, and isn't nearly as vital as it used to be.

Oculus VR coder Tom Forsyth, who previously worked on games for the PC, Dreamcast, and Xbox, recalls the crunching required to squeeze games onto discs back in the late '90s and early 2000s. He built utilities to compare compressed and uncompressed textures, to determine which looked acceptable in their compressed state and which had to be left uncompressed. He also hunted down duplicate textures and other unnecessary bits and pieces. While working on StarTopia, Forsyth even invented his own audio compression format to solve a problem with the music—with a week before shipping. Solving these problems, sometimes at the last minute, was necessary, as "you either fit on the disc or you didn't."

The same space-saving efforts happen today (Hanish described more-or-less precisely the same processes), but because an extra 200MB no longer blocks a release, and Steam won't take a bigger cut for a bigger game, there's far less incentive now to set a hard size limit during development. If shaving off a gig means a delay, or means resources can't be allocated to pressing bug fixes and improvements, it probably isn't going to happen.

"It's an infinite rabbit-hole," writes Forsyth. "You could spend years on compressing this stuff. But nobody has the time. Especially as you only really appreciate the problem once you're close to shipping. So do you delay shipping by a month to reduce the download size by 20 percent? That's a terrible trade-off—nobody would do that."

No developer I've spoken to denies that, with enough time and work, bytes can probably be taken off of any final build—at least until you get to some theoretical lower limit. But does cutting 50MB matter for a 30GB release? That's especially questionable when, as Gibson points out, the game is probably going to grow after release anyway. Free Killing Floor 2 updates have added new maps, modes, skins, items, and so on since its release.

2D games and intentionally low-poly, flatly-textured games will continue keeping the low bar low. Stardew Valley, for instance, is only a 462MB download. But Forza Motorsport 7 is a 96.5GB download, and there's no sign that the upper bar is going to stop rising.

"The moral of the story is: buy stock in ISPs and hard drive companies," jokes Gibson. And that's how it is. As our hardware gets better, developers are going to want to use more and more of our memory for higher quality audio, video, geometry, and textures—which means bigger games. We have little choice but to rely on our internet service providers to make fast, uncapped connections affordable. Unfortunately, ISPs, many of which pushed to repeal Net Neutrality regulations in the US, are not great allies. But at least our big, big games are going to look shiny (or specular) as hell.

Earlier this week, Motherboard reported on deepfakes, a redditor (now an entire subreddit, too) that specializes in using a machine learning algorithm to plaster celebrity faces over the actors' faces in porn videos. The result can be convincing, albeit horrifying both in the occasional slip of the algorithm that distorts the face just so and in the implications of the technology. All it takes is a PC, a couple high-quality videos of the subject, and some publicly available software to produce plausible face-swapped footage. That means anyone can be the victim of impersonation videos, or some unknown means of bullying and deception this horrible future has unlocked.But before the complete end of privacy and digital consent, the people must know whether they can put their favorite characters from The Witcher into porn, as we should have predicted. 

In one example found on the deepfakes subreddit (I didn't ask for this beat, OK?), Triss Merigold's digital face pulled from footage from The Witcher 3 is grafted onto a porn actress dressed, I'm guessing, as Triss Merigold. You'd think the cosplayer's face would be a close enough approximation, given that looking like the character you're cosplaying as is the whole point. 

The redditor behind the clips, FakingDeep (I'm noticing a theme here), thought their experiment went well, writing in the comments, "I think this one with Triss from Witcher 3 turned out pretty good, despite the training data not being ideal."

If 'good' is being used as a metric to describe how close they got to depicting the 'unspeakable horrors' Lovecraft wrote about so long ago, then yes, we're on the verge of a breakthrough.

Yennefer gets the Twilight Zone treatment from FakeDeep, her digital face—and we must emphasize that videogame graphics still don't look or behave realistically, so this is a guaranteed layering of the uncanny, a result that can only be less than realistic—is transferred onto someone that is not cosplaying as The Witcher's sternest sorceress (but they may have just moved beyond the costumed part of the whole ordeal). 

Again, the result works. The performer has a vague resemblance to Yennefer, a fictional character I broke up with on top of a mountain after kicking a genie's ass. I don't like it, but someone out there does I suppose. 

So far, the majority of those holding the reins to the 'deepfakes' subreddit appear to be straight men, otherwise we'd have several pages of Geralt porn by now. And if there's no avoiding this dark future, then bring on the nude Geralt abominations already. Still, I find the rapid proliferation of machine learning technology troubling. While it'll certainly solve some long-standing problems for fans of Sonic the very attractive hedgehog, AI-driven face-swapping done without consent from the subjects presents yet another way to deceive and abuse people.

With every Steam sale, our piles of shame grow to new, unsurmountable heights. If you've got a job or a family or some other responsibility, chances are your allocated gaming time is limited. Games can demand a lot of us, these days—whether it's an overload of sidequests, backtracking, repeat playthroughs to see every ending of a story, or because you're playing a multiplayer game with progression in mind.

Here, the UK team discusses whether games are too bloated, and where we draw the line with what we consider good value content versus filler. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below, too. 

Long journeys ahead

Samuel Roberts: Over the holiday, I finished Nier: Automata, capping off the fifth optional ending after 41 hours of total play. That game was mostly fantastic, but it also felt too long to me. It made me repeat the same story beats in a slightly exhausting second playthrough, which shed some new light on the characters but not enough to justify the hours invested. It finally ended properly with a mostly-great third playthrough, after which I had no desire to go back and mop the sidequests I'd missed. 

At this point, I'd seen the same grey boxes and washed out greenery that make up its world so many times. I then looked at the other games I'm yet to finish from 2017: Divinity, Shadow of War, Assassin's Creed Origins, which are all pretty lengthy as well. Many of our favourite games are long as heck, now. Some of them earn it, but others don't. 

Taking something like Arkane's Prey, which I mostly enjoyed, I felt like the last third of the game sent me back-and-forth to the same locations for the sake of it—which wore down the magic of its excellent setting for me. Shadow of War, meanwhile, is a game we called out specifically for being bloated. I wonder if our readers feel this way, that games longer than 20 hours can be more intimidating than exciting. Thoughts?

Andy Kelly: I don't mind if a game is bloated, as long as it's fat with interesting things to do and not just obvious filler. Shadow of War's problem is that the distractions that litter its map, whether it's revealing Shelob's memories or purifying Haedir towers, all boil down to following an icon on a map and pressing a button to interact with it. It's design like this that makes a game feel like a checklist, rather than a collection of fun things you feel compelled to do. Watch Dogs 2, on the other hand, features some really fun, unpredictable side quests that I enjoyed as much as the main game, which I wrote about here.

Phil Savage: Yeah, the best open world games don't feel bloated, just full of options. But the line between meaningful diversion and tiresome padding can be fuzzy. Shadow of War was the latter for me. I played through the opening area—a small, mini sandbox that offers a small sampling of its sidequests and structure—and couldn't bring myself to continue when I was faced with that but on a much larger scale. Seeing the size of the full map just made me feel tired. I quit out and uninstalled it soon after. 

Mandatory sidequests—we can live without them

Andy: Although I loved Assassin’s Creed Origins, it's guilty of a particularly egregious example of padding. Whenever I finished a story mission, eager to tackle the next one, I'd hit a brick wall. The mission would be two or three levels higher than me, forcing me to complete side quests to get to the appropriate level. Which would be fine if 80% of these quests weren't dull and repetitive. I lost count of how many people I didn't care about that I had to rescue from caves and bandit camps. It's a stain on an otherwise superb game, and really tested my patience towards the end. It took me 28 hours to finish Origins, and I'm sure at least eight of those were spent completing side quests against my will.

Samuel: Assassin's Creed is an interesting one, in that I feel almost trained to ignore the majority of the series' side content—ever since those collectable feathers in the original game. Would it have been a great loss to make the level gating leaner in Origins and lose that extra eight hours, leaving it to the player to decide if they're worth it? I don't necessarily think so. 

Phil: My only hesitance in criticising this stuff is it must appeal to someone, and that someone is essentially me 15 years ago. I used to scour RPGs like Baldur's Gate for every scrap of story, and 100%'d Grand Theft Autos III, Vice City and San Andreas. I even collected those damn feathers in Assassin's Creed II. It wasn't because I enjoyed collectibles—I didn't—but that I wasn't ready to leave these cool worlds. I felt compelled to stay until everything was done. Since then I got a job, and realised there were more games than I could theoretically play in a lifetime—both things that have made me more discerning with how I spend my time. But I recognise that even collectibles, as pointless as they usually are, can add value for some.

Samuel: Thing is, I played both San Andreas and GTA III before I had a full-time job and I still didn't 100% complete them. I played them until I'd seen the credits, then just messed around in the open world until I felt done. I accept collecting the hidden packages has value for some people, but as a player, I feel like I've become pretty savvy about breaking down the higher value and lower value content in a game. I know the difference between a sidequest that starts with a cutscene and a three-minute race that's slightly too tricky to be enjoyable. And for me, it doesn't matter how much I love the world of a game—it still has to give me slightly more back in reward (the entertainment value of what I'm playing) than it's asking in time investment.

To offer a slightly different example, this week I thought I'd start one of Obsidian's two recent RPGs, which I've been considering for a while. According to my favourite games utility site, How Long To Beat, Pillars of Eternity comes in at 36 hours to beat the main quest line, while Tyranny comes in at 23 hours. Knowing that, I started Tyranny—it's unlikely I'll ever get through both, and even if our reviewers preferred Pillars, I'd rather start something where I know I'll see the ending. That 13 hours is potentially a whole other game I could complete. 

Good sidequests vs bad sidequests

Tom Senior: I agree with Phil to the extent that I remember enjoying sidequests and working towards secrets in games like Final Fantasy VII. Finding Vincent, breeding gold chocobos, fighting the weapons—that stuff didn’t feel like second-tier content. Sidequests and secondary activities in a lot of current open world games feel like an afterthought by comparison, and I think that’s because, in open world games, technology has outpaced design for years. Game engines can do huge, beautiful worlds, but we don't exactly know how to fill them with interesting activities. 

There are exceptions, obviously, like Skyrim and The Witcher 3, and on consoles last year Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn. All of these games are full of fun, meaningful side activities that, crucially, don't delay your movement on the critical path. Assassin's Creed Origins' levelling system forces you to engage with the busywork to progress, which is the worst.

There are two big honking problem games I'd pick out: Mass Effect Andromeda and Dragon Age: Inquisition. The critical paths in both games are exciting, full of twists, drama, the stuff that BioWare is good at and known for. The open world side missions were drivel that got in the way and stopped you getting at the best parts of the game. Those games, and Shadow of War, define 'bloat' for me, though at least there is a point to Shadow of War having an open world. I reckon Inquisition and Andromeda could have been great relatively linear rollercoaster single player RPGs.

The Witcher 3 did it best, obviously

Samuel: I can see why open world seemed like the right route for both of those BioWare games. Dragon Age got to show you what felt like its whole world for the first time rather than just snapshots (and it's incredibly impressive to look at), and Mass Effect hadn't really done big explorable planets since the original game. But it's hard to dispute that one reason Mass Effects 2 and 3 were so great is that the busywork was kept to an absolute minimum. Pretty much all of the sidequest content was story-driven. Everyone remembers their favourite loyalty quest(s) from Mass Effect 2.  

That's one solution, then—linear games are totally okay by us, even if some publishers have seemingly convinced themselves otherwise. And open world games can be long, but that scale shouldn't ever get in the player's way. The more of these games that exist in the market, though, the less attention we can conceivably pay to each one—and the less likely we are to try and do everything. Sidequest design is more important now than ever. 

Tom: Statistically, looking at achievements, you can see that not many people ever finish games. Games seem more determined to tire us out than to leave us wanting more. Every hour you're spending in a game is an hour you're not spending with one of the game's competitors, and the games-as-service trend allows games to become platforms for microtransactions that can generate long-term revenue. 

Basically, there are incentives for big-budget games to be massive, but luckily smaller developers are able to create small games that don’t need to meet those big business aims. I wonder if there’s a space halfway for games with big beautiful worlds, minus the giant to-do lists. LA Noire and Shadow of the Colossus spring to mind, focused games that use its open world to create a mood rather than burden us with fetch quests and endless resource collection exercises. I think games are gradually getting better at this, though. The Witcher 3 showed that sidequests can be rich, self-contained short stories that don’t feel like filler. I hope to see more of that sort of thing as open worlds continue to get bigger with each passing year.