Early noughties Cartoon Network classic Samurai Jack received a long-awaited fifth season last year, some 12 years after its fourth finished airing. To put it simply, Samurai Jack is about a man with a sword fighting for what he thinks is right, and in that sense it's quite similar to The Witcher. At least, that's the only explanation I can think of for why Mashed felt the need to combine the two in an animated short, but after seeing their "Samurai Witcher" cartoon, I'm certainly not complaining. Have a gander:
It's a bit slow, but it nails the styles of its source material. It's sharply drawn and dramatically framed like Samurai Jack, and it's methodical and punishing like combat in The Witcher. It's oddly cathartic to watch all the preparation that goes into a good monster hunt, from gathering herbs and other consumables to tailoring your arsenal for the monster at hand.
And, as always, it's satisfying to see a griffin go down.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Astrid Johnson)
Welcome to Soundbyte, an audio mini-series that stimulates your ears and explores topics in the games industry. In our first episode, Pixel Picketers, we’re talking about unionisation in the games industry, what some folks are doing to make it happen, and the challenges they face. Let’s start by speaking to Doug Cockle, who plays Geralt in The Witcher among other roles, about his negative experiences in the recording booth. It turns out you can’t speak like a rough mercenary for hours on end without your voicebox shriveling up. Who knew?
Grand Theft Auto V Legacy - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)
Hallo! Me again, filling in (slightly late) while John is handcuffed to a steering wheel for other duties. The Steam Charts were all shook up (mm mm mmh!) last week by the launch of Steam’s summer sale, including propelling a lump of hardware into the top ten for the first time in ages. A number of older games have rocketed back too, boosted by sale discounts, and displaced several games from their near-permanent spots in the hit parade. Let’s stroll down it and see.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Fraser Brown)
A Witcher 3 Easter Egg that players believe references the world of Cyberpunk 2077 has, several years later, started to become a bit of a headache for the latter s game director, Adam Badowski. It turns out that a lot of people are hoping to bump into Ciri as they explore the futuristic streets of Night City, but Badowski is putting his foot down.
Summer landscapes can be taken for granted as bright and breezy backdrops to games. However, what spring started, summer finishes. Following on from the rebirth of spring, summer further fuels and invigorates the landscape. Lands become majestically colourful, gorgeously lush and bursting at the seams with life as the peak of the growing season and life cycle are hit. Bright sunlight basks the land in glorious light and stretches the days, while vivid foliage spreads as far as the eye can see, punctuated by glorious flowering plants, laying a carpet of life over the land. These are the hazy days of summer, indeed. Life breeds life and swathes of landscape are transformed, covered in lush foliage and colour, while the land becomes more productive, increasing interaction and function.
Summer has its own meaning, and this can be injected into games through the landscapes they have and portray - and all of their elements they contain. Smash this wonderful, bright season together with narrative and story arcs and there is a new side to summer environments to be enjoyed and experienced.
The success and majesty of The Witcher 3's landscapes are further elevated when examined through a seasonal lens as it can reveal even more environmental nuances and specific landscape features. The configuration of summer landscapes through fidelity, function and beauty underlines the environment's importance in contributing to The Witcher 3's place-making, story and atmosphere (particularly in Velen and Toussaint), but also demonstrate the sheer importance and power summer has over the landscape, guiding its life and character. Avoiding fawning over each individually hand-placed, wholly-accurate plant (this time) as examples of The Witcher 3's summer landscape, it is the active and productive horticultural landscapes that show summer's power.
A number of worthy visual overhaul mods already exist for The Witcher 3, but I reckon this is the most impressive one yet. Here's some moving pictures:
And here are some stills:
"The Witcher 3 Enhanced is designed to offer you the most immersive and real Witcher experience," says creator Noelgal on the mod's Nexus Mods page. "It works with all lighting mods and with Vanilla lighting. It enhances the shadows, the lighting, the colors and the contrasts."
More information, including installation instructions, lives here. And while we're talking visual overhaul mods, I'm also fond of Boostin4kix' Alternative Heavy Clouds. Follow that link for more info, and have a gander at these screens:
The Dying Light 2 announcement at Microsoft's E3 press event was made significantly cooler by the surprising news that cold fusion-powered RPG writing machine Chris Avellone is working on it. As we said in our report, Avellone's participation "signals a significant evolution for the series" by giving it a much greater focus on narrative and outcomes.
But Avellone isn't the only talent working on the game. "We also got some additional help in the form of the former The Witcher 3 writing team," Techland told VG247. "Those guys were responsible for some of the best quests from that game including the Bloody Baron quest line. All of those guys are working very hard to create a narrative—it’s like a puzzle to play with."
"Those guys" may not have quite the big-name cachet of Avellone, but their talents are readily apparent. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of the best RPGs ever made, and the Bloody Baron is the best of it—a character so good that we actually wrote about him specifically, describing him as a "complex, conflicted character" at the center of Family Matters, "The Witcher 3's most emotional and disturbing quest."
"We needed a character that personified Velen, with all of its beauty and troubles," quest designer Paweł Sasko said at the time. "The Baron is a soldier, much like we have today, who comes back from war with PTSD and alcohol issues. He’s unstable and unpleasant, but he also has positive traits. He loves his family and would do anything for them."
Not much is known about Dying Light 2 at this point except that it's set during "the Modern Dark Ages," 15 years after the zombie outbreak first began. But the core gameplay seen in the E3 trailer will be familiar—parkour, zombies, and "don't go out at night"—and Avellone said during the E3 presentation that the decisions players make will have a major impact on the game world. A release target hasn't been set.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)
Oh sure now CD Projekt Red are blabbing about Cyberpunk 2077 all over, blasting that rad trailer and showing a behind-closed-doors demo full of drugs, guns, and bums, but for a long time we clung to scraps. One of the more interesting was a story in The Witcher 3 from our magical daughter figure Ciri, which sounded like a nod to Cyberpunk. On her journey across time and space, Ciri told Geralt, she visited a city with “houses of glass”, people “with metal in their heads”, horses replaced with flying ships, and such. Geralt was not convinced. Don’t remember? Here, “Tolkfan” on YouTube has cut Ciri’s story in with Cyberpunk trailerbits and it’s all quite nice. (more…)
GOG launched its Summer Gaming Sale earlier this month, which is live now through Monday, June 18. Within, you'll find over a thousand games going cheap—with savings of up to 90 percent.
The PC Gamer Collection is part of the sale too, and gathers 37 games spanning three decades. Expect everything from The Witcher 3 to Dead Cells and Prison Architect in an assortment that suits fans of all genres.
Fancy winning one of those? Simply follow the instructions in the widget below for your chance to win one of 500 games from GOG's Summer Sale.
Good luck from us and the chap at the foot of the page.
Nexus modder Votislav has done the impossible: make Geralt better looking. Votislav's newly released Finger Lickin' Geraldo mod, which you can download here, changes the already fetching Witcher's stubble, complexion and eyes to make him appear sharper and younger but just as grizzled and dangerous. Gaze upon him:
The mod sports a white beard and brows, yellower eyes, scars left by a Striga (a woman transformed into a monster by a curse, if you're wondering), and most importantly, "quite possibly the best stubble in the world." It also includes a variant without the scar and with eyebrows and skin more in line with vanilla Geralt.
With that out of the way, there's something else I simply must share with you. Tucked away in the image gallery for Finger Lickin' Geraldo is perhaps the most incredible Witcher image since that other image we sometimes use. Votislav titled it "the stuff of dreams," and I have a hard time arguing with that. I present to you, Big Geralt:
Incidentally, there's something else you need to see, if only because I had to see it and I'll be damned if I'm going to suffer alone. It's Geralt's texture file, the stuff of nightmares:
