Announced during an otherwise dull financial results conference streamed on Twitch, CD Projekt Red announced a minor surprise today. Their long-awaited Gwent singleplayer campaign has grown into a separate and self-contained game all of its own. Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales is its new, Gwent-free name, and while obviously related to the free-to-play card game, the company are calling it a lengthy RPG in its own right. As such, it will be sold as a standalone retail game.

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If you’ve played through The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3, you’ve spent hundreds of hours with the character of Geralt of Rivia. But have you ever taken the time to go back to the beginning? I… absolutely have not. But I played enough Witcher over the years to have encountered people and quests from the first title that I had to fill in via Wiki work later. So I can see the value in going back to figure out where they all came from.

Today (and possibly tomorrow, there’s no end point listed), you can get the first game in the series for free from GOG, along with a card keg for Gwent — which contains five free cards. The process should only take one minute of your time and we have the details below.

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As rumoured and expected, Geralt of Rivia will indeed cross over into Soul Calibur VI. Everyone’s seemingly known for ages that the monster-hunting hero The Witcher would appear in the upcoming fighting game sequel, but now it’s official. One of my main interests in life is hearing Geralt talk in a weary voice so you betcha I’m up for throwing him through a portal into a new fightworld. He doesn’t sound best pleased with the situation in this new trailer. Good. (more…)

CD Projekt Red don’t have to do much to capture the internet’s attention. Remember when they beeped? That was a good day.

Today is also a good day. No beeps or boops or any other sound effects have emerged from the witchy cyberpunkers, but a new chronicle of Geralt’s adventures has appeared on the official Witcher twitter feed.

“Kaer Morhen s old stones have witnessed many battles… Once more they’ll feel the sting of sparks as blades collide… Check back tomorrow.”

What could it mean? Well, it probably refers to an official Soul Calibur reveal. It almost definitely does.

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We’ve already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin’ and a-shakin’ in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully community-voted affair which names the most-loved games across categories including best post-launch support, most player agency, exceeding pre-release expectations and most head-messing-with. Vintage cartoon-themed reflex-tester Cuphead leads the charge with two gongs, but ol’ Plunkbat and The Witcher series also do rather well – as do a host of other games from 2017’s great and good.

Full winners and runners-up below, with links to our previous coverage of each game if you’re so-minded. Plus: I reveal which game I’d have gone for in each category. (more…)

A new mod for The Witcher 3 recreates the first game’s prologue chapter, sending us back with all the bells and whistles of the modern day. As the RPG series kept revisiting characters across games and across the years, my memories of the first game kept updating with the latest game’s looks. Watching the mod’s trailer contrasting the original and remake, oh wow, nope, it has changed a lot. If you want to stoke wild dreams of a full remake (don’t get your hopes up, pal) or simply revisit that fateful day, you can now download the mod. Here, watch this: (more…)

Somehow, our lad Geralt’s video game adventures have turned ten years old this week. That’s ten years of slaying monsters as the silver fox with cat-eyes. Ten years of werewolves, dragons, unicorns, romances and politics, usually all at the same time. Ten years of articles debating how much sex in a video game constitutes too much.>

To celebrate the series’ tenth anniversary, you can pick up all the games in the franchise (as well as the various bits of DLC) with some hefty discounts this week. These offers are available at GOG if you like your games DRM-free, Humble if you’d like to kick a few pennies towards charity while you buy or Steam, if you like to keep things as simple as possible.

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Here s some interesting trivia for fans of emotionally stunted pest-control men. Footage of a long-cancelled Witcher game has surfaced thanks to some of the Polish developers who worked on the would-be adventure RPG back in the late 90s. This was before CD Projekt Red started work on their own version of The Witcher, and shows the white-haired swordsman we’d come to recognise as Geralt waddling around in dungeons at the mercy of ‘tank controls’ and taking swings at a burly man in a bar. It looks a bit like Resident Evil, except here the annoying camera angles fly sickeningly across the room. (more…)

Few witchers live to have a happy ending but shucks, our lad Geralt has done well for himself. With the tenth birthday of The Witcher games nearing (end of October), a new video from developers CD Projekt Red shows him having a big old knees-up with his mates and loved ones. He is my favourite of all tired old digital men and has been through a lot over a decade and three games. I didn’t realise quite how much I cared for this motley crew until I started tearing up seeing them reunited. Bless ’em. (more…)

The Witcher franchise is now getting an adult colouring book. It’s adult in two senses – one is the sense of colouring books aimed at adults as a relaxation method being a rising trend in the last few years and the other is the sense where you get a picture of Geralt in the nuddy in that tub to colour in. His witcher junk is hidden beneath the water but it’s not really the sort of fare you find in the Dr Seuss Colouring Book or the My Very Own Hungry Caterpillar Colouring Book. (more…)