The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - On This Day

The motto of the company CD Projekt from the start was: make a game that people want to buy, and you will not have problems with piracy of that game. Now, it's hard to do something good when your game is funded by a publisher who doesn't believe in that motto. That is why the Poles for the development of the game The Witcher 3, reached for private investment and decided to distribute it themselves. It paid off for them at least tenfold because they made not only a game that people wanted to buy but also a game that people simply, adored.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was launched on this day seven years ago for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. It was a game that concluded the trilogy about Witcher Geralt, but a good part of the players with Wild Hunt only met the world of Witcher for the first time. The game had become notable months earlier for its visual presentation that looked too good to be true, and interest in the game was supported by the fact that one of the most popular TV series at the time was Game of Thrones.

As there was no GOT game at the time, Witcher was closest to that medieval fantasy model. And it’s probably no coincidence that actor Charles Dance was hired for one of the roles in the play, after being among the prominent actors in GOT.

The release of The Witcher 3 was delayed twice, and the audience was impatient. When the game was launched, we didn’t get the graphics we saw in the initial displays, but it was still one of the most visually beautiful games to date. The controversy surrounding downgrade graphics quickly subsided, and the game was so good that many overlooked the problematic performance on consoles.

In terms of content, The Witcher 3 delivered all its ambition, which at the time was one step ahead of everything else in the RPG genre. Witcher combined the freedom of the open-world with an incredible amount of narrative, showing Bethesda the meaning behind the saying, “It just works”.

The Witcher 3 was a huge adventure with a story that spanned over 30 hours, and the supporting content was quantitatively impressive. It can often be heard that this was a game in which there were no delivery tasks but each quest had its plot, even if it was a rescue pan for grandma from the beginning of the game. All the characters acted in their way and the acting was filmed for them for a full three years. In total, the game had close to a thousand characters to talk to, and the complete script with dialogues had over 450,000 pages. We are talking about such a huge game.

While The Witcher 2 only partially hinted at the open world, the third part broadened horizons and boundaries. The maps in the game were still divided into several separate regions, but just as with other segments of the game - those regions were so interesting to explore that no one paid attention to being fragmented.

The story itself was layered and tense. Geralt's search for protégé Cyril was intertwined with the socio-political problems of his environment, which culminated after the events of the previous two games. And the characters managed to enchant those players who saw them for the first time. In short, The Witcher 3 was a very well-written and acted game, again level more than other games in its genre.

Central gameplay was similar to previous Witcher games, but with additional mini-games that made it more diverse. There was everything, especially in the later expansions, but the most prominent was the card mini-game Gwent, which eventually grew into a separate free-to-play game.

The Witcher 3 had several bugs after its release (especially with the Roach horse), as well as a problematic performance on consoles (the swampy part of the game could be pulled in about 20 frames per second). Over time, most of these problems were rectified by the fall of the same year when the first Hearts of Stone expansion followed. It brought us a fascinating treatment of Faust and one of the most interesting villains Geralt has ever encountered. The second and last expansion was called Blood and Wine, and it took us to the beautiful Toussaint region and formally concluded Geralt's story.

The Witcher 3 picked up numerous awards in 2015. The Witcher 3 was also reputed to be the game with the most Game of the Year awards.

In the first two weeks, the game was played by more than four million players, and by mid-2019, the game had flared up to 20 million copies sold. A new wave of interest in Witcher came in late 2019 when the first season of the eponymous series aired on Netflix. From the time Henry Cavill embodied Witcher until the month of 2022, an additional 10 million copies of this game have been sold, or more than 30 million in total.