CD Projekt Red recently held the first live-stream of Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, the studio’s upcoming Gwent RPG. It was the first time fans were able to see the developers discussing the game and showing off its features. In the process, the studio gave fans a sense of the true size of Thronebreaker; the game is much bigger than most expected.
The Size and Scale of Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales
According to CD Projekt Red, Thronebreaker contains over thirty hours of story content, with meaningful decision-making. However, until now, fans weren’t sure exactly how the studio would deliver that story in-game; whether Thronebreaker would be an essentially linear experience or something else. As it turns out, the game is surprisingly open, allowing the player to roam around five huge different maps filled with side-quests, story missions, and resources to collect. The live-stream showed players the start of the game’s story and some of its first map, set in the realm of Lyria. As a nod to previous Witcher games, notice-boards appear in the various settlements of Thronebreaker, although they serve a slightly different purpose.
To give players a sense of how much dialogue there is in Thronebreaker, the developers revealed that more voice lines were recorded for Thronebreaker than were recorded for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s Hearts of Stone DLC! Moreover, the game will feature localisations to translate those voice lines into no fewer than twelve different languages.
In terms of difficulty, Thronebreaker will feature three difficulty modes; Story, Normal, and Hard. The game’s Story mode makes the Gwent matches much more forgiving. In fact, players will be able to skip matches which they lose while playing on Story mode. Of course, there will still be plenty of decisions to make outside of the game’s matches. So many, in fact, that Thronebreaker features twenty different endings! The game is set roughly between The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. At present, it’s unknown whether the story will overlap at all with the stories of those games, or whether it will be considered canonical for The Witcher series as a whole. The game’s director has noted that The Witcher Tales could become a series.