The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt January 2015 Gameplay Video, Q&A Summary

After showing some new The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt footage during their livestream yesterday, the folks at CD Projekt RED have published it on YouTube. It’s devoid of commentary, but the quality is clearly higher and it makes for an overall smoother view, considering no developer is pausing during the video:

I have also taken the liberty of summarizing the more interesting info tidbits from yesterday’s livestream, for those of our readers who happen to have no time to watch:

– Crafting requires a blueprint, ingredients and a craftsman NPC skilled enough to produce the object. Some of the most skilled craftsmen will need to be unlocked via quests.

– Geralt and Ciri share the same father-daughter bond as in the books. Finding his adopted daughter is one of Geralt’s objectives during the game.

– Alchemy has been overhauled again. The basics are similar to those of the other two titles: Geralt needs a recipe and the correct ingredients to craft a potion. However, while in previous games a potion had only one use and ingredients were plentiful, potions in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will have more than one use – “three or four” according to CD Projekt RED’s Damien Monnier – and ingredients will be much rarer and require considerable effort to find. CD Projekt RED balanced the ingredients’ rarity by giving the players the ability to replenish a potion they previously crafted with alcohol while meditating.

– The extremely intensive “Ubersampling” option from The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is making a return, together with some other PC-only enhancements like NVIDIA HairWorks.

– Save imports will be handled in a manner similar to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II’s. During the course of the game, Geralt will encounter a character that will recount his past exploits and will be able to correct him/her to set up the proper variables for the game.

– Currently the game is in the polish/bugfixing phase.

– During Ciri’s playable segments the controls will feel familiar, but she has different abilities. It sounds like she might have a different dodge ability (perhaps teleportation magic?) but the developers didn’t want to spoil exactly what it was.

– The game will feature quite a few minigames. The developers cited horse riding races, a card game named Gwent, and fistfighting. Much to my chagrin, they made no mention of dice poker.