Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales Pre-orders Open, Gameplay Footage

Thronebreaker, the single-player campaign for CD Projekt’s standalone CCG Gwent that is now itself a standalone card-based RPG, is now open for pre-orders on GOG where you can grab it for $29.99 or your regional equivalent ahead of the game’s October 23, 2018 release. And while you’re at it, you may want to visit the game’s official website or watch the new story teaser:

And if you prefer something with more meat in it, so to speak, you can watch this IGN video with roughly 30 minutes of developer-narrated Thronebreaker gameplay:

And then, you can check out this preview article, courtesy of PC Gamer. A snippet:

Even in the first two hours I ran into a few sidequest puzzles that stumped me for a few tries. They get complex and hard fast, and are easily the part of Thronebreaker I’m most excited about. I expected to play a card battle RPG, but I didn’t think I’d get a puzzle game in the bargain.

The card combat is inventive. The puzzles are even better. Meve’s story isn’t exactly thrilling right away, but Thronebreaker is heavy on tutorials for the first hour, and it seemed like I was just beginning to see the real story–trouble brewing with Nilfgaard–when I wrapped up my demo. This is a remarkably strange follow-up to the biggest RPG of the decade, and if you hate Gwent you’re still probably not going to like Thronebreaker. But I have to admire CD Projekt for looking at what was once a minigame and saying “Yeah, we can turn that into a 40 hour RPG.”