Gwent: The Witcher Card Game [Preview]

I don’t think anyone was surprised when CD Projekt RED announced a new, standalone Gwent game at Microsoft’s E3 media briefing. What did come as a big surprise, is that this standalone Gwent game wasn’t just a straight port of the popular pub game from The Witcher 3.

The game of Gwent featured in The Witcher 3 was a fun, functional, but purely utilitarian diversion. Design-wise it was simply a static screen of a wooden table with minor animations for things like fog or card movement. The new standalone version has been completely rebuilt from the ground up with a new visual style, new card designs, and new animations on all of the cards.

At it’s core it’s still the same game played in The Witcher 3, but it has a gorgeous new coat of paint around it that’s nice to see.

CD Projekt RED said it didn’t want the matches to feel like friendly card games as they did in the original incarnation, and instead want the games to evoke a feeling of combat between two armies, and key to that was making the animations have a lot more impact and adding more unique dialogue to the games leader cards and the like.

The most interesting thing about the new version of Gwent is that it has it’s own full story mode, as opposed to being a fun little diversion. Each of the game’s factions (Skellige, Northern Kingdoms, Scoia’tael, and Monsters) will have its own 10+ hour campaign, be fully voiced, and have branching storylines based on player choice.

We didn’t get to see a lot of the single-player component in our brief demo, but what was shown had a player character traversing a top-down, 2.5D environment looking for clues to unfold the game’s story, finding cards in chests, and encountering enemy factions and then entering Gwent-based combat.

Outside of the story mode, the combat in both the single and multiplayer components seem identical, with the only difference being who is on the other side of the battle.

I can’t stress enough that at the end of the day, this game is still Gwent. Sure, there are some balance and card tweaks, but the rules and gameplay are identical, so if you expected something brand new then you’re sure to leave disappointed. However if you enjoyed Gwent in The Witcher 3 and want more of that with a story wrapped around it, this new incarnation seems to have you covered.