CD Projekt RED - Evolution of Gwent

CD Projekt RED has opened up about Gwent's evolution into something more like an adventure, with at least ten hours of campaign playtime.

Gwent wasn’t even part of the plan. Originally created by a pair of designers at CD Projekt Red in their spare time, Gwent eventually found its way into The Witcher 3 and became a small phenomenon: the mini-game that was so good, it just had to find life beyond The Witcher 3. A few months after The Witcher 3 was released, CD Projekt was still being flooded with emails about the card game. Lead designer Damien Monnier, one of Gwent’s co-creators, took those emails to the leadership. They asked if it was possible to make a standalone game. A multiplayer game. Of course he said yes.

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“There’s set choices and consequences, cards that you can receive from them, and that's the whole point,” Monnier said. “You start with a base deck and as you progress through the campaign, it gets bigger and bigger.

“I mean there’s loads of stuff that’s happening. You have these cool comic-like panels that appear where you [make a choice], as you choose you get to see a preview of what could happen....It’s just a little thing, but [our focus on quality] reflects in these little things when someone says, ‘wouldn't it be cool if?’ And we say, ‘well actually yeah, you’re right, it would be. How long would it take to do it?’ There’s a lot of people working extra time because they want to. We work super hard. I’ve been making games for over a decade now, and I’ve never been surrounded by such hard-working, crazy people.”

CD Projekt isn’t talking about how many of those campaigns it will make for Gwent or how much they’ll cost, but they’re the part I’m truly excited about. 10 hours gives a campaign enough meat to offer a sense of progression—starting with weaker cards, collecting heroes and rares along the way to bolster your deck—that I found addicting in The Witcher 3. And I expect battles against the AI to benefit from the complete rework Gwent has seen to be a viable multiplayer game, which is free to play in the vein of Hearthstone.