Everything Kotaku Learned About The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Kotaku has recently published a bullet point list of info they learned about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt talking directly to CD Projekt RED’s managing director Adam Badowski and lead gameplay designer Maciej Szczesnik. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, so here’s a snip to give you an idea:

‘¢ Dandelion will return in The Witcher 3, and he’ll take on a similar duty to his role in The Witcher 2 narrating recaps of the story as you go. However, the format will be a bit different. There will still be a journal, but there’ll also be a sort of “previously on The Witcher 3” animated story that plays at various points, or when you’re coming back into the game after stopping. They’re calling this feature “Storybook.”

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‘¢ They’ve built an animation system that has far more unique combat animations, which are somewhat randomly selected and chained together depending on where Geralt is swinging and what direction he’s moving.
‘¢ Every button press gets you a single move in combat, meaning that you’ll be able to break up your attacks much more easily than in The Witcher 2.
‘¢ The dodge is no longer a roll now, Geralt will pirouette to dodge enemies. No more roley-poley combat.
‘¢ Parrying will now be active, and you can hold down a parry button and move, sort of like in Assassin’s Creed.

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‘¢ Signs will still be selected from a radial menu, but will also have shortcuts, and the shoulder buttons will let you toggle between them.
‘¢ There will be 10 Witcher’s Signs instead of five, as there will be a second casting mode for each sign, which you can buy by leveling up.
‘¢ You’ll also have combat “skills” that you can use, up to 4 active in combat.
‘¢ There won’t be any arm-wrestling in the new game. Aw! But also. okay, that’s fine actually.
‘¢ In addition to cutting QTEs, hand-to-hand combat will work completely differently. It’ll be part of the main combat system, and will have moves that work and flow similarly to swordfighting.