Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

It's while playing games like Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales , which blithely exceed my expectations in many areas, that I remember why I chose to work in the video game world. We are indeed far from the simple single player campaign grafted in a hurry to a multiplayer card game. CD Projekt RED delivers a grandiose, complex and moving story, all carried by memorable characters, excellent dubbing and above all parts as varied as they are exciting.

The writing is the thing that blew my mind the most. The story takes place just before The Witcher game trilogy, during the Second Nilfgaard War, and puts you in the boots of Meve, the intrepid, dynamic and complex ruler of Lyrie and Rivie. Throughout her adventure, the heroine is confronted with a powerful enemy, political stakes and countless uncomfortable decisions that defy morale and which have made The Witcher saga famous. Are you ready to sacrifice your honor for the sake of your neighbor? Are you prepared to make sacrifices for the good of your soldiers, but at the expense of a potentially useful alliance? This tale makes no distinction between good and evil. In the end, I only retain from my adventure difficult compromises, emotional and imperfect, which stuck to my skin for several hours after having made them.

Throughout my epic, I was accompanied by several aides-de-camp, with personalities as diverse as they are fascinating. Characters that, in my opinion, equal - if not eclipse - the best companions encountered in traditional RPGs. From the irreverent Gascon bandit, to the pacifist and fanatic witch Isbel, they all make an impression with their unique reactions to the decisions you make. Depending on your choices, they may open up to you, or on the contrary want to stand apart. I did not manage to keep everyone happy, which adds credibility to my decisions and my behavior during the adventure.

And it's not just about losing a drinking partner. Some of the most powerful hero cards can only be obtained if certain companions are by your side. In addition, several of these companions can offer special solutions to certain events in the game, or on the contrary put you in front of certain dilemmas which can end in bloodshed. The Eyck monster hunter, for example, is very useful for clearing a cave, full of treasures, of its evil creatures, without having to sacrifice the lives of its soldiers.

Many other maps and branches can be unlocked by using diplomacy or by forming alliances with one of the many factions encountered, thanks to the connections of your companions. I particularly appreciated the very intuitive functioning of this system, and the way in which it rewarded me - or punished - according to the values that I had chosen to defend. Even though I only played the campaign once, each quest seems to have a lot of different outcomes.

Help me !

The quests and accompanying dialogues are on their side as well written as in The Witcher 3 . More than once, I have experienced deep emotional satisfaction, before being overwhelmed the next moment by intense sadness. And the card games that punctuate all these moments are really fun. There is no question here of playing hundreds of standard Gwent games. Each encounter revolves around particularly satisfying twists and turns to overcome. For example, some commanders can resurrect any card you destroy. The only way to win is to reduce their hit points with non-lethal attacks until the end of the game.

Some scripted fights also sometimes require the destruction of heavily armed gatehouses in order to attack the unit behind. The high level of customization of the decks - especially after obtaining the ability to recruit special cards such as dwarves or Skellige mercenaries - also allows you to spice up the games a little if you are bored, or on the contrary to tackle some clashes far too thorny with more serenity.

I regret the absence of a function to save and load decks associated with certain game situations. This defect is particularly problematic during certain scripted confrontations whose rules favor or hinder a certain type of card I remember in particular a lieutenant who could increase the power of his soldiers based on my strongest unit. One situation that encouraged me - or forced me, it depends - to use weaker cards. The only way to prepare for these kinds of games is to rearrange your deck by hand, one card at a time. And after you have won, you must reset it to start again on a more "standard" deck. In my opinion, this system discourages experimentation. The idea of spending several minutes creating a unique deck, before having to reset it completely because it ultimately does not suit me, did not delight me.

The soul of cards

Otherwise, I found the various puzzle parts dotted around the beautiful hand painted Thronebreaker map very interesting. These require certain unorthodox conditions such as using a specific set of cards for a limited number of turns. Others ask you to place a card in a specific location on the game board using movement abilities, or to increase a card's power to a certain level. Sometimes it took me over an hour to find a solution to some problems. Some goals were a bit frustrating, but that was nothing compared to the great satisfaction felt when finding a solution. And since all of these tasks use pre-made decks, the lack of a save feature was less of a problem.

The five maps (six including the short epilogue) of the game are also not lacking in character and style, thanks to their magnificent landscapes which scroll in the background and which give the impression of playing a title much more ambitious than 'a simple 2D isometric RPG. In particular, I enjoyed being able to glimpse the snow-capped peaks of the dwarf kingdom of Mahakam, a region unlike any that Geralt visited during his adventures. The visually vivid environments brilliantly capture the essence of the famous Witcher's world, from the smallest mud puddle to huge monsters stalking their prey. Thronebreaker has nothing to envy to the 3D world of The Witcher games. To end it all, the game revolves around an interface that is both intuitive, responsive and pretty, which can be handled as well with the joystick as with the keyboard / mouse.

We can answer the second doubt immediately with a sigh of relief: if you do not chew the dynamics of Gwent with particular ease and above all want to enjoy another story in the world of Geralt, Thronebreaker will not get in the way too much. There are three levels of difficulty and if you already have experts we advise you to aim for the most difficult immediately, otherwise you risk watering down your experience with a lot of trivial skirmishes. If you do happen to get caught up in a clash that you think is impossible, you can always solve it automatically, saving horrible wounds to your troops and limiting them to your ego.

The first curiosity instead requires a more articulated answer: Thronebreaker is undoubtedly an interesting spin-off, but requires a little of your trust and your time to be appreciated in the right way. Above all, it requires passing the first hour and a half of the game, which basically acts as a long tutorial. The story is based on the deeds of Princess Meve, proud queen of Lyria and Rivia, who, like many other rulers of her period, has to face the incredible military capacity of the Nilfgaard army. A long, complex and fluctuating story that unfortunately every now and then loses its compass and offers long digressions that we would have gladly done without, almost as if we wanted to lengthen the broth of a TV series on Netflix that must at all costs reach twelve episodes. It's a shame, because when everything goes smoothly, epic sensations are felt like the smell of Nekker in a marsh.

From a strictly narrative point of view, Thronebreaker represents something different than The Witcher: Meve is not a character completely in the player's hands, he offers less freedom than Geralt. He is a character with his own moral code, positioned in a context of a different class than the monster hunter, however we will be able to decide whether to impersonate an icy ruler willing to hang anyone who contravenes his laws or a queen of the people willing to forgive, at least every now and then . However, do not get too used to court jangles, because soon you will find yourself in the mud and horror of a story that when it wants to speak directly to our hearts and puts us in front of those swampy areas of consciousness that the Polish developer likes so much . Meve's journey is made much more interesting by the court of characters who over time find themselves at his side, often angular personalities, who clash with each other in a series of dialogues capable of sparking sparks of humor and cynicism, giving advice often diametrically opposed to the queen, underlining the difficulty of making a choice that is actually "right".

Continuing the tradition of The Witcher, some decisions will have some weight as the story continues, unlocking new travel companions (and related cards) or transforming choices that seemed magnanimous into bad decisions. However, it is fair to point out that in most cases they will simply make us choose between a fight or peace. And since each victory will bring us money with which to forge new cards and expand the camp it is quite clear which is the most sensible way. Also because playing a game of Gwent is undoubtedly more interesting than exploring by clicking around the map.

If the 25 hours of history have their ups and downs, where Thronebreaker excels is undoubtedly in the technical sector, both from a visual and sound point of view. The game environments are made with painstaking care that overflows with details and the same goes for the illustrations of the cards and the dialogue sequences. The various maps of the game come out of the screen with their bright colors, positioning themselves halfway between the richness of an ancient tapestry and the stylization of a game board. Since Meve's adventures can ultimately be described as a kind of personal board game, the choice is undoubtedly appropriate. And if the eye is satisfied, the ear is forced to say enough in the fourth encore because the excellent Italian dubbing, the music and the sound effects are able to help the static images that describe the most important events and help our fantasy.

But what happens when the talk ends and the swords have to be drawn? A lot of interesting things. CD Projekt developers know that card games do their best with a human opponent and that a computer, no matter how good, cannot offer the same clash. He doesn't bluff, he doesn't think outside the box and on long distance he succumbs, even in a game based on the cards you have in his hand. Moreover, the Gwent is different from its competitors, it is based much less on the attack and more on the accumulation, on the movement of the cards between the two rows, it is less "aggressive" and often the computer simply cannot counter a good accumulation of cards. For this reason it is essential to immediately seek the maximum confrontation if you are expert players, otherwise there is the risk of getting bored (and in any case nothing can replace a human opponent).

To overcome the risk of boring the player too much, most of the fights are puzzles or otherwise subject to particular modifiers that make everything much more peppery. In many cases we will have to resolve the clash in one turn, trying to find the correct mechanism with which to put the right armies on the table at the right time, instead of simply throwing everything we have against the opponent.

Those who are already accustomed to the original game will find that in Thronebreaker things are a bit different: there are only two lines, you need to know how to use the skill of the commander, there are only gold and common cards and above all some of them are equipped with a one-off ability that can be used at any time of our turn and that can be "reloaded" by deploying particular units. For example, the card of an armored tank can deal a lot of damage when the units deployed after it on the same line, but it can only do it once. To be able to use it several times, we must therefore use a card that recharges that ability and try to move others between the two lines to increase the damage. This is just a small example of the joints that must be known (and that are widely explained) in Gwent and, believe us, it is not even one of the most complex.

Perhaps the most skilled players at the beginning will bite the brake, because even if the deck is widely modifiable the resources to do it are limited and it will be essential to choose carefully, but the good balance of the game offers a rewarding experience both for those looking for customization total, and to those who just add some cards every now and then. But be careful, dear Gwent novices, at the end of your adventure with Meve it is very likely that you will want to taste some of the real competition (and this is probably the real purpose of Thronebreaker).

MODUS OPERANDI
I played Thronebreaker in PC version on a Legion Y720 with Nvidia Ge Force GTX 1070 and Intel i7 for about twenty hours, thanks to a code received from CD Projekt Red. I have completed the main quest and some of the side quests and puzzles.

One could accuse CD Projekt Red of Thronebreaker for a little calculation. The game was originally called Gwent: Thronebreaker, precisely because it's the single player part of Gwent - but of course a new card game is by no means as effective as a new Witcher RPG! Because of that, Gwent was kicked out of the title, and the thing now appears as a Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales. With the new name comes a new ambition and a new benchmark: the game not only has to prove itself as a card game, but also as a role-playing game.

The Witcher (almost) without Witcher

First off: Witcher RPG is not the same as Geralt. The witcher has a guest appearance, but Thronebreaker plays parallel to his book adventures and tells the story of Queen Meve . We lead the indomitable monarch into the fateful second war against the invading Nilfgaard. To do this, we march over five huge ISO world maps, hold dialogues and collect resources for our army - that is to say, for our Gwent deck.

We then carry out the battles as card games. Which works better than you might think! Gwent has always been meant to depict duels between two armies, and with the new gritty look of the Homecoming update, it'll be fairer than ever. Together with the excellent map images, Thronebreaker evokes a real general flair.

Gwent in top form

This is mainly because the game really gets everything out of Gwent. Almost every battle in the thirty-hour campaign has its own unusual twist. Sometimes we hunt a manticore that is composed of six individual cards for body parts such as claws and spiky tail - each with their own skills! Sometimes we besiege a city and should ideally crack the gate first to take away the armor advantage of the enemy cards. And sometimes ... yes, sometimes we even play Hearthstone . On a gwent board. Seriously! "The dwarves probably play by different rules than we do in the lowlands."

And thats just the beginning! Because a large part of the quests does not consist of normal Gwent games, but presents us with puzzles . Here we have to solve particularly tricky situations with given cards. There's even a stealth mission! In that, dwarf guards patrol the four rows of Gwentfeld and we have to scurry from top left to bottom right without getting too close.

Of frustration and triumph

Thronebreaker conjures up wonderfully creative games on the gaming table, but the balance is not always right. Most of the puzzles are pleasantly tricky puzzles, but a few span the arc into the frustrating and degenerate into trial & error - which is doubly annoying, since we usually have to do everything from the beginning after one wrong step.

On the other hand, the normal battles almost never really challenged us. We played the first two maps on medium difficulty and then switched to the highest for the remaining three, but still won many battles with an overwhelming 200 to 0 points . Only a climactic confrontation got us to the point where we had to go back to the checkpoint and build a new deck.

Trump card queen of hearts

Nevertheless, we never lost motivation, because Thronebreaker doesn't only live from its game mechanics. Because there are several authors of The Witcher 3 on board, it also tells a first-class story! Less impressively staged, of course, we're talking about a card game for 25 euros. We experience many quests simply through illustrated text windows. Thronebreaker only accompanies key moments with sparsely animated talking characters or neat but short cartoon videos. Everything is fully and excellently set to music, even in German - not a matter of course in such text-heavy RPGs.

And the Witcher authors still know how to shine with text windows: Thronebreaker is well written. It tells the captivating and winding story of a brutal war of desperation, built around an enormously cool and fresh main character - how often have we slipped into the role of a tough warrior queen? Witcher experts can look forward to an interesting new perspective on events that have shaped books and games. Including the appearances of some old friends.

Committed to the monarchy

However, not all quests have any really important long-term effects. Many are more reflected in our account than in the rest of the story. If we show our mercy to deserters, the next troop will burn away with a pile of gold - but we had that in abundance anyway, so who cares? The Banner Saga managed better to use scarcity of resources as a pressure factor and thus to give the decisions even more weight.

Classic RPG party in card form

The further we play Thronebreaker, the more important quests open up: some influence future dialogues, some the 20 possible endings and the most important ones our own entourage. In the course of time, Meve gathered an illustrious troop of sympathetic companions around him.

We can miss many of them if we don't explore the full map. What is more, we can lose them again if we make the wrong dialogue decisions. Which is even more painful because the companions tune into some quests and can solve them better than we alone - or unexpectedly trigger a disaster, which makes for some of the most shocking moments of Thronebreaker.

All of this, in turn, is cleverly linked to the rest of the game. When our best warrior turned away from us because we had violated his sense of justice, we very much mourned his company - but even more his Gwent card, which was the strongest of our deck! Each companion has its own character and some normal tasks can also discard fresh allies in card form. So our deck also represents our personal story. Very nice!

When role play and card game become blurred

Our companions are waiting in the camp for a chat. We can open that at any time and this is where we also tinker our deck. We improve barracks, craft unlocked better maps and have an overview of the various artifacts that we have collected as maps over the course of the trip. We don't have as much freedom when building decks as in the online Gwent: Due to the story, we always play Meve's army and we can't build anything completely different, such as a monster deck.

Nevertheless, the developers have designed the single player cards cleverly enough and built in enough companions and rewards so that we can drive a few different strategies. The deck building motivated us similarly to the character and group development of a classic RPG, because it feels very similar.

And that brings us back to the initial question: Is Thronebreaker more than a card game? Is it also worth playing for Witcher RPG fans? We think: yes. It may play differently, has its quirks in balancing and is less elaborately staged, but the heart of the Witcher games - their dark world full of gripping stories - also beats in Thronebreaker.

I love such erpegous bastards in which we walk around the map, collect various resources and fight our opponents in some original way - this was Puzzle Quest and its numerous clones. Easily, even too easily, I also get involved in card games - recently, the phenomenal Slay the Spire . So I should fall in love with Blood War: The Witcher Tales to Be killed. However, seeing the rating above the review, you can already guess that I would rather describe my relationship with this work as "it's complicated".

The first hours spent with the game are brilliant. If the Blood War had kept this level, I would consider a "nine". The music of Marcin Przybyłowicz and the "painted" graphics flawlessly introduce the witcher atmosphere, and the story, heavy and serious, rivets the screen . I wanted to know what would be the fate of Queen Meve and her team. I was curious about the consequences of various, often difficult and controversial decisions that I made during the game.

However, the more hours I had behind me, the more my enthusiasm decreased. The plot seemed good, but all the problems plagued by The Witcher Tales were starting to bother more and more. I have the impression that the creators have exceeded their ambitions - they lacked the knowledge and resources to make a nice card game that will be fun for 30 hours. Poor artificial intelligence, various minor or major stumbles and a low level of difficulty do not bother at first, but over time they start to spoil the fun. This does not mean, however, that the Blood War is bad - or good Witcher fans waved his hand at the history of any deficiencies and will be satisfied. Because it was the plot that made The Witcher Tales finally hooked me - despite all the shortcomings, mistakes and bad solutions that have found some way in this game.

A story like at Mr. Andrzej

Do you remember the third volume of Sapkowski's witcher saga? The baptism of fire has always been my favorite part of the five-book - team formation, atrocities of war, difficult moral issues to resolve. After so many years, this book continues to impress me. So it is a big compliment that I quickly felt in the Blood War as if I was interacting with this terrifying episode of the conflict with Nilfgaard . But let's start from the beginning, and this one - although it is not idyllic - does not promise to be that serious.

Queen Meve, ruler of Lyria and Rivia, returns home from a diplomatic meeting of the monarchs. On the spot, it turns out that Count Caldwell, who governs the country, did not do well - lawlessness prevailed, and his main perpetrator is a mysterious bandit nicknamed the Prince of Dogs (this is also what his companies are called - "dogs"). It's no secret that things are changing fast and the Queen is facing a much greater threat.

Nilfgaard's invasion of the kingdoms of the North, because it is what we are talking about, always reminded me of World War II. The names of individual armies (Army Group East), unprecedented cruelty and ethnic cleansing, and finally the militarization of Nilfgardian society - there is no doubt that the Führe ... Emperor Emhyr is a piece of bastard and in the War on Blood it is all too clearly visible . This is where the game shines. History has not avoided a few clichés, but writing, although of course not always up to Sapkowski's level, reflects his style quite well.

Let's play open cards

If I were to judge Thronebreaker only as a story, the final note would be much higher. However, The Witcher Tales is a game - and as such it must have gameplay mechanisms. In this case, of course, we are dealing with a card game whose rules are a modified version of gwent. So we create a deck, and then during a standard match we have to defeat the opponent in two out of three rounds , playing one card alternately.

I mentioned the "standard match", because in the Blood War the creators put a lot of effort into being able to offer a lot of different gwent variants. Rightly so, because a 30-hour game, where most of your time is spent laying cards in only one mode, would either have to have thrilling mechanics or (more likely) be just plain boring. CD Projekt RED has prepared many types of matches - from those in which we only play one round, to those in which the rules have been changed beyond recognition. The rules may, for example, resemble those from ... Hearthstone (this is one of the coolest easter eggs, and there are a lot of these in the game - some of them can be found in the "Did you know ..." boxes).

The most interesting variations on the gwent theme are puzzles - clashes with special rules marked on the map with a puzzle sign, which sometimes (not always) require intensive thinking. Once we have to deal with the mad cow before it kills the healthy cattle. Another time, in our opinion, is to sneak (read all the cards to the other side of the board) across the bridge guarded by a troll . The problem with the puzzles is that while there are many, only a few have been fine-tuned. There are many nice, but so banal that I advised them on the way. There are also puzzles vaguely described and frustratingly difficult. Not to mention that I passed a few, although I clearly did not meet the conditions. Well, there are quite a few mistakes in the War on Blood .

Painted boys

To say that Thronebreaker has been artistically pampered is to say nothing. The game is cute! Above all, however, we are dealing with a great-quality audiobook - all texts are read by the actors, and the actors are well-chosen, which makes it much easier to feel the story. Add to this beautiful, "painted" graphics and great drawings on the cards, and you will easily understand why I consider this item to be one of the nicer productions this year. It is a pity that there is no technological refinement behind it. Even on my quite powerful computer (i7-8700K, GTX 1070, 16 GB RAM) there were some clipping and frame drops. Not much, but it is a signal that problems of this type may be more troublesome on weaker machines. Apparently, in a card game, performance is not the most important thing, but it should be mentioned. Unfortunately, there are more shortcomings in this game.

Speaking of the artistic setting, it's hard not to mention the great music that plays somewhere in the background. Witcher and Slavic notes, a hallmark of Marcin Przybyłowicz, can be heard here all the time and create a great atmosphere, harmonizing with the graphics or voices of the actors. The motif that appears during fights with monsters is especially catchy. I am sure that the soundtrack will soon be on the playlists of many editors of GRYOnline.pl.

Too big ambitions?

For now, mainly praised the Blood War - it's time to look at what the game does not work well. And there is some. Artificial intelligence turns out to be the most disappointing - if this is Skynet of the future, we really have nothing to fear. The computer notoriously places its units on the lines set on fire by my units (as a result, the enemies lose health points unnecessarily when there is a field with no fire nearby), it does not use the synergy of its own cards, and it also happens to strengthen my cards with potions at the end of the match. The latter did not matter anyway, because the clashes were simpler than the construction of the Lyrian flail. And for the sake of clarity, I was playing on the normal difficulty level - there is one lower, story, and one higher.

The voice of reason

The main mechanics of The Witcher Tales are poorly developed and badly balanced. But other elements of this production were not used - during the game we collect three resources (gold, wood and recruits), which we use to create new cards (which does not make much sense, because the game is too easy) and to expand the camp. By erecting new buildings in it, e.g. we accelerate the movement of characters on the map (and this one is, by the way, definitely too slow) or we strengthen the cards. The problem is that on the fourth of five maps I built everything that was to be built, and after creating all possible cards, at the end I had 30,000 gold pieces anyway. For some time, it spoiled all the decisions that made it possible to do something decent (e.g. bury the victims of a massacre) at a certain cost. Because what kind of sacrifice is it to spend 2,000 coins when 25,000 of them are buzzing?

The degree of difficulty also has a negative impact on the morale mechanics that are interesting in theory. It has three levels and comes down to positive or negative modifiers to our cards during battles (respectively: -1, 0, +1). This is a nice solution, especially since many decisions involve a loss of morale in various ways (e.g. we can help someone, but the soldiers won't like it, so we'll lose one morale point). It is a pity that it does not affect the gameplay (I have already mentioned that it is too simple?), And thus loses the weight it could have if the game was challenging us (2 points difference in the strength of a given card is something, but not then when you win everything with 100 spare points).