UPDATE 4PM GMT: Netflix has also confirmed a number of the other actors joining The Witcher cast, including the actress who'll play iconic sorceress Triss Merigold. Taking the role is Anna Shaffer, according to the Hollywood Reporter, who you may remember as Romilda Vane from Harry Potter - the girl who gave Harry a love potion. Shaffer also played Ruby Button in British soap opera Hollyoaks.
UPDATE 15TH NOVEMBER: There was a minor update to this story during a call discussing CD Projekt's Q3 2018 earnings. Joint-CEO Adam Kiciński referred to the issue as "an open one", intimating no decision either way had been made.
"Every game you buy which includes DRM is, in a way, inferior."
Almost 10 years ago to the day, CD Projekt launched the online digital game store Good Old Games. The operation and scope was small - a handful of people salvaging iconic old PC games for modern operating systems - but the prices, customer service and DRM-free message were right, and slowly the service grew. And grew, and grew. And today things are different.
There's been the suggestion of multiplayer in CD Projekt Red's new game Cyberpunk 2077 for a while. In 2013, studio head Adam Badowski even told me "we're going to add multiplayer features", although he also said "it will be a story-based RPG experience with amazing single-player playthroughs". Regardless, that was five years ago, and a lot has happened since then.
What would The Witcher 1 prologue tutorial - where amnesiac Geralt is hauled in from the woods by his witcher pals and taken to the iconic castle Kaer Morhen - look like remade in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt? After all, Kaer Morhen and Geralt's pals all appear in The Witcher 3.
A new Polish documentary has unearthed rare footage of old and unreleased Witcher games. On show are Metropolis' canned Witcher game from 1997, as well as CD Projekt Red's fumbled first efforts at a game.
Can't wait for the Witcher Netflix series? This 30-minute Witcher fan film, Alzur's Legacy, looks surprisingly good. Perhaps it's because it's professionally made by a recognised Polish cast and competent crew - or perhaps it's because the main character isn't Geralt.
How a Bournemouth lecturer became Geralt of Rivia.
It's the middle of December, 10 days away from Christmas. I'm on a train chugging along the south coast of England, across chilly countryside under a darkening grey sky. It's almost idyllic but mostly bleak, and so very ordinary - I've watched industrial estates and small villages like these roll by a hundred times before. This isn't where you'd normally go looking for a superstar.
It's been a brilliant financial year for CD Projekt, crowned by the release of The Witcher 3, a critical and commercial success that has propelled the Polish company to sales and revenue an order of magnitude higher than anything it's enjoyed before.
A Witcher movie, which is nothing to do with Polish game maker CD Projekt Red, now has a global release date of 2017. It will both introduce the world of the Witcher and serve as the beginning of a series to continue in film and on TV.
The Witcher 3 is out today, and so we've hauled another exciting Witcher-related article out of the Eurogamer archive for you to read again or enjoy for the first time if you missed it. Here, Robert Purchese reveals the story of the Witcher game that never was in an article first published in June 2014.
"We did everything to make sure nothing bad happens."
Two key members of The Witcher 3 team officially departed CD Projekt Red last week: lead gameplay designer Maciej Szcześnik and gameplay producer Marek Ziemak.
How the studio behind The Witcher went from a Polish car park to open world glory.
The Witcher 3 comes out on Tuesday, 19th May, and so we've hauled an exciting Witcher-related article out of the Eurogamer archive for you to read again or enjoy for the first time if you missed it. Here, Robert Purchese reveals the story of Witcher developer CD Projekt in an article first published in November 2013.
Polish studio CD Projekt Red has announced 6 million combined The Witcher sales on this, the series' sixth birthday.
In that relatively short period of time Red has gone from being a nobody into an internationally renowned somebody, crafting a next-generation RPG prestigious enough for Microsoft to feature during its important E3 Xbox One presentation this year.
To mark the occasion I travelled to Poland to see the studio with my own eyes and meet the people responsible for it. That story, CD Projekt's story, will be told in an article coming soon.
The Witcher and its sequel The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings have cumulatively sold over four million copies, developer CD Projekt RED has announced.
The first Witcher was only released for PC and Mac, while its sequel launched last year on PC before receiving a snazzy enhanced edition on Xbox 360 a few months back. A Mac release is expected later this year, and the Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition will see and Xbox 360 release in Japan come August.
The series is based on Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski's bestselling fantasy novels about an amnesiac monster hunter named Geralt.
UPDATE: CD Projekt has released the first piece of art from the title. Take a look below.
ORIGINAL STORY: The Witcher developer CD Projekt will unveil its new role-playing game tomorrow during a press conference, it has confirmed to Eurogamer.
It will NOT announce Witcher 1 for consoles, as speculated today.
2007 fantasy RPG The Witcher 1 will launch on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, shop listings have suggested.
The Witcher is down for PS3 and Xbox 360 on the Danish version of Blockbuster, and the Danish version of CoolShop has the PS3 version listed (via VG247).
Is this the "major announcement" developer CD Projekt teased for its summer press conference, set for tomorrow evening? In February CD Projekt Red confirmed two "A" games were due out in 2012. Is The Witcher on consoles one of them?
The next two major titles from Polish developer CD Projekt Red, scheduled for 2014/15, will be simultaneous multi-platform releases for PC and next-generation consoles, detective Eurogamer has discovered.
Those sex cards, eh? I was determined to collect as many of them as I could. If that meant going out of my way to safely escort a barmaid home late at night, so be it. Convincing a dryad that sex is not just for procreation, that it's fun and can relieve stress? No problem. I couldn't help myself. It was like sexy Pokémon.
Expo! It's been a hell of a weekend for developer session speakers at the Eurogamer Expo so far. We've had Peter Molyneux and Tim Willits and all sorts. Today we've got CD Projekt showing off The Witcher 2. Senior producer Tomasz Gop and level designer Marek Ziemak were on hand to show how things are going for good old Geralt now he's in a new game engine with refined combat, improved dialogue systems and a newer and much bigger story.
Polish developer CD Projekt has told Eurogamer that The Witcher 2 and The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf were always - and still are - separate projects.
CD Projekt has revealed plans for a console version of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, no doubt hoping to realise what canned project The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf could not.
Polish developer CD Projekt has patched its cult low-fantasy RPG The Witcher to version 1.5, removing the game's DRM security protection and adding five bonus adventures created by players.
As well as removing copy security measures, you'll now be able to play The Witcher without the disc in the drive of your machine.
The five community quests - Deceits, Blight of the Bogs, Wraiths of Quiet Hamlet, The Wedding, and Merry Witchmas - were created with the D'jinni adventure editor first released last year.
Polish developer CD Projekt RED has confirmed that work on The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf has been temporarily suspended.
Speaking on the official website, CD Projekt RED boss Adam Kicinski said the console adaptation was simply not on track to meet the desired level of quality within the desired timeframe.
"The decision to suspend work on ROTWW was one of the most difficult in the history of our company," writes Kicinski, translated by Google. "We put this project in the hearts of many, a huge amount of energy and money."
The Witcher developer CD Projekt believes PC piracy can be fought by offering greater value, but said publishers are too scared to let go of the DRM safety blanket.
CD Projekt has released a free downloadable adventure add-on, a game editor and a patch for The Witcher on PC, all available from www.thewitcher.com.
The Prince of Neutrality adventure add-on is the game's first official DLC, offering two hours of extra gameplay. The developer says you will get to visit the outskirts of Kaer Morhen and meet other witchers glimpsed in the main single-player campaign in more detail, and there is more than one possible outcome to the story.
On top of that, there are new NPCs and other "new graphical assets" at work, and the content has been localised into English, French, Italian, German and Spanish as well as the developer's native Polish.
Atari has released a demo of The Witcher, giving you a chance to poke around the early bits of Geralt's monster-slaying adventure through the world created by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski.
Stop clowning around; it really is bastardly cold out there. Still, it's good for one thing: keeping my PC from overheating. All I have to do is wrap up warm and open my window, then pop in one of these festively fantastic frolics and laugh away merrily - probably with a vat of mulled wine close-by to ensure I am well and truly smashed. I'm only giving it serious consideration because there are some games worth seriously considering.
Let's talk about the term "role-playing game", shall we? It's one of those phrases that has slipped into the gaming vernacular so easily that we tend to forget what it actually means, and end up using it all wrong. Common wisdom has it that any game in which your character earns experience and levels up accordingly can be tucked away under the RPG blanket. For me, that's only half right. The clue's in the name - role-playing. Games in which you create a role and then act out that character in the gameworld. Without the freedom to come up with your own virtual identity, what you're really talking about are adventure games with a few RPG trimmings.
So, by my reckoning, The Witcher is only half an RPG. The role you play is non-negotiable - you're Geralt, a white-haired growly-voiced amnesiac anti-hero. Nor can you choose his profession. It is, after all, rather set in stone by the verb-slaughtering title of the game. He's a witcher, a professional slayer of the supernatural, wandering from town to town ridding the countryside of foul beasts using swords, magic and a little bit of alchemy. You'll be using the same swords for pretty much the whole game (though you can augment them), your armour options are limited and you've got a fairly rigid vengeance-fuelled goal in mind. If you're looking for one of those games where you can craft your own jewel-encrusted golden armour, and spend months tinkering with optional side-quests, then move along. This one isn't for you.
If, however, you're a fan of compellingly realised environments, commendably realistic social interactions and full-blooded fantasy storytelling then pull up a pew, since The Witcher has a lot to offer.
If you were magical you'd probably know that Eurogamer TV is showing an exclusive video of The Witcher.
It's a glorious cinematic that shows the hero, Geralt, battling all sorts of baddies - from money-grabbing swine to drooling beasties. It's ever so atmospheric.
The Witcher is based around Polish novels that follow the adventures of a professional and mutant monster hunter, Geralt.
"RPGs are like McDonald's burgers," says one of the team at CD Projekt. They're everywhere, and it's difficult to distinguish between them. RPGs are all the same. Rat-punching to level up. Twee character design. A world where the good battle dark forces to free the land of tyranny. And orcs. Orcs everywhere. Punch them. Level up. Go on. Now go and buy a leather waistcoat.
Atari has announced today that it has inked a deal with Eastern European publisher / developer CD Projekt to bring forthcoming fantasy role-playing title The Witcher to Europe next Spring.
