As a professional video game news reporter person, it’s really easy for me to find the negative in things. In some cases, it’s usually my job to be the Debbie Downer who reminds people that a beloved game isn’t quite perfect. But, occasionally, I get to play stuff that I have high expectations for only to be blown away by the fact that it actually meets them. This is the case for Gwent, the standalone card game from The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt devs CD Projekt RED. The E3 demo let me play against other humans for the first time, which is something I’ve wanted to do since I first started playing Gwent in The Witcher 3 last year.
So, what makes Gwent so good? If you’ve never played before, Gwent runs similar to other card games you may know like Hearthstone or Magic The Gathering. You draw cards with various strengths and abilities and take turns playing them against an opponent. Cards do damage, most damage wins the round. Unlike those other games, Gwent has a win two-of-three mechanic. So you’re not just playing to win “this” round, you’re playing to win the next round too.
This means tactics like bluffing and deception come into play. You can’t just run through all the cards in your hand. You need to pace yourself and think a few moves ahead. It’s an exhilarating playstyle, a marriage of the combat tactics of a Hearthstone with the turn-by-turn strategy of traditional card games like Euchre or Hearts.
My play sessions consisted of two games against human opponents. This may not sound like much but Gwent addicts know this a rare thing indeed. Gwent, as it exists in The Witcher 3, has no multiplayer component. Up until now the only way to play an official version of Gwent with another person was if you happened to have two of the physical print sets CDPR has distributed over the last few years. It’s really all I’ve ever wanted from Gwent. In my mind I’m living a fantasy wherein I am the greatest Gwent player in the world. I’ve dominated The Witcher 3 and now I’m ready to test my worth against humans.
I went 2-0.
So, clearly, I am in the running for Best in the World. But I think anyone familiar with card games will find it’s easy to win Gwent because it's easy to play Gwent. The standalone UI is much more polished than what’s in The Witcher 3 and the small amount of rebalancing done so far takes the edge off of some of the OP cards. Spies, for example, now only allow for one draw instead of two.
I used the new Skellige faction for both games. It plays really well in Gwent, with some strong graveyard-to-battlefield abilities that give serious buffs. One card gained +6 each time it was resurrected. I used it twice, and then played a commander’s horn to double the attack power to 36. Of course, I also had to carefully ration the cards that allowed me to bring the card from the graveyard in the first place, again part of the simple but effective best of three concept.
While I had a lot of fun playing Gwent against people, it’s only one part of the game. There will be a beta period in September which will presumably give fans their first chance to play the single player campaign. A few bits of single player action were shown to the press during E3 but there isn’t a playable single player campaign at the show. Given that the mechanics of Gwent are unchanged between the versions it’s probably for the best as all we’d really be getting are story spoilers. But fans of The Witcher 3 ’s narrative style, full of branching choices and unseen consequences, will like what’s on offer in the single player Gwent campaign. Current estimates put it around 10 hours, and CDPR’s principal narrative designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz told us it’s likely more campaigns will be added in the future.
Overall I left my Gwent demo session feeling very confident the finished product will make fans happy. I had a great time going head-to-head with other people, and it’s clear that CDPR is taking time to put some care into this project. It would’ve been easy to slap something together and rush it to market, but instead fans will be getting a well-rounded game (for free) that should provide hours of content. Hopefully they introduce a ranking system or leaderboards so delusional Gwent nerds like me can be brought back down to reality.
