Card games haven’t done story on this level before. With Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, we’re not talking about a bolted-on campaign, we’re talking about a whole separate game – a 30-dollar, 30-hour Witcher story with more lines of dialogue than The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt expansion Hearts of Stone. Thronebreaker has 77 side quests, 20 possible end-states and is directed by Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, lead quest designer on Witcher 3 (and also brother of Witcher 3 game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz).
The message is clear: the people who made one of this generation’s most celebrated role-playing games have made a new Witcher story. You’d be forgiven for not realising it was a card game – the title Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales doesn’t even mention Gwent, the card game upon which it is based. Then again, ‘more Witcher’ is a far tastier proposition. But can a card game reach the same storytelling heights?
I played Thronebreaker for two hours earlier this week, which wasn’t long enough to gauge whether the story will rival the Bloody Baron in terms of gut-rending oomph, but was long enough to sense a similar dirt-smeared grit in the world around me, and to be reassured dark and mature story is front and centre of what Thronebreaker is trying to do. At one point I ordered a defeated rabble – whose only real crime had been a few wrong words – to be hung, for example. I did it because as a monarch – Queen Meve – I didn’t want to show signs of weakness, but when a grubby onlooker then scorned me (brave, considering what I’d just done) for my cruelty, I felt awful.
Source: Eurogamer Is Thronebreaker the new Witcher tale we seek, or is it bloody barren?