The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

I would suggest either skipping or going all in on the Gwent. From what I remember the end of the quest line consists of a pretty hardcore tourney that requires a pretty specific deck (spoiler below). Grabbing a few cards here or there will not cut it.

Northern Realms Spy Deck

Yeah once you have that deck gwent is trivial, which was a shame for me as I found gwent to be an excellent diversion between roaming and questing. If only they could drop the new gwent into the old gwent’s place and add a Dark Souls-esque multiplayer where other people slot in as your opponent :)

O-ho! So you’re wanting to talk me out of Gwent but then you tell me there’s a secret “nuke it from orbit” set of cards that makes winning trivial! I may have to try for that - unless getting my hands on those cards is superbitch hard or something.

Pretty sure they’re easy to get, but I forget.

It’s the first four cards here http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Gwent_spy_cards + the ubiquitous decoy card. Play em with the fewest (25?) and best cards in your deck, and it’s hard to lose

Honestly though you can create decks that make Gwent fairly trivial to play, there isn’t some amazing storyline or anything attached to it.

I played like 3 hands of Gwent on my first playthrough, hated it, never played Gwent again and loved the Witcher 3. For my 2nd playthrough 6 months later or whatever, I decided to give it another go and for whatever reason it kind of clicked for me and I found it kind of a fun diversion that gave me a few more things to do I had skipped the first run through.

But you are not missing anything important by skipping it utterly. My advice is to just skip it and enjoy the actual game. Maybe if you feel compelled to replay the game some day you can try Gwent again like i did.

Witcher 3 is one of my all time fave games. I didn’t play a single round of Gwent.

Add me to the “fuck gwent, I’m too busy adventuring!” camp.

I was in the “I’m not here to play cards!” camp, then I learned how to play Gwent, then got caught up in a couple of nailbiter/down to the last card games, and I got hooked. I never played with anything but the Northern Realms deck (which means I skipped the storyline in the DLC where you had to win with a different deck.) Once I had a basic strategy that I found worked, I rarely lost, though there were enough really close games to keep it interesting.

Had someone not taught me that strategy, though, I’d have probable skipped it.

I put about 120 hours into the base Witcher 3 campaign to finish the story and the only Gwent I played was a few minutes for the required tutorial at the beginning.

Sensing a trend here. Interesting, I figured I was an outlier.

Gwent is amazing. The people who played The Witcher 3 without touching Gwent live hollow lives of sadness.

I actually restarted the game (I’d not gone far in) to pick up the early cards. I don’t play any deck games on iOS or in real life, and I absolutely positively was NOT going to play Gwent.

Then I played a few games against a few people, learned a strategy, and was freaking hooked.

Gwent can get bent!

“You saw my daughter? And she was being chased by a powerful ghostly being, with blood in his eyes and an enormous sword of flame? Recently? Tell me where! ----- but first, got time for a game of gwent?”

LOL! Yeah it really fits nowhere in my role playing image of Geralt. But the gwent games were so damned compelling.

So 33 million copies sold by the end of 2017.
TW1 and TW2 sold 9 million on steam alone, so probably around 15-18 in total when counting retail, gog and xbox 360.

That leaves nice 15-18 million copies for Witcher 3 alone, of which good half is probably on PC.

That little studio that could.

Heh, I started playing the Witcher 3 just a couple weeks ago, and I loved Gwent so much that I got hooked on the free-to-play CCG version. I’m now playing the CCG every day; haven’t played the Witcher 3 for a week now. I do hope to finish the RPG, as it is excellent too.

Are the Witcher 1 and 2 worth playing? GOG gave me the Witcher 1 for free (probably because I’m playing Gwent), but I couldn’t get autohotkeys to map mouseclicks to my keyboard, which is how I normally play games (to avoid mouse stress on my hands).

I think both are worth playing, but I’m not sure how well they aged, especially Witcher 1. Also, Witcher 1 has some severe pacing issues - though, if you’re pacient, it could make up for it in the way the plot advances and concludes.

Witcher 3 is by far the best game overall in the trilogy, but the story and overall “feel” of Witcher 1 still has a very special place in my heart. I appreciated the ambiguity in Witcher 1 more than I did the more straightforward storytelling in 2, and although Witcher 3 brought some of that feel back, the way Witcher 1 embraced that ambiguity is still uniquely refreshing.

The ending of Witcher 2 was so refreshing with the options it gave, I still remember it fondly.

I played through both of them twice, and they’re both great.

OK sure, my two cents as well: I found the first game dull as dishwater, while the second is my favorite of the whole series.