14 DAY TRIAL // At E3 2013, the team at CD Projekt RED offered gamers a chance to witness, for the first time, a significant gameplay demo from their upcoming The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, featuring a look at the open world structure, the new combat mechanics and details on the story.
The visual upgrade is clear as soon as the game starts, even if this is a product in the early development stages.
Geralt seems more weary than ever, paler and with a pulled back pony tail that allows players and other game characters to take a good look at his scars.
The open world structure is also solid, with the team showing a lot of villages and castles that can be visited an explored at will using a horse or boat.
But it is worth moving on foot between the points of interest in The Witcher 3 because Geralt can discover other locations filled with threats, ranging from looters to powerful monsters, that trigger side-quests.
The team explored one of them in detail, battling a lechen in an exquisitely animated deep forest in order to stop the killing in a nearby village.
The structure was classic CD Projekt RED, with moral gray areas, consequences that are revealed after the quest is done and some interesting characters.
Geralt has access to a new set of witcher skills that allow him to spot visual and audio clues in the world in order to get to the monsters that he is hunting and take them out.
The combat has also been improved in The Witcher 3, with quicker strikes and evasion moves and more of a focus on the use of signs to disrupt enemies and counter their own special abilities.
The area shown in the demo was bigger than the entirety of Witcher 2 and the team says that 80 new unique monsters can be found and hunted.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be out in 2014.