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With the Witcher trilogy, the developer CD Projekt Red has proven that he is able to create engaging role plays with difficult decisions, intense battles and a captivating tradition. In Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, all but one of these aspects persisted. This prequel is as captivating as some of the best tales of the Witcher series, filled with heartbreaking decisions that have far-reaching implications. The only difference is that instead of fighting with a sword, you fight with cards. Thronebreaker is an intelligent transformation of the Gwent trading card game and manages to transform its core principle into a captivating story of family, loyalty and hardship.
You play Queen Meve, sovereign land known as Lyria and Rivia, on the eve of the great invasion of Nilfgaard. These ruthless imperials roam the country like a plague, decimating villages and their citizens and using sneaky tactics to fight the control of kingdoms away from their rulers. Back in their country after a long war, Meve and his forces are taken in the middle of the invasion. With traitors on every street corner and spies hidden in the shadows, you'll have to make tough decisions about who to let in your party and who to permanently break ties with when you mobilize a guerrilla army. to smother the Nilfgaardian invasion and support him. for a full counter-attack.
Thronebreaker's story involves a whole new cast of characters (with some remarkable cameos here and there) that is fully expressed throughout the 25-hour campaign. The interaction between Queen Meve and her trusted subjects is particularly strong, an exceptional writing giving life to the motivations and principles of each character. Meve is not a blank slate on which you can project like Geralt, but Thronebreaker leaves you room for maneuver for decision-making. The choices you make are painted with the same gray brush that The Witcher is known for, no choice promising a better result than the rest. Leading a decreasing army into battles with impossible odds puts an incredible amount of responsibility on your shoulders, and choosing when to be empathetic and when being unforgiving has fascinating repercussions – both immediately and further in the story.
You control Meve through several large open areas, each with a distinctive visual aesthetic and characters to interact with. These areas look like pages taken from a conceptual art book, with stunning watercolors and brushstrokes giving life to sunny pastures and bubbling swamps with awesome details. The cel-shading function on Meve and the associated characters make it possible to define them on the background while giving them distinct appearances, but it can be slightly discordant when it is developed during serious conversations. Thronebreaker is a guided tour of some of The Witcher's most captivating landscapes. It's a pleasure to see them from another angle.
Each region hosts the many history battles that you will have to undertake to progress, but also many additional missions and content to collect. Side quests can be as simple as making decisions to solve small quarrels or involved in finding dragons in dark caves at the request of terrified villagers. Each quest has a story to tell, which can affect the mood of your troops, award you important rewards such as gold and wood, or introduce new special characters into your ranks. Ignoring them can also have consequences because the characters react to the people you help and the bonuses you choose to receive. The world of Thronebreaker feels incredibly responsive to your choices, forcing you to take care of the way you manage them.
You will also need to gather resources in the vein of gold, timber and requisitioned troops to better establish your fighting force. Building new attachments for your base camp can help you develop your Gwent deck of cards with new characters and abilities, from simple Lyrian forces to noble dwarves and stealthy elves. Thronebreaker does not make you feel the need to browse every corner of the map to find resources, but gives you more than enough on the only critical path. But seeing your little army grow up with each passing zone is rewarding, as are the effects it has on your ability to fight with the cards you have chosen.
Thronebreaker intertwines Gwent in its story in an intelligent way, preventing it from feeling like an intrusive method of resolving combat situations, helping you learn complex systems while engaging in quests and rules. unique.
Units have a variety of abilities that can be triggered in many ways, many of which can be linked with other units to create devastating combos during a turn. Since Gwent is not limited to reducing damage and more to controlling the field, it is important to find a balance between cards that damage your opponent and those that are better able to increase your personal score. Thronebreaker's changing priorities in combat prevent the multitude of battles from running out, with only a few relying on Gwent's ground rules. Some standout battles munched individual cards that made up the body of a dragon, each piece having its own attributes that damaged my cards or healed others. Thronebreaker contextualizes the rules of each of his encounters to intelligently adapt to the purpose of the story. This makes Gwent's game always rewarding and avoids the potentially destabilizing transition from a combat stunt to a simple card game on a table.
Playing Gwent in Thronebreaker can often seem like reintroducing the game with its new rules and conditions, resulting in the cost of some easy quests. On the default difficulty, most major quests will not bother you enough to make meaningful decisions about your deck composition, which undermines the overall meta-game of using resources to acquire better cards. The optional puzzle meetings compensate for this inconvenience by offering you a specific platform on which you can work in bespoke challenges. These encounters are the best learning tools that Thronebreaker has to offer, exposing you to the need for complex card combinations. These challenges often result in unlocking cards for Gwent's online component. You are therefore encouraged to use them as often as they present themselves.
Do not be fooled into thinking that Thronebreaker is just a long tutorial for what will happen when Gwent opens its multiplayer mode. His story is mandatory if you're looking for more Witcher traditions to master and manages to engage with a solid cast of well-written characters and a suitably dark plot that defies your morality on every occasion. Thronebreaker intertwines Gwent in its story in an intelligent way, preventing it from feeling like an intrusive method of resolving combat situations, helping you learn complex systems while engaging in quests and rules. unique. Gwent was a secondary attraction of The Witcher 3, but thanks to Thronebreaker, it has turned into something new that stands out as a proud member of the Witcher family.
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