The Witcher 3 'is not untouchable,' story director says of changes in…

The Witcher 3 is the perfect videogame. Is that hyperbolic? Maybe a bit. But it's unquestionably one of the greatest RPGs of all time, a game that arrived with a 92% review score and somehow got better through years of fixes, upgrades, and expansions, the last of which provided a perfectly satisfying conclusion to the epic of Geralt (and an even higher review score).

In his review for that brilliant denouement, former PC Gamer editor Tom Senior committed himself: "If one of these expansions came out every year I'd still be playing The Witcher 3 in 2020." Good news for Tom, then, because a surprise third expansion, Songs of the Past, is on the way in 2027, and a full remaster of the base game and first two expansions is set to drop ahead of that—later this month, in fact. CD Projekt Red has big ambitions for that remaster, aiming to make it not just look and run better, but to feel better too—like a new game, rather than a 2015 release with a fresh coat of paint.

It's a big undertaking, and it invites a question: Given the esteem in which The Witcher 3 is held, is there any worry about messing with it? For CD Projekt's vice president of narration Marcin Blacha, who served as the lead writer of The Witcher 3 and story director on its two expansions, the answer is an easy 'no.'

"For me, The Witcher 3 is not a monument and is not untouchable," Blacha told us in a recent interview. "It is still vivid in my memory, and it is still something that is not maybe a point of reference, but something that still may be improved. When I'm playing The Witcher 3, I still find some places that I think maybe nowadays, I would do it differently.

"So, you know, adding a new expansion is not such a huge deal. In fact, discovering we still have it, you know, we have this thing, and we are still able to create a story that fits not only vanilla Witcher 3 but also Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, It is still a very uplifting feeling—a time machine that brings me 10 years back, when I was younger and maybe more passionate and more enthusiastic."

And what sort of things would Blacha do differently? "Maybe some things I would make more nuanced," he continued, like adjusting Dandelion to make him a bit wiser and more supportive rather than just comedy relief, or adding more choices and consequences in Geralt's dealings with the world around him.

But Blacha also acknowledged that some of the changes would arise not from any problems or shortcoming in the game, but simply because—rather like Geralt—he's changed over the years.

"It may be as well, my process of aging, when I see some things from a different perspective. Maybe the problem is not in the game but in me, looking at the game with a different eye," Blacha said. That doesn't mean Songs of the Past will be the videogame equivalent of a grumpy old man sitting on his porch yelling at the kids, though.

"We have a crew that has both veterans from The Witcher 3, but also developers that joined Fool's Theory or the project quite recently," Blacha said. "So I hope it is not a geriatric expansion. It will be fueled very much by the passion of writers and quest designers and developers of Fool's Theory in general."

The Witcher 3 remaster update is set to launch on September 29, and will be free for anyone who owns the base game.

The Witcher 3, being one of the best RPGs of its era, naturally has a lot of very good quests—quests with weighty, significant choices that give you pause to think. In speaking with PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens, story director Marcin Blacha says that pause is a sign that he and his team have done something right in a story choice.

"First of all, the choice has to make you think," Blacha says, "So it cannot be obvious. You cannot simply go after one of the choices by simply pressing A all the time, so that's the first thing. Second of all, in addition to having this balance, it needs to have its own gravitas. It must be serious. It must make you think about either life or humans or this particular problem or the difficulties that the characters may have right now.

"I always repeat that when you have a really big choice in The Witcher 3, it must be constructed in such a way that the player puts the controller away, stands up, and starts walking, thinking about the choice, and then goes back, and then the player picks one of the choices."

Which tracks—when I think back to the most impactful choices of the RPGs I've played, there's usually at least been a jarring, 'sit back and think' moment that's knocked me back into my chair, if not off it entirely:

"So it is about thinking," Blacha continues. "It is about making the player immersed into the game and the problems that characters have, but also saying something about either who we are or how the world works, or how difficult life can sometimes be."

In regards to the upcoming DLC, Songs of the Past, and whether it'll have any hard choices to make? "Obviously. I mean, we are not trying to avoid difficult choices, and we are not avoiding making players uncomfortable. So I can promise that you will have both in Songs of the Past, and sometimes you will regret [your choice] and you will need to load the game to repeat your choice."

Nighthawks is an upcoming Steam vampire RPG where you have to navigate a modern underworld after awakening as a newly minted member of the undead. You can't have a vampire story without at least a little seduction, but Nighthawks steers well clear of anything more risque than you'd see in a PG-13 movie. It's easy to understand, then, why the devs were so worried when they got slapped with an "adults only" rating from Valve just days before launch.

"We are aware that Steam has classified Nighthawks as an adult game and has excluded it from searches (and delisted it entirely in certain countries)," producer Dave Gilbert said in a September 13 Bluesky post. "We are working on it. Valve is under the impression that this game is way sexier than it actually is."

The game's actual Steam page describes the mature content as follows: "Nighthawks features strong language and adult situations, with occasional moments of non-explicit nudity in romance scenes. Most mature content is only conveyed using text, with no graphic sex scenes or sexual violence."

In other words, it's less explicit than, say, Baldur's Gate 3, a game which does have full-frontal nudity and sex scenes worthy of late-night Cinemax showings. Despite that, Larian's RPG never got an adults-only rating because, well, it's not pornographic. Neither is Nighthawks, but with launch set for September 22, that age restriction was severely limiting the game's visibility to prospective players.

"Much as I hate to turn down possible buyers," writer and designer Richard Cobbett added, "if you acquire Nighthawks specifically for the sexy, you will swiftly be disappointed that it consists of a couple of butts and some largely comedic romance sequences with conveniently placed hands or scenery."

It's unclear why Valve slapped the adults-only tag on Nighthawks, but after a couple days worth of nonstop stress for the devs, it's finally been removed. "I want to make a joke like 'Sorry it's not porn,'" Gilbert says, "but honestly I'm just happy this has been resolved."

Valve's willingness to seel pornographic games alongside mainstream titles on Steam has put the company in the unenviable position of having to define what pornography actually is, and its answers have never been perfect. The real question about Nighthawks is how it got slapped with the adult content tag in the first place, but that's one that hasn't been answered. At least it's all worked out in the end.

"Now that this whole 'adult content' debacle is over, I think I can call it a net positive," Gilbert concludes. "More people know about our game than ever. I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome. That said, I hope to never have to go through anything like this ever again. I wish I could say I planned this as some kind of marketing stunt, but I’m not that smart and I’m not that dumb."

Valve locks Australian Steam users out of age-restricted store pages if they don't have a credit card, even if their account is over 18 years old.

Rockstar seems to be doing something with celebrities like Travis Scott, since they keep releasing cryptic GTA 6 teasers.

The somewhat notorious Travis Scott posted art of two glittering pleaser heels leaning against a stripper pole on his Instagram, where he writes, "Phase 1. NOW ITS TIME. MY RETURN TO GAME GOTTA COME WITH RAGE AND ALOT OF DANCING LETS RIDE

"J… O. H….. to be continued. See yall soon." Travis Scott already suggested he would be involved in GTA 6 in his 2025 music video for the song "2000 Excursion" with Don Toliver and Sheck Wes, as a GTA 6 fan on Reddit noticed.

So far, joining Travis Scott in ruining GTA 6 fans' days with speculation is Morgan Wallen – the seriously controversial country star – who suggested on Twitter he was a part of GTA 6 with an image of a crumbling poolside in GTA 6's typical pink and pulp-y art style. Then, the rapper Future, producer Metro Boomin, Yung Lean, who is one of the great loves of my life because I was weird in high school, as well as Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, Latin music star Raúl Alejandro, and Argentinian trap group CAR7IEL & Paco Amoroso also have all hinted at a GTA 6 collab.

"Wtf is going on lol," frets a popular Reddit comment in a thread about Future's teaser.

My personal conspiracy is that there's a difference between the musicians who have posted the same picture of a shiny, sunset-colored Corvette (Future, Metro Boomin, and Yung Lean) and those with unique images.

Keith Richards, for example, got to release a GTA 6 teaser of an iguana looking pensive in yellowish light. I'm inclined to think that this means that he, and the others with special images, like Travis Scott, will have character roles, while those who are posting that Corvette will be featured on GTA 6's radio. The GTA games have never been too modest for a celebrity cameo, after all, and they've hosted a huge variety of artists – like Twin Peaks actor Kyle MacLachlan in GTA 3, model Cara Delevingne in GTA 5, and late Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld, who played himself in GTA 4.

But the real point of GTA 6 marketing is to push fans to the fine edge of the cliff leading to a mental breakdown, so Rockstar hasn't yet offered any peace with an official explanation for the open-world game's latest blast of teasers.

King of '00s nightclub music T-Pain previously revealed his involvement with GTA 6 in 2024, and Widow's Bay actor Stephen Root just confirmed he'll appear in the game. So Rockstar is definitely unrolling a 1,000-foot red carpet for GTA 6, but we don't know why yet.

Rockstar boss says GTA 6's police "can be harder" to shake off than before, "but it's fun" because it forces you "to think more."