TOKYO: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, in just 25 hours. Be still your beating hearts, all you stalwarts planning a semester off (or extended leave of absence from work) to lavish a reported 200 or more hours polishing off the full game the studio doubtless hopes we’ll play in its entirety.
That 25-hour figure must be robot-assembly-line math, a swaggering integer devoid of narrative context, thoughtful exploration, or much to do with diversionary raisons d’être (i.e. genuine enjoyment). The Witcher 3 feels like Leviathan peering over the horizon, a moon-sized planetoid quietly rounding the outer rim of the solar system, wheeling through vacuum with the gravitas of an extinction event headed straight for our living rooms.
200 hours isn’t the far-flung playtime estimate, either. CD Projekt Red announced earlier this week that at least two expansions to the game are happening. One’s a 10-hour-plus mystery arriving later this year, the other a 20-hour-plus trip to an entirely new region due in early 2016.
“We remember the time when add-on disks truly expanded games by delivering meaningful content,” said CD Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwiński.
