The Witcher card game Gwent to wind down next year
Community will be given reigns to vote on balance changes.
CD Projekt Red has announced plans to wind down support for Gwent, its Witcher card game spin-off, and laid out how it will hand over future balancing decisions to Gwent's community of players.
The game's final 72 cards will release next year in three expansions, set to launch in April, July and September 2023. After this time, CD Projekt will transition from its own monthly balance changes to a system voted on by players.
Dubbed as "Project Gwenfinity", the idea is that Gwent can be left to just a skeleton crew within CD Projekt to keep an eye on, while the game's community decides on tweaks to exisiting cards to keep up with the current meta.
"We believe that this existing card pool can be improved in terms of viability of the meta, [but] there is no need to introduce rotation anymore," Gwent director Vlad Tortsov said in a 2023 roadmap video for the game. "With this fixed number of cards within Gwent, we will do our best to make sure it’s in a good state meta-wise.
"We want to give the Gwent community the right tools and opportunities to drive the balance changes of the game going forward."
How exactly this will look - and how bad elements in the community will be limited from changes which could unbalance the game further - remains to be seen.
A spin-off from the Gwent mini-game playable in The Witcher 3, Gwent originally launched as a standalone game for PC, PlayStation and Xbox in 2018, with mobile versions arriving thereafter.
This year also saw the launch of Gwent: Rogue Mage, a roguelike single-player game based around on deckbuilding for PC and mobile.
Existing Gwent team members will be shuffled into other CD Projekt projects next year - and there's plenty keeping the studio busy. In the world of The Witcher, CD Projekt is now hard at work on a fresh trilogy of titles, while a Witcher 1 remake is made externally. The company is also getting ready to launch a Cyberpunk 2077 expansion, beginning work on a sequel, and developing an entirely new IP.
Speaking of The Witcher 3, our Bertie has just got back from giving its brand new console update a go.