When you think of ‘The Witcher’, I kinda doubt
the 427 failed spin-off games cross your mind. Instead you think of The Witcher 3, or if you want
to give yourself crippling impression maybe the Netflix show, but the truth is, CDPR have tried
around 4 million times to license out the Witcher for spin-offs, and with almost no exceptions
every attempt has failed, and I stress almost because things started off extremely interesting
in the Witcher 1 era, but then when we get to the Witcher 3 and beyond years… well, it ain’t pretty,
it’s actually kind of a bloodbath, in fact even saying it that way might be underselling
it, and we’re covering everything today, so strap yourself in because this story begins all
the way back in the ancient times, 2007, when it was decided that the moment had arrived to expand
on the modest success of the first Witcher game with a new Mortal Kombat ripoff, bet you haven’t
seen that one before, as well as a 2D beat-em-up / platformer, and that was the one that released
first. It’s called The Witcher: Crimson Trail, and after tracking it down which was a nightmare
because it borderline doesn’t exist at this point, well I have to say that it’s kind of amazing,
at least, amazing if you don’t care about little things like, you know, gameplay, because
that part of Crimson Trail is pretty boring, and what we need to get to is the reason
I beat this game nine times in a row. Why did I do that to myself if the gameplay made me
want to step into oncoming traffic? Well, one, because I have a compulsive need to not cut any
corners with my videos, it’s why they take like 3 weeks each because I don’t want to waste your
time with garbage, but 2 is because this little hour-long mobile game from 2007 not only has a
story, but it also has choices, consequences, and several endings, none of which are documented
anywhere so I had to blindly figure out what in the shell I was supposed to do to get each of
them, and one ended up being so unbelievably depressing even by Witcher standards that I could
hardly believe it. Now, just so we can continue and you have an idea of what this game is, here’s
the 20 second rundown gameplay-wise: Crimson Trail has 12 levels, but really, there are 4, you
just play through each environment 3 times in a row before you fight a boss and move on to the
next. The combat is just mindless button mashing with a combo system that doesn’t work properly,
you can just press whatever buttons you want and they’ll activate anyway, and the platforming
is just jumping without knowing where you’ll land because you can’t see that far. I mean it’s
a near 20-year-old java game, whatever, and let’s just get straight to where Crimson Trail gets
weirdly ambitious, which is with the story - so, you play as a very young Geralt who has just set
out on his own for the first time. You quickly come across your first major opponent, a Werewolf,
and once its been killed Geralt finds one of its previous victims, a nobleman, still clinging to
life. The dying man hands over a crumpled map leading to a nearby castle as well as a mysterious
ring featuring two engraved lion heads, and with his final breath the man says “save us”. Now,
this ring Geralt is given is extremely important, and it’s at this point where the major choices
begin in such a clever way for a game like this, especially when you consider where it all
leads. You see, after you play through the next environment, a Graveyard area outside the
castle from the map, you’ll come across a striga, and the “choice” you have to make here is one that
wouldn’t be obvious to non-Witcher fans. What you need to do for the good ending is not to fight or
run away, but to simply keep the Striga occupied. Just like in Witcher 1 and the original short
story, you can cure this thing by just surviving in its lair until sunrise, at which point the
Striga will transform into a young woman. Geralt then notices that this striga-woman bears a close
resemblance to the dead nobleman from which, and then she takes off towards the castle before
Geralt can stop her. Now, once you begin the next level, something you may notice while playing is
that one of the heads on the nobleman’s ring will not be lit up red, which doesn’t happen unless
you properly cure the striga. Lighting up the second head can be accomplished at the very end of
the castle area, which is filled with knights that can’t be killed. If you strike one down, it’ll
just get back up immediately, and what you need to do before moving on is to find one specific,
ever-so-slightly different looking knight. Once you’ve found the correct one and have dealt enough
damage to him, he’ll seem to come out of some sort of trance and will tell Geralt that a woman in
the nearby swamp placed a curse on his family, which includes the nobleman and the girl you cured
from her… uh, Striga-ness, and by the way that girl doesn’t ever show up again. You then have to
decide whether to kill this guy, or to spare him, and the correct choice for the good ending is to
let him live, at which point the second head on your lion ring will ignite and you’ll be ready
for the final boss in the next area. This boss is the reason the game is called Crimson Trail,
as it’s a vampire, a bruxa who’s been enslaving everything and everyone in the area, including
the family in the castle. Once this bruxa has been taken down you’ll face your final decision,
that being whether Geralt finishes her off or not, but this choice doesn’t really matter all that
much unless you’ve managed to fully ignite the nobleman’s ring. If you hadn’t, or only managed
to light up one of the heads, you’re locked into a horrible ending no matter what - if you spare
the bruxa, Geralt dies, and not in an ambiguous way - she knocks him unconscious, and his body is
pulled into the swamp and devoured - and believe it or not that’s the more upbeat ending of the
two. If you kill the bruxa then she uses her last bit of energy to transfer her essence into
Geralt, and the game ends by telling you that weeks after the events of Crimson Trail, tales
began circulating about a mad white-haired Witcher who’d been slaughtering innocents all across the
continent, and those stories led to a detachment from Kaer Morhen including Vesemir and Eskel
being dispatched to take Geralt down. I think even CDPR’s most depressing ending doesn’t touch
that one. Fortunately, the nobleman’s ring can change everything - if you made the right choices,
there is one good ending. Sparing the bruxa still ends poorly, she doesn’t kill Geralt because the
power of the ring saves him, but she continues to terrorize and enslave the locals, so this is the
‘you completely wasted your time and accomplished nothing’ ending. If you kill her in this situation
though, she’ll try but fail to take over Geralt’s body before death, and her reign of terror will
come to an official end, as will the game. You know, I gotta say, props to the devs of this game,
Breakpoint - they were working on a license from CDPR, and even though they went out of business
just months after Crimson Trail came out, I still think this game is pretty okay for what
it is. It’s not really worth playing in the 2020s, but it is interesting and more importantly, it’s
way more successful at what it’s trying to be than most of what’s coming up, which includes another
spin-off from the very next year, 2008. This one is called The Witcher DuelMail, or The Witcher
Versus, it changed names after release I assume because DuelMail is the clunkiest name for a game
I’ve ever heard. Anyway, you know how a little earlier I said that this second Witcher 1 era
spin-off was a Mortal Kombat clone? Well, I lied, because even if the Witcher Versus kinda looks
like a standard fighting game, it isn’t, at all. The Witcher Versus is actually an RPG, or scratch
that, it’s an RPS, meaning Rock Paper Scissors, because despite what you’re seeing, that’s more
or less what this game was. How the gameplay worked is you’d queue up a series of attacks, and
then send those attacks to another player as a challenge, at which point they’d have as long as
they needed to look at your sequence and respond to each move, so you could send a challenge,
log off for six months and then continue the same fight as long as your opponent had replied
during those six months, with the goal obviously being to be the last one with health. The Witcher
Versus had an absolutely stacked character lineup which included Geralt, Triss, the Frightener that
attacked Kaer Morhen, and, actually, that was it. There was no Vesemir or Zoltan or Lambert or Adda
or Eskel, but you could play as the Frightener, so, that was something I guess, and the game
even had microtransactions way back in 2008, as you could spend real money to buy mandrake, which
in turn would get you potions and other items to boost your survivability. The game was initially
PC only, before being brought to mobile for a very short time at which point the plug was pulled for
both platforms, and hey, speaking of mobile games that didn’t last long, let’s move onto one some of
you may have actually heard of: The Witcher Battle Arena, released in 2015, and yes, we did just jump
forward 7 years, because other than a physical board game that was given a digital edition,
there wasn’t anything else between 2008 and 2015, at which point they started really pumping ‘em
out. Before we get to the depression-inducing Battle Arena though, I do want to quickly thank
Displate for sponsoring this video. You probably already know that Displate make high quality,
metal posters, and script-they-sent-me-aside, the best possible pitch I can make is that for years,
long before this sponsorship, I’ve had a bunch of them displayed out in my living room. They took
10 seconds to install, they’ve stayed put for many months, and if I ever move they’ll come down in
another 10 seconds with no damage done. It really doesn’t get more convenient, and whatever your
tastes are, Displate have just about anything you can think of, from Witcher to Cyberpunk to Kingdom
Come to your favorite band or show, they probably have it, they’re all officially licensed, and if
you're interested now is the time, and here come the talking points, as through my channel you can
get 22% off 1-2 Displates, and 33% off 3 or more, and as this is a Christmas discount, that deal
will last until the 24th of December. Just use code Neon Knight at checkout or use the link in
my description to have the discount automatically applied. Now, that said, to get back to Battle
Arena, I do realize that many of you will be extremely, just incredibly jealous to hear that
I was among the lucky few to have played Battle Arena back in its prime, in fact it was my
first-ever Witcher game, not trying to brag, and anyway looking back now… what the shell were
they thinking with this one? I mean Battle Arena released right alongside Witcher 3 to try
and siphon players from one game to another, if I remember right physical copies of Witcher 3
came with an insert that had a code for a Geralt skin in Battle Arena to incentivize you to
try it out. Not a bad idea, right? Well, yeah, but for some reason beyond my comprehension there
was almost no content in Battle Arena for anyone who got on board the franchise with Witcher 3,
which was 95% of the playerbase. The gameplay of Battle Arena wasn’t anything amazing, but it
also wasn’t the problem - the main game mode was conquest, or capture the flag, whatever you
want to call it, where with a small team of Witcher characters you’d go to an objective,
gain control of it and earn points for doing so. Whichever team had more points when the time
was up won the match. Not exactly groundbreaking, but fine. Where it becomes extremely unsurprising
that this game was shut down in mere months despite Witcher 3 becoming the most popular game
of the year is when you look at the playable roster of Battle Arena. At launch, there was no
Yennefer, no Triss, no Dandelion, Ciri, Vesemir, Eredin, Eskel or Lambert, but instead the single
digit number of playable characters was made up of fan favorites like a random rock Golem you
could play as for some reason, and Eithne, a dryad from the books that isn’t in any of the
games, and also the Operator, a very optional boss from a Witcher 2 side quest. The only characters
for someone who might’ve been interested in Battle Arena because of Witcher 3, which is the entire
point of a game like this, were Geralt of course - Okay, this is future me chiming in with
an important Witcher Battle Arena update, bet that’s the first time anyone’s ever said that
sentence, but the denial has finally worn off, because while editing this video and looking
through every trailer, of which there are a ton… I realized that Geralt wasn’t there either. I
mean there’s a whole official roster announcement, and Geralt himself is nowhere to be found
even though he was in the game at launch, they just left him out of the trailers for some
reason. Like, I get that Battle Arena came out alongside Witcher 3, right before actually,
so you’d want some Witcher 2 content to ease people in, but… how does equal marketing
the game as having no Geralt, no Triss, and no Roche, aka the three most important
Witcher 2 characters? Anyway, as we’ll soon establish this sort of thing gets even worse with
our next game, so back to whatever I was saying - and I guess Zoltan, because the rest of the
launch lineup was made of characters like Iorveth, who’s not in Witcher 3, and Saskia, who also isn’t
in Witcher 3, and Philippa and Letho who are in Witcher 3, but barely. I mean, they did eventually
add a very small number of DLC characters, but even some of those are confusing, like
they added the Succubus from Witcher 2, that one specifically, and Vabjorn, a random warrior
from Skellige, and while they did eventually at least add Ciri and Yennefer, I feel like Battle
Arena is a game that deserved to fail, and you know they really missed the mark when every single
trailer makes this game look like it was meant to come out alongside the second game, not the third,
and the most shocking part is that Battle Arena isn’t even the worst-marketed game we’re covering
today. No, sadly that title goes to Thronebreaker, an absolute masterpiece that I am very sad to say
was failed by everyone who was involved in trying to make it look appealing to the public. In case
you don’t know, Thronebreaker is a single-player narrative-driven game that came out in 2018 on
the very same day as the multiplayer version of Gwent. Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, which
is its full name, was intended to be the first of an ongoing anthology Witcher Tale series, with
each one telling a standalone story in the Witcher universe. Thronebreaker specifically is about
the ruler of Lyria and Rivia, Queen Meve, and the second game was going to be about Iorveth. That
didn’t happen though, nor did any other Witcher Tale games, because at release Thronebreaker
flopped so unbelievably hard that all plans for future Witcher tales were scrapped. CDPR have
stated publicly, and that’s how you know it’s bad, that the game fell far short of expectations. The
number I’ve heard, and this part hasn’t been said outright, so take it for what it is, but the
number that’s out there is that Thronebreaker sold just 10% of what was projected, and whatever
the number was, the low sales were not because the game sucked, no, Thronebreaker bombed mostly
because the marketing was so unbelievably bad that I still can’t wrap my head around it, 5 years
later, and I have an oversized head. The trailers for Thronebreaker feel like acts of sabotage
by some mole planted deep within CDPR’s ranks, because they undersell everything that’s amazing
about the game while putting emphasis on its one weak point, and what’s worse, and this part is
beyond bizarre because it’s the entire point of a trailer, but you can watch all of them and
unless you already know, you’ll very likely come away from the trailers having no idea
what Thronebreaker is even supposed to be, and how in the shell do you sell people on a game
when they don’t know what it is? The answer is that you don’t, this game sold 3 copies worldwide,
and that’s such a shame because if you’re a Witcher fan who hasn’t played Thronebreaker, well
you owe it to yourself to check this game out if you can overlook its one flaw. That flaw, by the
way, has nothing to do with the storytelling, because Thronebreaker belongs in CDPR’s
holy trinity of incredible writing - of all the amazing work they’ve done and the great
stories they’ve told, the best, in my opinion, have been the Bloody Baron Questline, Hearts
of Stone, and Thronebreaker, and by the way, Thronebreaker doesn’t come last in that trio.
I would very much recommend not watching the trailers if you’re going to give Thronebreaker
a try, because you really should know as little about the story going in as possible. All you
should be aware of is that you play as Queen Meve, and when things go wrong in her kingdom… well, you
need to clean up the mess while killing a ship ton of Nilfgaardians in the process. The writing is
flawless, and I mean flawless, but the gameplay is where things are more of a mixed bag - the
exploration part of it, well, there’s very little to complain about there. You run through beautiful
linear areas while listening to the greatest soundtrack ever conceived by mankind, and every 60
seconds or so, you’ll come across a story event, most of which have choices, and if you love
Witcher 3 for it’s choices and consequences, well Thronebreaker arguably handles that sort of
thing even better than Witcher 3, which I realize is hard to believe but… it’s kinda true, I mean
everything that you do in Thronebreaker matters, there are a ton of endings, and the moral dilemmas
you’re placed in the middle of aren’t written like they were meant to be analyzed by someone with
severe head trauma, and thank you CDPR for that, because for some reason that’s how most games
handle choices, y’know, with no subtlety and very predictable outcomes. Thronebreaker, well,
it isn’t like that, and we’ll leave it there. Now, where the gameplay truly becomes a mixed bag,
because if you haven’t noticed I said it was one but then listed zero negatives, well, it’s the
battles, the combat is what brings it all down, because combat in Thronebreaker is represented by
a weird version of Gwent that isn’t like Witcher 3’s or the standalone game, and the single-most
important thing to know about Thronebreaker’s Gwent is that all of it can be skipped if
you don’t like it. It’s a completely optional part of the experience you can avoid with zero
drawbacks, and if you just want to take in the story and exploration, you can and should, do not
let the Gwent part rob you of an amazing story, and I feel very strongly that Thronebreaker never
should’ve had anything to do with Gwent, and that’s not because Gwent is terrible in this game,
it’s okay just mind-numbingly easy even on the highest difficulty, but I feel that way because
every single person on the planet should’ve been able to predict that Thronebreaker would only sell
2 copies worldwide if it was marketed as a weird, confused single-player Gwent spinoff hybrid mess,
which is what was done yet that description is an insult to what Thronebreaker really is. The
failure of the ‘Witcher Tales’ idea is so frustrating because it was so avoidable.
The anthology idea was and is perfect, and there could’ve, no, would’ve been a very
dedicated audience if it had been thought out just a little better and also maybe they should’ve
started with a more marketable character before dipping into the obscure. Point is though, I
want to live in a world where we’ve been getting a Witcher Tale every couple of years for the past
half decade. Anyway, hey, if you’re gonna be among the first to give Thronebreaker a try, because
as we’ve established it sadly only sold one copy, then consider buying it or any other games on GoG
and using my link which is in the description, helps out the channel. Now, you might be wondering
if I’m also going to talk about the somewhat slow, mostly ignored death of standalone Gwent, which
has recently received the pillow-over-the-nose treatment. CDPR announced at the beginning of 2023
that the plug was being pulled after a few small, final updates which have now come and gone, and
while the servers will remain online for now at least, it’s pretty wild to see how far the game
has cratered. The sad truth is that Gwent gets a lot of negative reactions from people coming off
of Witcher 3, which is fair, it’s very different, but in my opinion at least Gwent was always a
good game, and at times it was a truly great game that really did a lot of things right and
put the community first to a pretty wild extent, the Gwent team really did seem to care, and I
would argue that in terms of artwork and music… well… games don’t get better than Gwent, and
I’m far from a monocle-wearing wine-sipping art connoisseur, it’s just that Gwent’s artwork was
consistently that good, I mean you could show it to an uncontacted tribe off the coast of India
and the first thing they’d do is ask how they could commission the artist in question, within a
week they’d have an Artstation account. Beautiful artwork can’t save a game though, and despite
the positives I’ve always felt that Gwent as a standalone experience was doomed from the very
beginning. Why? Well, for reasons we already kinda touched on. 99.7% percent of people who try
standalone Gwent are Witcher 3 refugees, fans like me or you who played Witcher 3, loved it, and
wanted more. Where does that lead you? Well, if you liked Witcher 3’s Gwent then at one point
or another it likely lead you to standalone Gwent, and part of the reason the game’s playerbase was
constantly getting smaller, even years ago before it really started falling off, is that with each
passing update Gwent became less beginner friendly and more unrecognizable to new players who were
coming off of Witcher 3 Gwent and thinking of giving this version a shot. As someone who has way
too many hours in standalone Gwent, I am not an outsider talking about the game here, well there’s
a lot I could say about smaller mistakes made along the way that frustrated the Gwent community,
or lead to some seasons here and there with really annoying metas, but I don’t think any of that is
even necessary because those small missteps just aren’t what doomed the game. The devs have always
had a pretty impossible situation to deal with, where Gwent as a standalone experience could not
continue without some monetization and an active playerbase, but most incoming new players were
expecting something that could never maintain an active playerbase. Listen, I loved Witcher 3 Gwent
my first time around, but there’s nothing to it, it completely falls apart when you add a PvP
element to the mix, and at most it could’ve been a $5 offline mobile app you’d open once a month
when bored out of your mind. It was built for mindless fun against stupid AI, nothing about
it lended itself to a competitive experience, and while the original Gwent beta was cool, almost
all of its gameplay issues were a direct result of it trying to sort of cling to the Witcher 3 Gwent
formula, and as much as people like to look back at the beta fondly, it had a lot of problems that
just would’ve become worse and worse as players increased in skill. So, what we eventually
ended up getting from standalone Gwent was a more traditional, much more complex card game,
which I have seen firsthand a million times from my comments, just is not what most Witcher fans
wanted out of Gwent. To me, it’s just a situation where the failure of this game really isn’t
anyone’s fault - the blame definitely doesn’t fall on the fans, because their expectations are what
they are for a reason, and it really isn’t the fault of devs either, even though I do think Gwent
could’ve done a better job at easing new players in and also welcoming them back after a break,
because one thing I did find was that Gwent was consistently brutal to return to after anything
more than like a month away from the game. Anyway, it wasn’t just standalone Gwent that CDPR told
to look at the flowers within the last year, no, shortly before Gwent was put to death a second
Gwent-related single-player game was released, and it’s not a Witcher Tale but something
completely different. I’m talking about The Witcher Rogue Mage, or Gwent Rogue Mage, which
was unceremoniously dumped onto the market with zero advertising in the summer of last year.
If I remember right Rogue Mage was very quietly announced the day before it released, the day
before, and the official Witcher accounts didn’t even post about it at all, only the Gwent-specific
ones. It felt like CDPR just didn’t want people to know this game even existed, maybe because
Rogue Mage doesn’t feel like a finished game, or even a finished expansion, because in some
but not all places it’s subtitled as an expansion even though it is a completely separate game. No,
what Rogue Mage really feels like is the skeletal, picked over remains of a once-good idea,
like there was a solid pitch that was given a greenlight, development started but then they
were told pretty early on to just wrap up what they already had and put it out, because someone
realized very few people were going buy… this, which they didn’t. Shell, when I was recording
the gameplay for this video Rogue Mage had just 1 player online, which was me, so… Anyway, in
Rogue Mage you can experience 99% of what the game offers in about 40 minutes. You build a deck, play
a few Gwent matches in a row before a boss match that ends your session, and then you repeat that
same exact thing over and over again. That’s all there is to Rogue Mage, other than very occasional
story cutscenes except calling them cutscenes is an exaggeration, because the “cutscenes” in Rogue
Mage amount to you staring at a rough black and white sketch for 3 minutes straight, and I can’t
imagine that was intended to be the final product. The bones of the story that exist are kind of
interesting, they detail how the mage Alzur created the first Witcher, but across the hours
you have to grind to unlock those rough sketches, there’s only 10 minutes of story content in total,
that’s how barebones it is, and barebones is honestly the perfect word to describe Rogue Mage
as a whole, and the only saving grace the game has is that if you want to buy it only costs 10-$20
dollars depending on which version you pick up, so at that price, it’s not really worth being
too hard on it, and I do think it’s possible to get $10 of value out of it. Now, you may have
noticed that in covering Rogue Mage I skipped over a Witcher game from 2021, a game that many
consider a classic, and by many I mean, well… no one. The game in question was skipped over for two
reasons - so I could have all the Gwent-related stuff together, and because I figured we may as
well end on a game that truly didn’t get anything right after it launched, and I’m talking about
The Witcher Monster Slayer, a Pokemon Go clone that had some redeemable qualities at first but
then almost immediately started to gut everything it had going for it. If you didn’t know, Monster
Slayer only lasted a little over a year before being pulled from all app stores, and that was due
to the minior issue of…. y’know, nobody playing it, and as someone who tried this game out at
release and stuck around for a bit… well, it’s not hard to understand why. The core of the game was
mostly what you’d expect - you’re a Wolf-School Witcher so go kill some monsters out in the world,
even though you don’t have a silver sword because the game stuck those behind a paywall, and no,
I’m not kidding. Steel sword only for you unless you were ready to grind or cough up, with basic
silver swords starting at $5 and going all the way up to $50+, because this game was the anti-Gwent,
with pretty obnoxious microtransactions that only increased in their obnoxiousness as time went on,
to the point where about a year after release the decision was made to ruin everything about the
game to try and get you to open your wallet. When Monster Slayer first came out, the combat was
somewhat skill-based - spending money helped, but there was a perfect parry system to completely
avoid damage, critical hits were something you earned, the game had a full-blown RPG style
skill tree you had to be strategic with, and potions and oils were something you had to use
wisely, only dipping into your supply when a tough fight called for them. Then, with just one update
in 2022, nearly everything skill-based was wiped out. Alchemy had to be used even for basic fights,
perfect parries didn’t block damage anymore, the skill tree was completely removed, and….
well, by this point you probably see what they were trying to accomplish with those changes. Too
many people were playing and progressing without entering their credit card info, so Spokko,
the now-defunct developer of Monster Slayer, just removed everything that made the game a game,
and turned combat into something you just watched while mindlessly scribbling, with the outcome of
anything other than basic fights almost entirely being based on how much money you’d spent.
It was kinda shameless even by mobile gaming standards where the bar isn’t exactly high, and
unsurprisingly just months later, The Witcher Monster Slayer died what I think was a pretty
well-deserved death, rounding out what can only be described as a disastrous Witcher 3 and beyond
era of spinoffs. Anyway, if you enjoyed the video please consider leaving a like, that’s how YouTube
decides what is worthy content, and if you want to see more consider subscribing. I’m gonna date the
video here but in the next month I have an Elden Ring video coming up, Plague Tale as well, and
finally you guys will soon get the follow up to the big Every Choice Geralt Would Make video,
this time covering Hearts of Stone. Thank you to my Patrons as always for their support,
consider checking it out we have a Discord and early videos and other bonus, plus don’t
forget to play Thronebreaker, and by the way, saving this for the very end but if you don’t have
Thronebreaker and want it, go follow me on Twitter and Tweet at me and I’ll try to get a few of you
guys codes. Anyway, that’s all for now… see ya.
