Jared’s Top Ten Games of This Horrible, Godforsaken Year

2. Gwent: The Witcher Card Game

It’s astonishing that between the first article I wrote about Gwent, the second one I wrote, and this now, the game has gone under some radical design changes when it comes to how Gwent is played. It’s unrecognizable to the version in the Witcher 3 for people in the know (if you aren’t they look identical, I know) but that speaks volumes to how much CD Projekt Red values experimentation and optimization, compared to Blizzard’s Team 5 and Hearthstone. One game has updates that take forever and leave the meta stale, the other keeps a healthy diet of paint coating. One is risk averse to patch their game for balance, which is criminal, the other is never afraid to rework an entire card from top to bottom, including the name you grew attached to. It’s night and day the differences between these two card games, and I hope it becomes a David and Goliath situation because I want nothing more than these two to improve their games in spite of each other, cut throat in their ambition, so everyone gets kick ass stuff to play. I’m not sure fat cat lazy Blizz will live up to it, and I don’t know when Gwent is going to actually release, but this is the era where games don’t even need official release dates. Like when could people play Battlefront 2? Does that matter? Which version is the one you review, the old one or the new one sans microtransactions? When is a game even complete? When it works? This is another rant for another day, but Gwent’s single player and storytelling puts it a step above the rest of the competition and I’m not even going to get into the actual jargon filled specifics and mechanics of the game because A) you don’t care or already know and B) I’ve written extensively about it already and I’m not going to beat a dead horse and C) I upload clips to my YouTube too often, just go watch those.

In less than 1 calendar year I have 600+ hours in this game, and that is all you need to know about why it is number 2 on my list. There is a lot of guilt mixed in with pride and enjoyment that came from me finding out I wasted 600 hours on this virtual children’s card game, but was is wasted if I liked every second of it? Is any time wasted? Can anyone truly retrieve the time they lost? Will anyone answer my rhetorical questions about time? Should I keep asking them?

Gwent is not the Dark Souls of card games.