While The Witcher won't be getting any new video games anytime soon, CD Projekt Red has unveiled a new way for fans of the iconic fantasy franchise to experience a world of monsters and mayhem. A new board game has been revealed called The Witcher: Old World, and it looks like the perfect excuse for us to immerse ourselves within the land of witchers once more.
Created in conjunction with Go On Board, this latest board game is designed by Lukasz Wozniak, a name that has created numerous tabletop adventures including Valhalla and Titans.
The Witcher: Old World is an experience meant for 2-5 players and serves as a prequel to the tale of protagonist Geralt of Rivia. "Players take on a role of professional monster slayers who recently completed their brutal training in one of the witcher schools: School of Wolf, Viper, Cat, Bear or Griffin," says the Polish studio about the latest Witcher take. "On their adventures across the Continent, young witchers will face difficult choices, take on contracts, battle monsters — and perhaps find themselves brawling with another witcher in order to defend their school’s honor!"
In order to get your hands on this new board game, the company is looking for your help! The Kickstarter for The Witcher: Old World will go live sometime this May and will allow fans of the series to contribute in a chance to unlock additional surprises. With the Kickstarter planned later this year, the team is looking at an April 2022 launch for both English and Polish speakers at this time, though additional language options are "being negotiated."
To learn more, get in on the Kickstarter action early by checking out the page right here.
Thoughts on a new The Witcher board game? What other adaptations would you like to see land on a tabletop near you? Sound off with your thoughts in the comment section below!
Epic Games has pulled the curtain back on MetaHuman Creator, its upcoming character creation app used for sculpting highly realistic human models for use in video games. The streamlined service is designed to expedite the game development workflow for studios of all sizes by allowing creators to create next-gen caliber models in a fraction of the time.
According to Epic’s blog post (thanks, Gamasutra), the technology condenses weeks or months of character design to “less than an hour”. How it works is that the engine draws from a large cloud database of different human appearances and motions. MetaHuman then blends those variants together in, as Epic puts it, “a plausible, data-constrained way.” Users can begin by selecting preset faces and build from there. Models are constructed using 30 different hair types, 18 proportioned body types, and various clothing options. The best part? All of this work can be done in a browser.
Click here to watch embedded mediaOnce the model is done, users can download it, fully rigged and ready for animation, to import into other programs for continued work. Epic plans to hold an early access period in the coming months and have created finished sample models for designers to download and tinker with.
As a former game design student, I know firsthand that creating a single, well-designed human being in a game takes a lot of time and effort, not to mention skill. I would have loved to mess with something like this back in college, as it might have saved me from many long nights crafting all sorts of abominations posing as human beings. This technology is very impressive pretty (and kind of freaky), and I'm excited to see how MetaHuman Creator affects the game development cycle going forward.
[Source: Epic Games via Gamasutra]