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Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

> Now we know that it's a ground-up remake of the game that introduced Geralt of Rivia to Witcher fans outside of Poland.

I was always of the impression that it was Witcher III that achieved this.

I'm Polish so I genuinely don't know. Were the previous two installments popular outside of Poland?

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Witcher 1 made a big splash among fans of PC RPGs and action RPGs. Didn't hurt that it landed in the middle of a relative doldrums for those genres—they got much healthier again a bit after that.

2 and 3 switched to a more console-friendly style of play and had good success there, though, so I expect they did more to spread the word than 1 did.

Witcher 2 was popular in my social circle in the USA. A lot of us went back to Witcher 1 afterwards to get a better idea of the story.

So I'd say Witcher 2 was when the series started to get popular. Witcher 3 was riding on 2's coattails. Now that the Netflix show is popular, Witcher1 does deserve a remake.

Witcher 1 not so much, but Witcher 2 had a pretty good 360 port that a lot of people played in the West, and PC version did well too - across all platforms 1.7 million copies sold by 2012, another article I saw suggests 8 million by 2014.

I think thats getting towards very roughly ~1/4 the success of Witcher 3, volume wise. Not bad, considering Witcher 3 volume includes a portable Switch release.

> https://www.eurogamer.net/the-witcher-2-sales-top-1-7-millio...

etc.

> Not bad, considering Witcher 3 volume includes a portable Switch release.

I've seen the Switcher. Wasn't actually half as bad as I anticipated. All the more surprising that CDPR is abandoning their own engine in favour of UE5.

I don't think they're abandoning it, they are just going to hire a new team to remake W1 in Unreal Engine, while the core team works on new games using proprietary tools

Actually no, they announced some time ago that the next Witcher games (a trilogy) would be made with UE5.

their "own engine" I think is a euphemism here - its arguably several different ones. By many internal accounts, engine development has been hell (see the Cyberpunk launch issues), with each game CD Project Red start being in many ways a complete rewrite to the extent its not charitable to describe it as a single engine.

I think less time on game engine tech and hopefully more on shipping creative features sounds good to me, although it is sad to lose yet another independently developed game engine.

> with each game CD Project Red start being in many ways a complete rewrite to the extent its not charitable to describe it as a single engine.

That's normal and fully expected. You generally don't maintain an in-house engine the way general-purpose engines are maintained. You don't make it as generic as possible to accommodate for various uses, like Godot, Unreal or Unity do. Instead, you make games and then your engine is an optional byproduct of those games. It gets to be as specific to your game as you need or want it to be.

Its not great data, but peak Steam player counts:

Witcher 1 Enhanced Edition: 12,685

Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition: 12,884

Witcher 3 Wild Hunt: 103,329

Witcher 1 & 2 were popular within the PC RPG niche in France. It attracted the same types that were into Neverwinter Nights, Gothic 2, Morrowind etc.

Popular might be a stretch, but they had their audience. I played Witcher 1 shortly after it came out and I bought the collectors edition of Witcher 2 on release. So there were definitely fans out there. But it definitely wasn’t popular in the way that, say, Mass Effect (which came out around about the same time) was popular.

They were moderately popular games in the US for those that didn't constrain themselves to the AAA powerhouses (no judgement either way). I didn't play them at the time, but knew of their existence and that they were supposed to be good.

The Witcher 1 had a relatively large cult following for such an obscure game. The Witcher 2 took it to the next level.

> Were the previous two installments popular outside of Poland?

I would guess so, but the third one was even more popular. Maybe 3 is a bit like Skyrim.

I only played the third one. One of my friends was already a fan of the other 2 back then.

Witcher 1 was pretty niche but I played it as a 15 year old rpg fan and liked it a lot. It wasn't as well known mainstream as mass effect but most gamers surely at least heard of it.

According to this site (can't vouch for how accurate their numbers are) The Witcher III sold ~12 million copies on Steam, The Witcher II sold ~6 million, and the original sold ~3 million. That's not counting sales on GOG and other stores, consoles, etc. And I personally got copies of the first and second game around the time the second game released.

https://vginsights.com/game/292030

If it doesn't count sales on GOG then it's not really reliable. GOG is owned by CD Projekt group, and one of the big points when releasing Witcher games was that people bought them on GOG so that all money went to the devs instead of paying the Steam tax.

How many people were aware of that campaign? Maybe in the Witcher/CDPR superfan groups, but on the scale of 12 million copies I can't imagine it budges the number that much.

I don't know why we're only talking about the PC version anyway, there's apparently been 40 million copies sold across all platforms according to a quick Google search, so most people didn't even play on PC.

>I don't know why we're only talking about the PC version anyway

Because the post I was replying to was about the popularity of The Witcher in the west before The Witcher III, and the first Witcher game was a PC exclusive so there are no console sales to factor in to the comparison.

Yes, they were very popular in some circles. My preferred Witcher games are, in order, 3 then 1 then 2. I vividly remember Witcher 1 for one very difficult battle in the first part and some yellow fields later on. In Witcher 2 the combat system was not that pleasant for me, so I did not play too much even if I bought it. For Witcher 3 I waited a couple of years after I bought it to play it, waiting for a new GPU that was good enough to play on highest detail level.

witcher 1 spread to all dnd groups I had contact with back in Italy. not a large sample size, but within our niche it was well known and well received, jankiness notwithstanding

Witch 2 definitely was. Witcher 1...maybe? I thought it was a pretty mediocre game, so I doubt it was really that popular anywhere outside of Poland.

What's impressive is how much better each sequel was compared to the previous game. It was a giant leap in both graphics and gameplay from 1 to 2 and 2 to 3.

The first game was rough but very enjoyable, And I actually liked the second one a lot as well. (even have the special edition with the coin/maps/booklets and all that jazz)

Still haven't finished the main story of the third game tough...

I was a relatively active PC gamer in the US at the time they all came out...

I somehow didn't know about Witcher until the third made a big wave! Granted, I was only playing some of the most obvious/big RPGs at the time

At the time I was more into FPS

From what I saw Witcher 1 had a following in RPG players, back in the day I remember seeing one guy at multiple lans play the game. Witcher 3 though was the big breakout where I saw people get excited for it and play it.

I can only speak for Czechia and here the Witcher II definitely made a splash.

I would say W1 was successful too. At least for me it has stronger story telling then W2 which is too political for me.

When I first played W1, there was no North American release. I only found it because metacritic listed it with fantastic reviews in Europe and I tracked down a place to buy it there.

It was an amazing game at the time.

> I'm Polish so I genuinely don't know. Were the previous two installments popular outside of Poland?

Not as much as the 3rd one but popular enough to get two sequels.

> Were the previous two installments popular outside of Poland?

Witcher 2 was the first time I heard of the franchise.

Heavy gamer here. I heard of the first Witcher but didn't think to play it until after I tried The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, which is still my favorite game in the series.

I can only really speak to my experience, but I don't really remember Witcher 1 being a thing. Witcher 2 was pretty big and then Witcher 3 was pretty massive.

I saw the tech demo for Witcher 1 and got the game subsequently afterwards. I lived in Canada at the time.

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