Ready for some crazy The Witcher 3 news? This, apparently, is what years of dedication to your IP and artful refinement of your category buys you: The third installment in a once-abstruse roleplaying series by likewise recondite Polish developer CD Projekt Red sold 4 million copies in its first two weeks.
That’s not quite Skyrim turf — Bethesda’s open-world roleplaying opus managed 7 million copies in just one week and over 20 million copies to date. But it’s one heck of an upsurge over the last game in CPR’s series, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, itself considered a resounding success both critically and commercially for the developer, with somewhere in the vicinity of 2 million copies sold worldwide.
I was lucky enough to get in on the ground floor with the original The Witcher, a PC-only game that came out of nowhere back in 2007, packing a lot of the play components and storytelling tenor sorely missing from the merry-go-round of increasingly anemic, cliche-riddled vamps on Dungeons & Dragons.
The Witcher 3, to trot out a highfalutin word, may be the apotheosis of the stadium-rock roleplaying shtick–the Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band of video gaming. I’m still not finished with it, but I can say I’m much happier, 50 hours in, than I was with Skyrim at the same point. Will The Witcher 3 push past Skyrim sales? Probably not. But remember, it took Bethesda five The Elder Scrolls games to reach Skyrim‘s numbers, and CD Projekt Red’s already clearing the charts with game number three.
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Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Activision's futuristic first-person shooter in which players take on a rogue private military company uses a brand new engine built specifically for PCs and new-gen consoles to handle its cutting-edge lighting, animation and physics.
Sledgehammer Games/ActivisionFar Cry 4. This pulled back shot of fictional Himalayan region Kyrat is in-game, believe it or not, rendered with an overhauled version of the engine Ubisoft used to design Far Cry 3.
UbisoftThe Last of Us: Remastered. Naughty Dog's meditation on the worst (and best) of humanity is built on technology that reaches back through the studio's pulp-adventure Uncharted series.
The graphics are so impressive,
TIME recently assigned a conflict photographer to photograph inside the game.Ashley Gilbertson for TIMEAlien: Isolation
Built from scratch, the Alien: Isolation engine's outstanding deep space visuals all but replicate the set design of Alien film concept artists H.R. Giger and Ron Cobb's work.
The Creative AssemblyAssassin's Creed Unity. Ubisoft says it "basically remade the whole rendering engine" in its AnvilNext design tool to handle the studio's meticulous recreation of Paris during the French Revolution.
UbisoftChild of Light
Inspired by filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki and artist Yoshitaka Amano, Child of Light's hand-drawn artwork puts the lie to presumptions that graphical richness depends on shader support or polygon counts.
UbisoftDestiny
Built from scratch by ex-Halo studio Bungie, Destiny's game engine was designed to scale across the next decade, says the studio.
BungieMario Kart 8
Nintendo's kart-racer for Wii U reminds us that raw horsepower is just a facet of crafting a beautiful game world.
NintendoInfamous Second Son
Sucker Punch's freeform Seattle-based superhero adventure models all sorts of minutia, from the intricate wrinkling of an aged character's face to the way eyelids stick, slightly, before separating when characters blink.
Sucker Punch Productions Monument Valley
Escher-like at first glance, Ustwo's mind-bending puzzler was also inspired by posters, bonsai plants, arabic calligraphy and filmmaker Tarsem Singh's The Fall.
UstwoGrand Theft Auto V
Rockstar's remastered crime spree opus was crafted from an in-house engine first employed in a game that simulated table tennis.
RockstarTitanfallRespawn EntertainmentForza Horizon 2
Turn 10's Euro-racer actually models light refracted through drops of moisture, the render tech plausibly simulating something as intangible but essential as the earth’s atmosphere.
Microsoft Studios/Turn 10 Studios80 Days
Inkle's anti-colonialist vamp on Jules Verne's famous novel uses crisp art deco imagery inspired by travel posters to unfurl 80 Days' tale of intrepid globetrotters Monsieur Fogg and his valet Passepartout.
InkleTomb Raider
Crystal Dynamics' radical reboot of its popular series about an athletic archaeologist uses a modified version of the engine that powered Tomb Raider: Legend in 2006.
Square Enix
