Gwent: Homecoming First Glimpse

It’s been a busy weekend for CD Projekt Red and Gwent. Not only did the latest installment of The Gwent Challengers Tournament take place, but we were also treated to a first glimpse of the upcoming Gwent: Homecoming overhaul.

Pawel Burza and Michal Dobrowolski—two of the developers currently working on the game—presented a 10-minute video to reveal Gwent: Homecoming during The fourth Gwent Challenger.

What immediately jumped out at us was just how different the game looked. The overhaul seems to have given the game a far more mature, darker feel, with the development team taking the aesthetics back to a more gritty, Witcher 3-esque theme. We liked it. In fact, it’s just what the game needed to separate itself from some of the more colorful, child friendly designs of other online card games. After all, Gwent started life inside The Witcher 3 universe, so it’s come as no surprise that we’ve been taken back there.

A number of new board designs have been promised based on fractions from the Witcher series. We got to feast our eyes on just one, a Monster type board with bones littered across the battleground,and with spooky looking trees and monsters surrounding them.

Visual updates also include 3D models, with leaders now appearing on the board as if they were squaring off in battle against one another. Homecoming also includes some major changes to the gameplay – for example, players can redraw many more cards during the mulligan phase with rejected cards now stacking at the side instead of being instantly re-shuffled into the deck. The biggest change, however, is the removal of one of the rows of cards. There will only be two rows for cards instead of three; the Melee Row, and the Ranged Row. Players will be able to play cards to different rows, and they may feature different effects or abilities in different rows.

We don’t yet have a release date for Gwent: Homecoming, but expect it to be released alongside ‘Thronebreaker’ – Gwents 30-hour long standalone RPG. Needless to say, we’re very much looking forward to both.