The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Complete Edition launches on Switch this October
The Witcher 3 was announced for Switch earlier this year during E3, and given a tentative release window of “sometime this year.” Now, it has a date, and it’s closer than you’d think.
CD Projekt Red announced during Gamescom today that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Complete Edition will launch on the Switch on the 15th of October in the US, Europe, and Australia, and the 17th of October in Japan.
The package comes with the base game, the Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine story expansions, and all 15 free DLCs, said to offer over 150 hours of open-world fun. Not content with just announcing the release date, the dev team also put together an absolutely gargantuan 41-minute long gameplay overview video. It’s pretty impressive.
The good folks over at Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry have also put their eyes (and analysis machines) on the game, showing that the game runs at a mostly-locked 30fps, at a dynamic resolution of between 540p and 720p while docked. It’s a compromise, to be sure, but having this running on the Switch at all is nothing short of a miracle.
We’ll be sure to bring you more news on The Witcher 3 as it happens, and keep your eyes out for a Bargain Roundup closer to release.
The fact that all of the DLC will be included on the cartridge (instead of being tied to a single account) also makes this excellent value, and this is also the first Switch game released internationally to ship on a 32GB cartridge.
The only other Switch games to have been released on 32GB cartridges include Dragon Quest Heroes I + II (which is still exclusive to Japan) and the Japanese/Asian releases of Final Fantasy X/X-2, which contains both games on the same cartridge (spawning separate icons for each game) as opposed to the Western release, which only includes the first game on the cartridge and the second as a download code. The most insulting thing about this release is that the infinitely superior Asian release costs the game as it would to buy the inferior local release, so importing is highly recommended for those interested.
And that’s it as far as I’m aware. Every other physical game over 16GB (that I am aware of) was given a crappy partial-cartridge release by their publishers, and I was stunned that Nintendo would ever allow such a hideous anti-consumer practice to take place on their platform. I can’t help but think that Iwata-san would not have had a bar of it if he had still been alive.