Today I was surprised to see that CDPR was hosting a Twitch stream with live gameplay from Wild Hunt. I'm pretty excited for this game, so I thought I'd take some notes on what they discussed and showed. I apologize in advance if this doesn't come out organized very well...

Combat

Some quick notes about combat, in no particular order:

• There are heavy, medium, and light armors. Different armors affect stamina regeneration
• Stamina is used for signs, so regen is important if you focus on that playstyle (more on playstyles later)
• The yellow bar beneath each enemy's health is their stamina. If their stamina drains, they may become stunned. You can focus on bringing down their stamina to take them out
• You can equip potions mid-combat
• To avoid damage you can block, dodge, or counter attacks
• Blocking may cause the enemy to be stunned, opening them up for an attack
• There are two types of dodging: short and long range. Short dodges allow you to get around your enemy and follow up with a counter attack. Long dodges allow you to create (or close) a lot of distance between you and your enemy
• There is a timing mechanic for parries, both with swords and with arrows. For enemy sword strikes, their health bar glows the moment you can counter them. I'm not sure about how you deflect arrows, but I assume it's rather similar. There is a potion that can increase your parry window
• You can use adrenalin points to perform special attacks (both with swords and signs, I think). Adrenalin points are gained as you continue to attack your opponents, but can also be taken away if you're hit

Builds

Over the course of the livestream, CDPR showed off how you can play the game in any way you want. Specifically, they demonstrated combat-, alchemy-, and sign-based builds. To achieve this, they showed off the synergy between the talent tree and items, runes, and weapons.

The Talents screen is broken up into quadrants; two quadrants were unlocked during this demonstration. Each quadrant contains 3 slots for equipable talents along with 1 slot for a mutagen. Note you can switch out your equipped talents at any time.

There are a wide variety of Talents to choose from. There are 3 trees (Combat, Signs, and Alchemy) of 20 Talents, and a General tree of 10 Talents. Mutagens are also shown on this screen, and are collected in another page alongside the previously mentioned trees. The Talents in these trees can be upgraded to either 2, 3, or 5 levels, with each level increasing its potency and effect on Geralt's abilities. When equipping these talents, they are deposited into one of the slots in the quadrants I mentioned earlier. You can boost the effectiveness of the talents by placing a mutagen in its quadrant slot. Matching the color of the mutagen with the color of the talent (red for Combat, blue for Signs, and green for Alchemy) will boost the skills even further.

Now some more notes on builds:

• You can use runes, oils, and elixirs to boost your abilities even further
• Runes go in weapon slots and add not only boosts for your playstyle, but also have a cool visual effect
• Armor enhancements are available too, and act the same as runes for weapons. Upgrading your armor also has a visual difference
• Interesting thing is, though, you can extract the rune (or enhancement) from its slot by going to a blacksmith and then use it on another weapon (or armor). You can instead salvage the weapon or armor and lose the rune or enhancement in the process.
• You can upgrade potions
• Once you craft a potion, it is always available to you (I think). You have a certain number of uses, but you can regenerate potions by meditating
• Each point towards increasing Signs' strength also helps stamina regen (I think)
• They mentioned once you spend a lot of points into Signs, you can basically spam them because of the stamina regen
• Each Sign has two versions: a tap and a hold of the button. Each has its own use. An example is the Igni sign which with a tap casts a cone of fire, but with a hold you can basically aim a jet of flame like a flamethrower
• You can switch talents mid-combat to account for different combat situations

And Some Final Notes

• Your horse has inventory slots too:
• The trophy slot (from your slain monsters, like the head of a gryphon) can buff your abilities. It also shows dangling off of Roach
• The saddle bag slot increases your inventory weight limit
• The saddle slot increases Roach's stamina
• And the blinders slot covers Roach's eyes, increasing the time during which he isn't afraid of oncoming monsters
• You can temporarily tame a new horse with the Axii sign. But Roach is your real horse, always
• There are 4 levels of difficulty, named specifically for how they expect people to play the game: "Just the Story," "Story & Sword," "Blood & Broken Bones," and "Death March."
• The difficulty changes effect how much damage enemies deal and take, as well as Geralt's stat scaling
• Oh, and CDPR removed all QTE's from the game

I hope you all are as excited as I am, and thanks for reading!

EDIT: Removed link to the archive, which no longer exists.

Neat. I didn't even know there was a livestream. Is it archived anywhere?

@shadowconqueror: Just updated the post with this link to the archive :)

EDIT: Removed link to the archive, which no longer exists

Now to finish witcher 2.

I like the idea of playing as Wizard Geralt, so I hope the variable build stuff pans out. It's clear they were shooting for that in the Witcher 2, but you pretty much had to specialize in swordplay to get anything done.

@onionknight14: Cool, thanks.

• You can equip potions mid-combat

HALLE-FUCKING-LUJAH!

I don't even need to hear anything else. This alone makes me so damn happy.