The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is celebrating its 15-year anniversary today, May 17, 2026. Below, we examine how its release reflects a particular time in gaming history, making it one-of-a-kind.
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings was a standout RPG when it launched fifteen years ago, but it’s the kind of game you could never make now.
Each of the three games in the Witcher series marks an important moment for developer CD Projekt Red. The Witcher was the moment the organization went from being a studio that mostly translated games from other territories to being a developer of new games. The Witcher 3 was the moment CD Projekt Red became a household name among gamers, as it set a high-water mark for open-world RPGs that similar games are still compared against.
But The Witcher 2 was a moment of true ambition for the studio. It was the first time the studio reached for technical excellence, developing its own graphics engine to move the Witcher series from being an awkward re-engineering of someone else’s engine to something of CD Projekt’s own. It also marked the moment when the studio began trying to push the limits of storytelling in video games.
The idea that choices matter in an RPG is something CD Projekt has chased across all of its games. The Bloody Baron questline in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has Geralt investigating a missing persons case, only to discover a painful family history. He has to make a difficult choice to end a curse. In Cyberpunk 2077, V is employed by a mayoral candidate named Jefferson Peralez, who believes there’s more to the former mayor’s death than a simple assassination. During the investigation, V discovers that Peralez’ beliefs are correct, but go much deeper than he expects. V has to decide whether to lie to him and let him live a happy but false life, or to tell him the cold truth and possibly destroy his life. These quests both offer difficult decisions, but the course of the main story remains largely unchanged regardless of your choice.
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
The Witcher 2 perhaps puts the most drastic decision to players. At the end of the first act, you’ll be presented with a choice: Side with the rebel resisters of the Scoia’tael or the Temerian special military group called the Blue Stripes.
While this is a serious philosophical decision in the context of The Witcher, it also has perhaps the greatest influence of any single decision in a modern game. If Geralt sides with the Scoia’tael, you’ll head to the Dwarven town of Vergen with Scoia’tael leader Iorveth. If Geralt sides with the Blue Stripes, you end up at the Kaedweni military camp with Blue Stripes commander Vernon Roche.
Which side you choose determines where you’ll spend the second act of the game; once you choose, all of the quests, characters, and locations of the other path are cut off. You have to miss a quarter of the game’s content.
And that just wouldn’t happen in a game made today, for a bunch of reasons.
Even at the time of release, The Witcher 2 sat firmly in the so-called double-A space of gaming–not an indie game, not a blockbuster aimed at a huge audience, but rather a game made with high production values for a specific audience. In the time since the game’s 2011 release, game publishers have become more and more risk-averse, and that means they’re looking for something that’s either very low-risk, or a game-changing success. The games in the middle tend to be moderately risky and moderately successful–all while still being a long wait for return on investment.
Games also simply take more time and money to create. To use CD Projekt as an example of growing development time, the Witcher games were released in 2007, 2011, and 2015, with the fourth game releasing in 2027 at the earliest. With Cyberpunk 2077 releasing in 2020, that’s still at least a seven-year cycle from production to release–nearly twice as long as the earlier games. Developing a huge section of the game that half of your audience won’t see is a big gamble. Players generally don’t play games like these more than once, so the people spending money on development will be tempted to look at something like The Witcher 2’s second act as development budget being wasted on game content that won’t be played.
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
Another important element to consider is the direction taken for many role-playing games. There’s an expectation that so many of these will be open-world games, and cutting out a huge chunk of content is difficult to justify simply by the nature of open-world games where the expectation is that you can travel anywhere at any time.
Even ignoring all of this, there weren’t many games like this even at the time it was made. Fallout 3’s Megaton, which you can blow sky-high, is one example of a game where you can change the map in a significant way, although even in that case, the game goes out of its way to make sure you don’t lose out on significant content by making that decision–the important quest-givers still survive.
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings represents a time when these AA-size games were still commonplace, and the risks involved with a mid-size game were still acceptable, whether that was for a big game publisher or for CD Projekt (which self-published The Witcher). With budgets being tighter and costs being higher, that leeway to take weird swings is harder to find, and most often better suited to smaller projects or to small sections of bigger games. Gaming software these days is usually boom and bust or so small in scale that it’s only notable when a game catches on enough that the greater gaming public takes notice, like Peak, Slay the Spire, or Balatro. The middle is just harder to find, and the risks are too great to spend time and money on something so substantial.
