GWENT: the card game GOG still files under early access

Years-old reviews still frame the Homecoming relaunch as a reboot that won over new players while losing part of the crowd that came from the beta.

A game that never reached a finished version

GOG still lists GWENT: The Witcher Card Game as early access, even though the game has sat in its catalog since May 24, 2017 — CD PROJEKT RED, which both develops and publishes the title, has never called the work finished. It's a turn-based strategy game set in the fantasy world of The Witcher, where you build a deck and duel another player across quick matches of bluffing, reading the board, and careful hand-building.

Older reviews in the file recall where the game came from: it began as a plain card minigame before CD PROJEKT RED spun it out into the standalone title that would become the beta. The store page sums up what survived that shift: duels in which you command Geralt, Yennefer, and other names from the universe, with spell cards and special abilities that swing the course of a match. The store also lays out the match formats — classic mode, seasonal mode, and Arena — where the deck comes together match by match, with no collection stockpiled ahead of time.

The page also describes a reintroduction: the next three seasonal Journeys return to the catalog for anyone who missed them, and once unlocked they carry no time limit to finish — completing them unlocks new cosmetic items.

The art is the consensus; the rest, less so

Among those who weigh in on the game on GOG, approval runs wide, and the dissenting voices are a clear minority. The ones writing in praise keep reaching for the same image, whether in English, Polish, or Russian: cards treated as illustration, not as menu icons. One player who came back in January 2019, after following the closed beta, points to how the art has grown as the reason to keep playing. Another, writing in Polish in October 2017, ranks GWENT among the best collectible card games they've ever played — and credits that to the absence of pure luck: what settles a match is the plan, not the card you happen to draw. It's the kind of difference you only notice once you stop playing on autopilot and pay attention to your own move.

Not every bit of praise is only praise. One player with nearly 250 hours in the beta, who gave the released version top marks, writes that the game changed too much for their liking: less room to vary how you build a deck, cards crammed into rows left over from the old board, little space for the very art they praise. It's a five-star rating with a caveat — the kind of write-up left behind once the launch euphoria wears off.

The row that vanished, and the gripe that didn't

The most repeated complaint blends mechanics and feeling. On the mechanical side, it's an entire row that vanished from the board in the overhaul players call Homecoming — one player who reached Pro rank twice without ever buying a card pack says the promise to make the remaining rows matter never came true. On the feeling side, it's nostalgia: someone writing in Russian in October 2018 says the team went quiet for months and handed back a different game without asking the people already playing; someone writing in Chinese in November 2018 asks for the old balance to come back, pointing to area cards and control effects that dominate matches too heavily.

Another gripe needs no translation: matches that always come down to the same handful of decks seen as the strongest of the moment — vampires, Skellige, Nilfgaard. You open a match and, from the first card flipped, you can already guess which of those decks you're about to face yet again. The player describing that fatigue calls themselves a veteran, worn out from running into the same opponent wearing a different name.

Two games inside the same box

GWENT isn't one game: it's two, stacked in the same install. One is the card game CD PROJEKT RED chose to keep — quick duels, a deck built from what you earn by playing, art that gets named again review after review. The other is the game that stayed in the memory of anyone who followed the closed beta and the board with one extra row: that GWENT isn't coming back, and whoever carries that memory tends to play little and leave let down.

Anyone who never touched either version comes in through the good side of that split: with no comparison to make, what's left is a tactical strategy game, with a seasonal mode and Arena to vary the format without rebuilding the collection from scratch. Anyone who played the beta that predates the relaunch may not recognize what made the game special the first time around — and that's the real call: not whether the game is good, but whether it's the same game that person is looking for.