It's a full story--well, really, multiple stories. Each faction in the game (Scoia'tael, Skellige, Northern Kingdoms, and Monsters) will have its own fully voiced, 10+ hour campaign, with branching storylines and player choice. "It's not so simple to come up with a story for you playing as monsters," Tomaszkiewicz said. "But we have some ideas about it and I think it'll be pretty cool."
The game's story is presented in cutscenes that are somewhat similar to the storybook-like cel-shaded characters in games like
The Banner Saga. At the moment, the characters in these scenes only have minor animation, but CDPR is looking to add more. Each of these scenes have dialogue options, and you'll have to make difficult choices that can impact the larger story.
But it doesn't end there. There is also a map you can walk around in. From a top-down perspective, you control a character moving through the map that CDPR claims is an open world. "There are events you can find, there are treasures you can find, some things might change in the map based on your decisions. There are secrets to find. As you progress through the map, it will evolve based on your choices. Tomaszkiewicz explains that, in the world, "There are events you can find, there are treasures you can find, some things might change in the map based on your decisions. There are secrets to find."
It's surprising that this mode is showing up in a collectible card game, but CDPR simply doesn't make games without narrative. Tomaszkiewicz told me, "We always did hard choices, morally gray choices, with impactful consequences. And this time around we want to do the same thing."
This is where CDPR's efforts to position the game as featuring pitched battles between armies, rather than just card matches, becomes even more important. Tomaszkiewicz and the other designers are using this to try to make Gwent work within this wider, meta-story. "This time around you are building an army," he explained. The cards you find in the world will essentially be "soldiers" in your brigade. He continued: "It'll be a story told from the perspective of leaders, and this is a big challenge because we have to come up with a new way to introduce choices and a new way to introduce exploration, and how you solve sidequests and side activities."
As I learned about it, standalone Gwent seemed more and more like it's being positioned as a Witcher game itself. You'll pursue multiple objectives at a time, find quests throughout the world, and change the story based on your choices. Elements of Gwent that made it so interesting in The Witcher 3 are coming back, too. You'll still pursue cards throughout the world and find them when completing quests and events.