The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Free on GOG for Owners on Other Platforms

[Guest_Jim_*]

Time definitely does fly as The Witcher 3: Wild hunt reached its fifth anniversary on May 19. With the celebrations finished and Night City Wire coming up next week for CD Projekt Red's next title, Cyberpunk 2077, the developer and owner of GOG decided to perform a special giveaway leveraging GOG Galaxy 2.0's main feature. If you own a copy of The Witcher 3 on any PC or console platform with an integration for GOG Galaxy 2.0, you can claim a copy on GOG for free.

If this kind of setup sounds familiar, it does seem similar to the GOG Connect program that launched in 2016, allowing users to claim games on their Steam account on GOG. This required connecting their Steam and GOG accounts and for the developer and/or publisher to have the game participate, but it served as a way to get some of your Steam library to the DRM-free storefront. That was limited to just Steam games but this will work with Steam, Origin, Epic Games Store, Xbox, and PlayStation accounts as each have an integration for GOG Galaxy 2.0. These integrations allow you to collect and manage your entire game library from the single application. You can see the time you have played, achievements, and even connect with friends on these other platforms via GOG Galaxy 2.0, so if you find yourself commonly using multiple platforms, this may be worth investigating.

For owners of the The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on other platforms, this giveaway ends on June 23 and will allow you to claim the base game or the Game of the Year Edition, depending on which you currently own. This is important because if you own the base game with the expansions but not the GOTY edition, you will only be able to claim the base game on GOG. It does include various goodies such as the extended soundtrack, official paper toys, and The Witcher: House of Glass digital comic book, but that is not the same as the expansions. Also, if you own the game on multiple platforms, you will still only get one copy on GOG, but if at least one of them is the GOTY, you will get that version.

If you already have a copy on GOG and another platform, and the versions match, you will get a giftable code valid for a week. It would appear, based on the FAQ, that if you own different versions on the other platform and GOG, you may just be able to claim the same version as that other platform. For example, if you purchased The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on the Xbox One and then later got the Game of the Year Edition on GOG, you will only be able to claim a copy of the base game for your GOG account. If that console copy were also the Game of the Year Edition, however, then participating in this will get you a code for the GOTY that you can give to someone else.

Something else to note from the FAQ is that you cannot claim a copy on GOG if you have the Nintendo Switch version. This is because there is no integration for that console available for GOG Galaxy 2.0.

Considering how good a game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is, this might be a great excuse to play it again, especially if this offer allows you to play it on PC now. It has apparently been five years since I played the game to review it, but I still remember solid gameplay and a very strong story. The graphics were also quite impressive at the time, but I would not be surprised if they can still hold up now. If they are not good enough for you though, there are various mods available for the game, including mods to tweak and upgrade the graphics, so it might be worth taking a look at them.

While this is the first event of its kind of GOG, we can hopefully expect more events like this in the future.

Source: GOG

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