Anticipation for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is high, bordering on explosive, considering the tantalizing details that have been trickling down ahead of its May 19 release. These include a Season Pass that comes with around 30 hours worth of gameplay, and that the core game would be roughly 200 hours long.
As a somewhat frightening testament to how massive this game will be, one of CD Projekt’s developers, speaking to Gamereactor, said that their own internal tests produced a speedrun that beat the entire game in 25 hours.
This speedrun did not involve exploiting bugs to skip entire chunks of the game, as was the case in the Dark Souls games, but involved taking the optimum route to objectives, skipping dialogue, and other legitimate forms of playing the game.
Considering that The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, a game of similar scale and magnitude as The Witcher 3, has speedruns that average about an hour, this is truly an eyebrow-raising testament to the amount of content the game will have.
Of course with The Witcher 3‘s staggering length being a key feature, it remains to be seen if CD Projekt will manage to keep its narrative interesting enough to hold players’ attentions for literally hundreds of hours.