Before The Witcher 3 came two predecessors from CD Projekt Red: The Witcher 2 and the series original RPG – an RPG that features one heck of a, erm, unique romance system.

In case you've never played the first Witcher game, the 2007 gem boasts a certain set of cards you can collect that act as… well, sex trophies, basically.

While more modern genre giants like Baldur's Gate 3 have elaborate romantic cutscenes (many of which are indeed NSFW), The Witcher had these romance cards instead – little pieces of art that, much to many fans' dismay, arguably felt a bit shallow in substance.

According to lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec, however, CD Projekt Red opted for the cards because the developers knew they needed romance – The Witcher books do feature romance, after all – but didn't have the resources or ability to create full-blown, lengthy love arcs or animated cutscenes.

He recalls as much in an interview with CHIP (as translated by GameObserver), admitting he's not 100% sure how it all went down.

"Sometimes a feature appears as a result of someone going: in the books, there's lots of romance, so we'll probably need romance, too. Someone creates a list of characters; someone else looks at it productively and says: 'There's no way we're making so many cutscenes.' Then comes the question: 'if the cutscenes are a problem, what do we do? Maybe 2D drawings?'"

That might just be the origin story of the infamous "sex cards," as they're widely known.

"I don't know if that's the exact way it happened," Ganszyniec continues, "but that's how it could have happened. Everyone's responsible for finding solutions to their own problems, and suddenly something's in the game. When something's already made it into a version, it's difficult to remove it."

And, yep – "sometimes it worked as a shortcut." When you have cards instead of scenes, you "understand that it's meant to represent just part of a longer story."

Plus, as the dev puts it, "thanks to the fact that The Witcher was indeterminate and full of shortcuts, the player accepted it." That makes sense, I suppose – and, well, for the most part, folks did.

That's not to say the cards are popular, but it's not as though they soiled The Witcher's reputation. CD Projekt Red worked with the resources it had at the time, and Ganszyniec isn't "ashamed" of the romance cards despite their reception.

"Some of these moments ended up being absurd," though, and he's not afraid to admit as much. "It's just that sometimes you fail to write something good enough – then, you play the game, you read the dialogue, and you see: this did not work." Hey, it happens… right?

Here's hoping The Witcher 4 features a more, uh, immersive romance system, as CD Projekt Red has said it'll "absolutely" be a part of the RPG.

Excited to see more upcoming CD Projekt Red games come to fruition? Browse through our roundup for other great new games arriving this year and beyond, too.

If you're rockin' a current-gen AMD graphics card, there are yet more hints that multi frame gen (MFG), ie, frame gen that promises more than 2x frame rate, could soon be with us. 'Soon' is relative, of course, especially in the case of AMD, but detective work by a user on the Chinese forum Chiphell has revealed the presence of FSR MFG ratios up to 8x hidden in recent drivers (via Wccftech).

The user discovered the setting in the RadeonTuner tool, which hooks into the official AMD driver and provides a different app on top. This app, crucially, can present things in the driver that the regular AMD Adrenalin app might not yet give you access to. Things such as the FSR ratio drop-down.

To be clear, we already knew that MFG was probably being worked on by AMD, because earlier this year there was mention of "frame generation ratios" in documentation for the ADLX API. This implied that game developers were now being allowed to tinker with frame generation ratios, which implies the existence of ratios above 2x. In other words: multi frame gen.

Now, we have more confirmation of this, and not only that, but (A) it's seemingly in the actual drivers rather than just SDK documentation, and (B) the ratio maxes out at 8x. For reference, Nvidia's Multi Frame Gen maxes out at 6x.

As someone who uses an AMD RX 9070 XT as my daily driver, I am keenly aware of just how long it's taken AMD to implement promised technologies that Nvidia has already long been able to deliver. Technologies, that is, like multi frame gen, not to mention the latest upscaling and frame gen technologies in general, in more than a smattering of games.

The RadeonTuner tool also seems to show FSR Ray Regeneration and Neural Radiance Caching overrides, which will presumably allow us to override a game's settings to force FSR ray reconstruction and neural caching for better ray tracing.

I can't help but wonder, though, whether AMD users would rather more adoption of the latest FSR technologies we already have, such as regular 'Redstone' ML-powered frame gen and upscaling. There have been improvements on this front of late, though, with the technologies being allowed via driver-level overrides even for previous-gen AMD GPUs.

I also can't help but wonder how 8x frame gen will work in practice. I know for my part, I struggle to deal with the latency of even 3x or 4x frame gen on Nvidia cards. But I'm particularly sensitive to latency, so maybe 8x frame gen will have its place.

For six months after the March 2024 launch of Dragon's Dogma 2, Capcom had all hands on deck, mostly responding to issues and complaints via patches. Ever since, the RPG's dev team has been working on Dark Arisen, a major expansion meant to answer the fans who wanted to keep playing.

Dragon's Dogma Online head and original Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen director Kento Kinoshita joined the sequel's team around the middle of the project, and toward the later stages, he began to wonder what an expansion might look like for Dragon's Dogma 2, which proved to be a divisive RPG. About half a year after launch, work on Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen began in earnest, and now we're headed toward an October 8, 2026 launch for the long-awaited expansion.

"Sorry to keep everyone waiting," Capcom producer Naoto Oyama tells GamesRadar+ in an interview (via interpreter). "We started the project during the period where, after the release of the base game, we received incredibly passionate feedback from our players who expressed a desire to play more and continue exploring. They wanted to enjoy more combat in this game, so we really worked hard on answering these requests. We launched the project with the concept of providing a highly accessible brand-new adventure, more combat, and we're happy we were able to announce this and come back to the game again."

Kinoshita's return was a godsend to Dragon's Dogma 2 players who'd given up hope that the game would ever receive the same treatment as the original. Dark Arisen made Dragon's Dogma a noticeably better game, and there were hopes that the sequel would get at least the same style of expansion – in addition to the major title updates due this year, with one already released and another coming in August.

Kinoshita says, "I'm really happy to be back here as director for the new Dark Arisen. The motivation behind kicking off this project was the passionate feedback we received from players, so we really appreciate people's support and feedback received so far."

For the new Dark Arisen, Kinoshita explains, "I was thinking, if we can make an expansion for this game, how can we make it? What will be enjoyable? What will be fun? So I'm really positive that, finally, this is taking shape and we'll be able to deliver this soon to players."

This expansion is also called Dark Arisen for a few reasons, Kinoshita says. "We decided on the title after finalizing the content we were creating. It wasn't title first. We named it after consolidating the ideas of what we want to include in the expansion.

"There are three main reasons for the naming. One is a strong affinity with the story that will unfold in the new area. The second is the presence of a loot-based gameplay cycle similar to the original Dark Arisen. And for the third one, we chose a familiar name which we think is the easiest way to convey to everyone what kind of elements will be added. Some people have already experienced the Dark Arisen expansion in the first title and we're building something similar and more expanded in Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen."

Compared to the original game's expansion, this new Dark Arisen is less of a dungeon-crawler experience, instead bringing players to a new area of the open world in the Norgan region (with some dungeon challenges along the way, for good measure). "Also, an appeal compared to the original is that the story that unfolds in the Norgan area is really deep, and there is kind of a mystery you will chase and you have to solve, and there will be supporting characters around you," Kinoshita adds. "Compared to that title's dungeon-crawler experience, that will be pretty different."

To my delight, there will be a similar rhythm of uncovering relic-type equipment and essentially decrypting it back at your base, uncorking a whole crate of random end-game gear at once to see what will make it into your build. In the best way, this feels similar to Capcom's Monster Hunter games adding G-Rank or Master Rank gear in their expansions.

"For both existing players and new players, I hope people will enjoy Dragon's Dogma 2 more, that it will lead to the perfect shape of Dragon's Dogma 2," Kinoshita concludes.

Capcom returns to its divisive RPG with Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen, and the dev leading the expansion says its friction will be preserved – "That is something that we offer so that players can make a decision on how to play."