Witcher 3's Highest Difficulty Might Delete Your Saves

CD Projekt RED is revealing more details on the upcoming action-RPG as they draw nearer to the game's spring release. A lengthy new live-stream enabled the developers to talk more about some of the features gamers don't know about, such as the Insanity mode – the highest difficulty level in the game – and how it might delete your saved games.

Game Informer provided a comprehensive bullet list of some of the highlights from the live-stream. Some of the gameplay on display from the stream were compiled into a 14 minute video compilation that you can check out below.

Now on to the good stuff... apparently the Insanity Mode is still being tweaked and the team wants to find a sound balance between difficulty and fun for The Witcher 3. One of the ideas they tossed around was having the Insane Mode delete saved games when you die. How challenging is that? It's literally having to restart the entire game if you screw up. That's like old-school Sega Genesis and SNES level challenge right there.

They revealed a ton of more details about the game, including side-activities where you can participate in a fisticuffs mini-game, featuring Geralt getting in some bare-knuckle brawling. The Game Informer article notes that the brawling mini-game will no longer be quick-time oriented, but this time around players will take control of Geralt in the fights.

Speaking of fights... the game's combat is constantly being tweaked and improved. According to the developers, they want to put more of the control back into the hands of players, enabling them to take on the fights in the best way that they see fit.

They have more than 100 different animations present in The Witcher 3 when it comes combat. However, players will have to unlock the various skills in order to see how those animations come into play.

The team also overhauled the way alchemy works. Players now acquire a recipe, get the ingredients and then make the potion. After consuming the potion it's possible to replenish the contents by meditating. How do you meditate? Well, Geralt can lay down a camp fire somewhere outside and meditate.

Crafting also has an interesting dynamic in the game... instead of simply getting the blueprint and crafting tools/items, players will have to find a proper blacksmith with the qualifications to actually make the designated item. Hopefully this gives The Witcher 3 the needed nudge for players to keep exploring and adventuring throughout the game world. Usually one of the biggest drawbacks to open-world titles is the lack of requiring any thorough exploration. So having blacksmiths scattered about and forcing players to seek them out is a great way to remedy the exploration conundrum.

The Witcher 3 is scheduled to release on May 19th, 2015... later this year for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC. The game was delayed from its original early 2015 window when CD Projekt RED realized they still had to do some fixing up, patching and ironing out of certain features before release. They most likely wanted to avoid scenarios like the no-face glitch found in Assassin's Creed Unity.