Gwent Announces First Story Campaign And Esports League, With $250,000 Prize Pool

There's a lot of Gwent news coming out of Gamescom.

First of all, a new story campaign has been announced. Thronebreaker tells the tale of Meve, "a war-veteran queen of two Northern Realms." She reluctantly returns to battle, "on a dark journey of destruction and revenge." So it's more of the typical feel-good, happy-happy storyline players have come to expect from the Witcher universe. That makes sense, since the campaign has the same lead writer as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The campaign will last 10 to 15 hours and change how the game plays "in wildly unexpected ways."

And you can't have a big CCG without esports, right? CD Projekt Red has also announced Gwent Masters, Gwent's official esports series. As the video below demonstrates, CDPR has a schedule plotted out for more than a year, with Open and Challenger tournaments scheduled until December 2018 and two-month-long Pro Ladder seasons throughout. It all leads up to the Gwent World Masters, which offers $250,000 in prizes. Learn more about the tournament series on the Gwent Masters site.

But what if you're not good enough for competitive Gwent? You're in luck, because there's a service out there that offers coaching for would-be tournament pros. It's called Gamer Sensei, and it offers services for players of Dota 2, League of Legends, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and more, and has just added Gwent to its lineup. On the one hand, "lol, video game coaching." On the other hand, one-on-one coaching exists for all sorts of individual sports, like tennis, golf, or boxing, as well as specialized sessions for team sports, so maybe it's another step toward mainstream acceptance of esports.