The Witcher 3

So the game I've been putting most of my hours into, along with my faithful spectator @[member="Iridescent Isabelle"], is The Witcher 3. So far I haven't finished the main game, nevermind the 2 very well received DLCs, but I've put in enough time and am deep enough through the content that I feel comfortable talking about the game, and recommending it.

For the unaware, The Witcher 3 is an open world RPG game. You play as Geralt of Rivia, a Witcher. In this setting Witchers are monster hunters; they're mercenaries for hire who specialise in defeating the ghouls, ghosts, monsters and abominations. It's a fairly mature game that's not afraid of showing gore or partial nudity and, more interestingly, visiting some challenging moral places. Add onto this that it's beautifully presented - some of the scenery coupled with dynamic weather is bloody spectacular - and the vast amount of things to do and you're starting to understand what the game's about.



I've been in love with this game. The main reason it the top notch story-telling. There have been occasions both of sadness and joy, amusement and horror. The game really has challenged my moral compass on a couple of occasions, where I've literally sat at the screen ringing my hands without knowing what to do. Even after I decide I'm forever second guessing myself, and the after-effects of a few choices have made me convinced I messed up. But that's the joy of it. Very few games have presented me with issues where there really is not a correct answer and The Witcher does it just as well as any Bioware game I've played.

The setting is beautifully realised. There are 3 major settings and, within that, there's several factions. Velen is a war-torn swamp, and everything is bleak and dank and foul, although not without moments of beauty. Novigrad is dominated by a single, huge, city, which is astoundingly pretty and couples pretty market squares with a dark underbelly. Skellige, most beautiful of all, is a series of Norse inspired islands and the landscapes are honestly breathtaking. Even if you don't want to play it you should go look at screenshots, it's phenomenal.

I also can't enthuse enough about the writing. It's been pretty uniformly excellent, funny in some places, dark in others. Most NPCs have a decent amount of character, brought to life by their words and the writing.

Finally the combat. This is what stood between the previous two Witcher games and greatness, in my opinion, but in this one they've finally hit a sweet spot. Most enemies have unique attack patterns to learn and discover a pattern that works against it. This results in you genuinely starting to learn how to beat certain enemy types; the first time you come up against a Griffin it's a huge, striking fight, but you learn what to do, and you improve. The difficulty, for me, was about right, though it did suffer from the age-old issue of getting easier as you collect gear and level, rather than harder. The inclusion of bombs and potions and decoctions and oils, all of which alter combat in various ways, give you a large toolbox of answers for various enemies.

Is it a perfect game? Of course not. There's a couple of niggles that I'd be remiss not to mention. Firstly, the biggest one for me, is that the movement controls are a little imprecise. In the open world this is no big deal because you're rarely required to make fine adjustments, but once or twice it expects you to do a certain jump to get to an area and the game really is just a bit too sticky for it to work smoothly; jumping takes too long, and you have an awkward, imprecise turning circle. It gets a little worse on horseback, too. Additionally there have been a few quests that end up in 'search this huge area to find the thing!' and that has been tedious, though I would say there's only a handful of examples of this.

I strongly recommend this game to anybody interested in western roleplaying games. If you like Dragon Age Inquisition or Mass Effect, I think this would be right up your street; in my opinion, it's better than either of those. The setting, writing and style of the thing is so deep and rich that it's a joy to play through and I'm eager to see the conclusion of the main story, as well as to visit the DLC in the future.

Has any body else played it? What did you think? What were your favourite or least favourite parts?

 

There are no other love interests, what are you talking about? But actually, yeah, the romances are pretty good and well done. Triss, at least, is a really good character! Yen is also interesting, at least...

We slightly disagree here. I actually think the world does seem pretty alive; it's certainly no worse than Skyrim for having characters doing the same thing on a loop. Of course they are like that but very often the city and populated areas seem bustling and alive.

Yeah this is unfortunate, but I would mention that it's usually pretty well handled! Instead of going to the quest giver, getting the quest, then immediately handing it in... There's more fluid dialogue like "Oh yeah, I already killed that thing a while ago." and it seems normal. There've been one or two exceptions, like finding that woman that you mentioned, but mostly it's done quite well.