Eight long weeks of rolling: The Witcher 3

The Witcher series is one of the oddest progressions in the history of RPGs. It's also, maybe, one of the best attempts and best successeses at creating a real RPG that actually has you play a role in a story as opposed to a video game where a story plays in the background while you grind for goat butts.

The thing that stands out here is that the first Witcher game is weird and janky, and I rather liked it, but it was clearly limited by its engine. The Witcher 2 is much closer to realizing what they wanted to do, with an interesting and multi-threaded story that can go many different ways. The Witcher 3 realizes what Witcher 1 and 2 wanted to do - It's one of the few games I've ever played where the feeling of budget or design rarely if ever hits that sense of them wanting to do something

The Witcher 3 might ultimately be compared to Skyrim, albeit with mods so ladies can get their bits out, and then it would utterly crush Skyrim. That's not to say Skyrim is a bad game in any means, but Skyrim feels so bland and lifeless compared to the sharp wit of TW3. Though, to be fair, I have my complaints about the writing style as well, but Skyrim never makes you stop and pause to think about how much you're going to mess with people's lives. TW3 will trick you into it.

Witchers are tricky.


Let's talk engine, get this out of the way: The Witcher 3 is one of the best looking games ever made. I can't bring any other game to mind that comes close, not in photorealism anyway. There's all sorts of positive things you can say about the visuals, but I mean... Geralt grows a beard. He has actual hair. When Triss furrows her brow, there's wrinkles on her forehead. Old people actually look like old people, people have scars and moles, different materials look wildly different. Clothing gets wet in the rain, clings to people's figures, flops around in the wind.

Monsters look incredibly varied. I don't know, I could rave about the game endlessly in terms of visuals. It's such a giant step up. People are so expressive and emotions come through. That's the biggest thing about the progression of Witcher 1 to Witcher 3. There's a ten year gap, but it looks like a two-decade gap.

The pool of animations is nice too. Geralt pulls himself up, swims, gestures and emotes with his hands and face. His hair flaps in the breeze.


Also excellent: The music. The audio in general is a huge treat, except for parts where they let storytelling overrule boredom. I'm thinking of a conversation with a werewolf where he keeps making silly noises instead of talking. But the music is fantastic, you hear it as you go through towns, out in the swamps, so on. The voice acting is fantastic, although Triss sounds younger to my ears in this game and the Dandelion old man narration I'll get into. Mostly, the game is just stunning in sensory terms.

The world is... A little weird. I believe Wild Hunt was proposed as an open world game, but it's more just a RPG, as I said along the lines of Skyrim. There are only two major cities in the game, one of which is in DLC and kinda small, but the wilds are big and varied. The map is dotted with villages, but also treasure and other random stuff. On the other hand, the map isn't really set up to define any sort of leveling path, which discourages exploring early on. I ended up finding all sorts of level 12-18 content I never ended up doing because I kept running into leshens and griffins when exploring early on.

dlc character actually recognizes you're wearing a mask from an earlier scene

Bad luck, that.

In terms of narrative and story-telling the game is actually rather hamstrung by its willingness to let you explore and by poor integration of different questlines into the main questline. There's also weird thread drops in its storytelling, but, ultimately there really aren't a lot of games to compare to it. Witcher 3 tells you a lot of stories, in parallel and in part, that takes hours of your life to resolve little parts of. I have a lot of misgivings with the why and the how of the game's storytelling, but not with the what. It's good. It's great. It's not perfect.

Gameplay is... There's a lot of different elements to the Witcher 3, some of which it does incredibly well and some of which it does extremely poorly. The middle-ground is the combat.

I was surprised, or maybe not surprised, that once again combat felt really frustrating at the start of the game. That was true of the last two witcher games and it isn't any less true now. Man, getting ploughed by Drowners at the beginning again... Nostalgic to Witcher 1 but kinda frustrating. It feels sort of like maybe you shouldn't start off a total wimp for the third game given this is the experienced veteran Geralt. I guess they don't want to mess with the formula too much. This is compounded by the fact the game's autosave just isn't very good. You'd think it would save whenever you're assigned a quest or get through another tutorial bit, but it's kinda unreliable.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it messes with your memory in a weird way. It's Geralt. I've gone through something like a hundred hours of Geralt, and getting smacked around by a werewolf? Sure, that's harsh but fair. But having trouble with Drowners? It just feels a bit confusing. But it always comes back to the ol' Witcher rule: Don't fight fair. You get re-accustomed and the game starts to open up again.

On the other hand, there's a couple points where the game makes you fight fair against unfair odds and I just didn't understand. In particular, there's fist-fights against bandits, thugs and just assholes where you're not supposed to kill them or throw bombs because...? And these were often so shockingly different than fighting monsters I had more trouble with three fat dudes punching me than, you know, a three metre long basilisk raining down poison from the sky.

The potion system got changed again. I looked up my review of Witcher 2, and it's completely different from that one. You're expected to chug potions in Witcher 3 mid-combat, the idea of pre-combat preparation (a big part of Witcher 1 and 2) is toned down a bit. The alchemy system in general is a bit odd, you have limited charges on potions but they refresh when you rest. So you have all these herbs and you make like, one thing out of them, then I don't know if they do much else? It's strange. I have a bag of like 73 different flowers and I'm wondering if I use any of 'em. Eventually you get upgraded potions, but due to how I pathed through the game, I ended up with a lot of the tier 3 potions ... Which you can't upgrade to until you've got the tier 2 versions.

I felt like it was a worse system than Witcher 1, basically. Without looking stuff up on a wiki I don't think you'd naturally have access to several important potions, though I've read they can drop randomly, it sure felt like they didn't.

Crafting in general is probably the lowest point of the game. There are about a hundred different components used for crafting and many of them can assemble or disassemble into different loot. For example, Grandmaster Feline School witcher armor requires Enriched Dimetrium Plate. This is made by taking ore, into ingots, into plates and it has multiple different recipes. And you're expected to dismantle things down into components but you need different tiers of components to make other components and if this sounds confusing I've replicated how the system felt.

All of this costs way too much coin, too, so you end up broke just assembling the components together before even making the armor or weapon you actually wanted. Bad, poorly laid out system that takes too long. That's probably the worst system in the game. Actually, it easily is. You still end up using it and I still love the way the different gear looks. I settled on light armor, early on - a twenty hours of dark souls seems to have driven that into my mind forever, when fights are unfair, dodge you must - and the cat set looks damn fantastic.

I didn't play any Gwent. I've generally avoided mini-games in Witcher games. I never played dice or the punching game either. There's more punching in Witcher 3, in fact, I kinda regret not getting good at it. There's also horse racing, which is sort of mixed. The game has a set of context sensitive button presses while on the horse and sometimes they snag up. I had to re-do the race in the DLC a couple times before I smoothed that out.

So what's good? The game's dialogue system is honestly really good, most of the time. There's a little of that issue where your responses can be a little hard to finesse meaning from, ie you don't know what you're picking, but conversations are interesting and flow surprisingly naturally for much of the game. Decisions you make impact how the world changes and there's a lot of bad endings for characters if you don't choose wisely. I played Geralt pretty mercifully, and generally the game rewarded that, but I often ended up killing a lot of people I wasn't actually keen on killing. Quests in general have a fair amount of variety, which leads to talking about witcher senses.

One of your buttons turns on "witcher senses" which highlight loot and herbs, but are also used in quests to find things. Geralt can track foot prints and scents through the air, most of the time, and this mechanic is used to make you feel more "witcher like". A lot of quests involve a mix of tracking, fighting, persuasion and decision making. Sometimes it gets a little stupid - one quest just has you look around for a knob on a wall - but it helps break things up.

It's especially cool with Witcher contracts, where you need to gather information, figure out what the monster is, then track it down and fight it. The bestiary spits out useful information as you determine what you're fighting, so it works in this nice mentally rewarding way. I wish the game had more witcher contracts and less random treasure side quests, but I think they take a lot more work.

Oh, and the leveling system is weird and a little confusing at first, but I actually found its internal balancing rather interesting. You have talent tables with required levels of points spent, but you also have to activate talents and can tie them with mutagens for stat bonuses. At first the system looked kinda dumb to me, but after a while I found I quite liked it.

Basically, the witcher 3 does a lot to keep you from getting bored with one element or one setting. You go all over the place, do different things, track down monsters and see a very big, interesting world.

So, now we move onto the negative. I mean first and foremost, this game is colossal and any game this big is going to have lots of odd bugs or weird scripting. There are parts where quests work very oddly, where the game is needlessly confusing or the pathing just doesn't make any sense. You run into things, you get stuck, you re-load. You reload again. I went thirty hours in the game before realizing Places of Power were supposed to be giving me ability points because the button press didn't work. You have to hold it down? Odd.

I don't even know how to describe this glitch

Sometimes you see through people. A woman's butt during a sex scene didn't load properly and looked weirdly jagged. During some cutscenes, random townsfolk would stagger by and vomit during especially terse dialogue. I had a couple spots where animations would clip or cycle improperly. The one cutscene looked like a bird having a seizure, which I'm pretty sure was a bug. There's a lot of odd in Witcher 3.

The game's loading times are... Even on an SSD, they're very sluggish at times. The game is incredibly detailed and gorgeous, and once in game it doesn't seem to load very often at all, so make of that what you will. I feel like this might be a candidate for those new fangled 'better than SATA ssds' but I won't be upgrading my motherboard for a while longer. Then the game has grandpa Dandelion read off some lines about the plot.

Here's the thing: The plot isn't precisely linear and doesn't precisely make sense at all times, so it's kinda derpy and it gets pretty annoying. Then really annoying. I did Velen then Novigrad, then finished a sidequest in Velen and Dandelion got stuck at some point on some early point Velen stuff. It's already kind of annoying, since it plops it out on any reload, but it being weird gibberish from earlier in the game is really annoying. There's a lot of other, exceptionally irritating issues in the game. It's hard to really define a lot of them without spoiling things by using examples, but I feel like the game isn't verbose enough when it should be, and talks too much when it is.

I also have... Weird issues with some of the storyline and events. The imported save file thing is incredibly poorly implemented. I don't want to spoil anything, but I ended up missing out on a quest and a bunch of side story because I loaded the wrong save. There are two romance options in the game and, again trying to avoid spoilers, the set up just baffled me. The best way I can frame it is they seem to have set it up for people who want to play true to the books, or people who want to play true to how they played the games in the series. With little recourse for other option.

I mean the one character repeatedly insults the framing mechanism used to actually, I don't know, set up the Witcher 1 existing at all. I'm never going to read the books - the plot descriptions make them sound pretty eh, and the games are dark enough - so I just felt really turned off by how much they played to them.

As a total aside, I've played very few games in the last few years new or old where I honestly thought to myself "I need to upgrade my machine to enjoy this more". I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the Witcher 3, obviously, I'm saying this really is a game that tests your machine and finds it wanting. I bought a new monitor before playing this, and I'm really glad I have an IPS for this game.

Lastly, the game is... Actually a bit too ambitious and too big, and frankly in the wrong direction. The countryside feels silly in size, you go outside a village and trip over random monsters a meter away, but it still actually feels weird in scale. Truth be told, I wish they'd dropped some of the outlying regions and fringe quests, and put in more stuff with Triss, Yennefer, Zoltan and Lambert especially. The game should have given up 30 hours of random side quests to add 15 hours of stuff with them in my mind.

In that sense, the game is a little disappointing. It spends too much time world building and too little time with its characters. That obviously is a design choice, not a design flaw, and some individuals may find the adventure far more interesting than listening to Zoltan talk about fish. Me, I like Witcher games for both, but I think it slipped too far in the one direction.

All in all, I have to really give Witcher 3 a glowing review. It might honestly be the best game I've ever played. It's too long, yes, and that changes how you look at it. Having thirty hours of really fantastic content buried in another seventy hours of not quite as fantastic content drags it down. There's a huge list of things I'd change in Witcher 3, but that list is so long because the game is so big and so good.

One thing that does stand out in the Witcher, as a series, is just how miserable in its predictable nature it can be. If there's a curse, someone did something horrible, and now that horrible thing prowls the night murdering people who had nothing to do with it. If someone is missing, they're a mutilated corpse in a pile of shit, also the shit is haunted, and the ghost? Probably on fire. And angry about it. I get that it's supposed to be dark fantasy and not at all a happy ending fairy tale, but it does start to get monotonous.

There's just an "I get it" moment that shouldn't be there.

Yes, it's true that the rest of the genre relishes choices that all lead to 'and then you defeat the dragon-wizard and everyone is saved and hurray' but Witcher choices also end up feeling the same. It doesn't detract too much from the game, but it hurts the individual scenes. Every disappearance just goes the same way, every curse, every haunting. It's a bit of a snore.

As an aside, while I would highly recommend the Witcher 3, I would not recommend the DLC. This isn't to say I don't think the DLC is good. It's very good! It's more to do with the fact it isn't integrated especially well and pairs poorly with the game's already ridiculous length. The game's core narrative constantly shreds immersion when coupled with all the side quests, and the DLC just feels bizarre. I'm not really sure what the best solution is. I couldn't bring myself to finish the game before finishing the DLC (just felt out of order) but I don't know that I think I should have bought them at all. I wish I hadn't, I think. Maybe. On the other hand, I think the GOTY edition is likely to be the most cost effective, so it probably doesn't matter.

It's weird saying a game is just too big for its own good, but in this case, the lack of focus legitimately hurts. The DLC pulls away too far from the main narrative. There are some fantastic scenes, mind you, but it feels like the DLC should have been before the main game or integrated within it. Except it can't, so it just feels weird. To review them in specific, I think HoS is much weaker than B&W. I read a review flattering the antagonist of HoS, but I actually found him really lame and the elements of the content I liked were more the personal conversations.

B&W just felt like way too much and kinda silly as a post-game. I can't imagine doing it after the main game, frankly, it should be around level 20. It's gorgeous, though, and the main story was really interesting. I didn't do many of the side quests, like I said, there's just too much. Honestly, if you look at my achievement percent above, I think that's pretty close to how much of the game I actually did. There's a ton of content I left on the table, just completely exhausted.

I look forward to anything else CDPR puts out. Witcher 2 was excellent, but flawed. Witcher 3 does away with most of those flaws and ends up feeling like a truly satisfying RPG that tells a truly bizarre, unique story. I would highly recommend it. The only thing I'm sad about, besides not playing another game with Geralt in it, is that I can't imagine finishing Skyrim (which has been sitting on my HD for a year) for a couple months after this. Witcher 3 just makes Skyrim look like a tin can in a snow storm with 'beward of dargons' written on the side.