The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition
PlayStation 4
Nostalgia Factor:
The Witcher 3 came out in 2015, a little over six years ago. In the years that have passed since its release, I have heard nothing but universal praise for this game. I’ve even seen it ranked as high as number one on several gaming websites’ best games of all time lists. Obviously I was interested in playing this game, but from what I had heard it was a massive time commitment – something I was never quite ready for at the time. I kept putting it off and putting off before I finally bit the bullet here in 2021.
I’m late to the party, yes, but what would my thoughts be on The Witcher 3? Would it live up to the tremendous hype? Let’s find out!
Story:
There’s just so much to unpack here. I’m going to try to keep it simple and only touch on the major plot points of the game. But we’ll see how that goes.
I’ll preface this by saying you don’t necessarily have to have played the other Witcher games before playing this one. I’m sure it’s helpful, as there are many characters who appear that I assume you are supposed to “know” from games’ past. But I personally have not played any of the other Witcher games and it did not affect my enjoyment of this title one tiny bit. I did see the first season of the TV show on Netflix, however, so I didn’t necessarily come into this game completely blind.
What I knew from the show coming in was that Geralt is a Witcher – an enhanced human being who was taken as a child and turned into a monster hunting machine. The show tells the origin of things that you’ll see in this game, such as the Nilfgaard War, where Yennefer came from, and what Geralt’s nickname the Butcher of Blaviken means. It also sets up the world of the game beautifully, giving you a glimpse of its creatures, its people, and its lore. What I mainly got from the TV show was the importance of the bond between Geralt and Ciri – a young girl with strong magical powers that is basically set up as a “daughter figure” to Geralt. I’ve only seen season one of this show, and as of the time of this review, season two hasn’t come out yet (it’s slated to hit on December 17th, two days from now. You bet I’m going to be all over that shit!). So that was the extent of my Witcher knowledge coming into this game.
Witcher 3: Wild Hunt takes place several years after what I presume will be the end of the show. Ciri is no longer a small girl. She is a young woman who has trained with Geralt in the ways of becoming a Witcher (although she has not technically joined their ranks). Ciri has been absent for a while now, whereabouts unknown. Geralt is tasked by her father with tracking her down and bringing her back home. Thus begins your quest.
Ciri was last spotted in three possible locations. You can visit these locations in any order you want (I think?) but the game kind of nudges you to handle them in order of lowest difficulty area to the highest. Each area you visit you pick up on Ciri’s trail, following little bread crumbs that point you in the right direction. In several spots you even play as Ciri as the game shows you what she was up to while she was missing.
There’s much, much more to this game’s storyline but the basic premise is that you spend the majority of the game looking for Ciri – who you discover is on the run from something called The Wild Hunt. As you dig deeper, you find out that the Wild Hunt is a band of elf-like creatures from a parallel dimension that are trying to kidnap Ciri because she is the only one with the power to save their world from annihilation. And they will stop at NOTHING to capture her.
Geralt eventually locates Ciri (about 70 plus hours into the game) and the two come up with a plan to lure the leader of the Wild Hunt into a trap and kill him in his minions in one giant, epic battle. They succeed.
Now, the way you play this game has a direct effect on the ending you’ll receive. Who lives, who dies, what ultimately happens to both Geralt and Ciri. I’m not going to spoil anything, but luckily I think I got the “good” ending – or one of them at least.
Again, this is just a very basic outline of this game’s story. As you play you will meet many characters, tackle many quests, get into some romances, make big decisions, and get completely side tracked from your mission to find Ciri. I would be writing for six more hours if I got into every single nugget of story-related info I have on the game, so I will spare you those details. But suffice it to say, this is an incredibly fleshed out world that has an amazing and deep lore to it. As you play you uncover history books where you can read all you would ever want to know about the history of The Witcher. Personally, this game was long enough that I didn’t bother to read all of that stuff, but the option is there if you are so inclined.
Gameplay:
All right. The meat and potatoes of The Witcher 3: its gameplay.
Despite all the things I had read about this game coming in, I still didn’t know much about its gameplay. When I first started playing it, my initial impression was that the controls, combat, and overall maneuverability of Geralt were similar to what I experienced with Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn. The quests, the world of the game, the choices: they were more like Fallout or Skyrim. Even after completing the game I feel safe saying that these comparisons are fair, regardless of which game came out first or which one borrowed from which one.
Just like with its storyline, I could sit here for hours and hours dissecting the intricacies of the Witcher’s gameplay. But I am not going to do that. Instead I will talk about the basics. You control Geralt using the left joystick. Geralt can walk, jump, run, and climb on things. Geralt has several “signs” he can cast from – which act as this game’s magic. Some of these signs include a fire attack, an energy shield for Geralt, or a Fus Ro Dah-type force push move. There is no MP in this game. Instead, there is a meter on the top left of the screen that controls how often you can use these signs. You have to wait for the meter to fill back up naturally, which means you can’t just spam the same fire attack over and over again. This meter is also your stamina meter. You can run in this game, but it drains your stamina meter pretty quickly. You’ll find yourself letting go of the run button every once in a while to give Geralt a breather. Because your signs and your stamina share the same meter, this means you can’t come charging into battle at full sprint and expect to be able to use a sign right away.
Combat is pretty simple. You have both a strong and a weak melee attack. If you‘ve played literally any other games in this genre, you’ll immediately know that the strong attack is slow and the weaker attack is fast. Using different button combinations you can unleash combo attacks on your enemies. The classic weak weak strong attack combo rears its head yet again in the Witcher 3, and I took full advantage. Battles in this game aren’t too challenging. Mix up your attacks by casting some signs. You can roll out of harm’s way. You can block and counter enemy attacks if you time things right. Rarely did I encounter a fight that was too difficult to win, but it did happen. I’d just come back and try again after handling some other quests and leveling up a bit.
One thing I will complain about with The Witcher 3 is that it is yet another one of those games that allows you to become overburdened with items. I’m one of those people that just grabs everything in sight, and it bugs me to no end when games install these artificial weight limits that prevent your character from moving or severely limit their mobility when they are carrying too much stuff. I was always having to stop and empty my pockets in the middle of the road. It was not an uncommon occurrence to see me running to the nearest vendor to sell things after each and every mission I’d complete. Inventory management became half the battle in this game.
More complaining: your weapons and armor take damage as you use them. Having to visit blacksmiths to repair my equipment all the time started to get old fast, not gonna lie. I also don’t like how expansive the inventory system is. Crafting? Alchemy? I don’t have time for all that shit. Nor do I have time to read in-game history books. Or play that freaking card game, Gwent. I gave it a shot towards the beginning of the game but got my ass handed to me and never played again, unless I absolutely had to in order to advance a mission. Me and video game card games (cough, Final Fantasy IX, cough cough) don’t go well together.
I guess while I’m complaining I’ll just keep the ball rolling. Geralt’s mobility is not the best. I can’t tell you how many times I’d be walking along and get “caught up” on the edge of something, like a bush or a fence post, and not be able to move. This happens ALL THE FREAKING TIME. It’s even worse when you are on your horse, Roach. I swear it is faster to just run from location to location rather than using your horse, because that thing is ALWAYS getting hung up on a rock or a tree or a slight drop in the land. You even so much as bump anything and the horse completely stops and starts neighing at you. So annoying. And then it takes forever to start going at full speed again. Oh, I didn’t even mention that every time you call your horse, it comes running from the opposite direction in which you’re going. So if I want to go south and I’m running south, the horse will appear behind me – making me have to turn around, run the opposite direction, get on the horse, and then start kicking it in the right direction. Again: very annoying. Why can’t the horse just run up to you after you call it, and you hop on it seamlessly in the direction you need to go – like other games like this? Roach is not getting a Christmas card from me.
I can’t complain about your characters’ mobility without complaining about how Geralt acts in battle. He draws his sword and he kind of hunches over. Whatever. He’s in battle: he’s got to be ready to strike! But many of the other button commands suddenly get remapped. If you’re stuck behind something or want to jump up onto a ledge, well guess what? The circle button doesn’t jump anymore. It rolls Geralt away from your enemy. That’s right, as soon as you enter into a battle you can’t jump on anything anymore. If you’re stuck behind an obstacle you won’t be able to simply hop over it when you’re in battle. It happened to me a few times where enemies would attack when I was in a corner, with a tree branch or something in front of me. I’d be stuck in that corner since I couldn’t hop over the tree branch to start fighting my enemies who were RIGHT ON THE OTHER SIDE of the freaking branch. It’s amazing to me how many ways there are to get stuck in the middle of battle, especially considering how dynamic the landscape of the game is. My favorite thing is when I was stuck in a ravine with enemies above me. Geralt goes into combat mode. But can I climb the ravine to attack the enemies right above me? No.
Trying to run from battles is an adventure, too. Geralt always wants to face his enemies, so if you are running away he will keep turning around over and over again to try and fight them. No, Geralt, you dumb shit! Can’t you see I’m trying to run from this fight???
The complaints keep coming. I’m just going to get them all out now. The loading times! My god, this game has to have the worst loading time of any game I have played in my life. I guess the wait when starting the game up isn’t too bad considering the size of this game. Even using fast travel is a wait that I expect when it comes to a game of this genre. But the loading times after you die… ugh. We’re talking two to three minutes here. And you die a lot in this game, too. Especially considering how much of a pansy Geralt is when it comes to falling long distances. In most video games you can accidentally walk off the side of a cliff or a rock staircase and survive the fall long enough to get back up to where you were going again. Not here. You can’t even leap out of a second story window to the ground below to save time. You’ll die – and then it’s three minutes of loading screens for you! I lost track of how many times I died falling from distances you could easily survive in other games. So, so annoying.
Am I done complaining yet? No. The characters talk too much. Just point me in the direction of a monster and let me go after it. I don’t need these long winded ten minute conversations telling me everyone’s back story. You read faster than you talk, so I’d often skim through these long conversations, reading the text on the bottom of the screen and cutting the character off before he or she was even allowed to speak. The downside to this is that I’d often skip over entire cutscenes because I’d just want to skip someone saying “okay I’ll do that”. If that’s the last thing they say and there’s a cutscene after your conversation, you skipping their words will skip the cutscene. Again: very annoying. So much annoying about this game.
I’m still not finished complaining. The quests are repetitive as fuck. There are only so many times I can investigate a crime scene with my Witcher senses and follow the footprints to find the culprit of the crime. Character behavior is predictable too. You can’t do anything in this game without getting sent on endless fetch quests. I need to talk to the village shaman, who was the last person to see Ciri? Oh, it may sound simple enough, but rest assured when you get there he is going to send you on a complex, multi-step mission you have to complete before he will tell you anything. That’s how the entire game works. Any time you are sent to talk to anyone, you can be guaranteed that they’re going to have a mission for you to complete before they’ll spill the beans. Sometimes when you are doing missions for people you even get stuck doing missions within that mission because whoever you are sent to deal with won’t comply with you either unless you do something for them. It’s a cycle that seemingly never ends.
Now am I done complaining ? I can’t think of anything further to bitch about so I guess so. Where were we? Ah yes, I haven’t even explained the basic flow of the game yet.
You begin the game with one main quest in your pause menu: find Ciri. As you start playing, you’ll quickly pick up other quests you can work on. You can take monster hunting quests off of notice boards, you can talk to people to take on individual quests for them, you can trigger quests on your main map by just wandering around and stumbling across something interesting. Before you know it you’ll have dozens of active quests in your pause menu that you can work on – and in any order you’d like.
The world of this game is freaking huge. And I mean huge. I’ve played other games like this before, but I can’t say with any certainty that the worlds of those games are as big as this one. As you play it is impossible to ignore the rich lore and world-building of this game. While it may seem on the surface like you’re playing “just another” open world game with lots of quests and things to do on the map, The Witcher 3 is so much more than that. That’s why even with all my complaints and nitpicking I still hold this game in high regard. There’s always something to see and do. Even putting aside quests and just exploring is something I’d do every so often. I’ve heard of people who turn off quest notifications and just wander the land in no particular direction, creating their own story as they go. If I ever play this game again, that is how I want to play this game.
Graphics:
The game is a beauty to look at. For some reason I didn’t expect it to look as good as it did when I first started playing it. Maybe because of the game’s age? It doesn’t seem like it is over six years old. The characters look great, the landscapes are breathtaking, and the world is just so incredibly fleshed out, filled with a countless number of details and small touches. Considering the size of this game, it must have taken years and years to complete. The amount of real estate you cover is like the size of freaking Texas. It’s so big. You’ve got cities, swamps, forests, caves, mountains, rivers, lakes. You see it, you can probably explore it. I’m beyond impressed by both the graphics and the scope of the game.
Sound:
This game amazes me with its sound, too. The voice acting is tremendous. Like I said before, my only Witcher experience before this was the TV show. I expected to struggle with the fact that Geralt in this game isn’t Henry Cavill, but to be honest this Geralt is much better. That voice, that emotion. It’s terrific. The supporting cast sounds great too. Considering how big this game is and how many hours and hours of dialogue must have been recorded for it only makes this title even more impressive.
The music is great. The sound effects really bring the world of the game to life. The roar of busy city streets, the quiet conversation in a local bar, the birds chirping as you ride your horse through the open field. Completely immersive and incredible. Nothing to complain about here. Nothing!
Overall:
So what useful information have we been able to parse from this review so far? The loading times are long. There are too many long-winded characters. Too many conversations that go on forever. The quests are repetitive. Geralt can’t survive minor falls. The horse is a real piece of shit. There are a lot of annoying gameplay quirks that drove me up the wall sometimes. Yada yada yada.
Complaints aside, this is a tremendous game. The scope of it is just incredible. A giant world, tons of locations to visit. Gorgeous visuals, a really engrossing environment that sucks you in. Memorable characters. A fun plot. So many thing to see and do and discover. As much as I like to complain about this game’s faults, it is a great game. I couldn’t put it down half the time I was playing it. I always wanted to complete just one more quest or uncover just one more question mark on the map.
That said, there were times the game felt like a chore to play, especially when you’d start working on a group of missions that you didn’t have any particular interest in. The whole “tracking down Dandelion” in Novigrad part of the game was just brutal for me to slog through. The game hits low points every so often. You just have to power through these parts while knowing that the reward will be well worth it.
And that's why I can't give this game an A+. That score is reserved for what I consider to be "perfect" games that are fun from start to finish. Super Mario Bros. is a game that received an A+. Herein lies another flaw in my review system.
You can't tell me that a game that had so much time and effort put into it, like the Witcher, isn't better than Super Mario Bros. with its simple gameplay and its outdated graphics and its tinny music and its short length. The Witcher 3 takes you hundreds of hours to complete. It has beautiful graphics, where each blade of grass seems like its given personal attention. Where the waves crash against the shore as you can stop to watch the sunset. There are hundreds of hours of recorded dialogue, hundreds of quests to take on, a map that could take you days to fully explore on foot. There's weather. A day and night cycle. People in towns that you can interact with. The Witcher 3 when compared to a game like Super Mario Bros. is like an absolute titan juggernaut demigod looking down on the smallest of ants.
But Super Mario Bros. gets the better review score? Yeah brah. That's just how it goes. When you play Super Mario Bros., you play something that you have fun with nearly 100% of the way through. In the Witcher 3, you have fun maybe, um, 60% of the time you're playing? When you're not running from location to location, sitting through long loading screens, getting stuck in mind numbingly boring conversations that seem like they will never end.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
The Witcher 3 is more than just a good game. It's a great game. It's an epic game. It's a game everyone who considers themselves a gamer needs to play immediately.
But it's not a perfect game.
Final Score:
A
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