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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
PC (Steam)
No GOAT Zone
3.5/5 stars
Alas, CD Projekt, the Polish company behind both ‘The Witcher’ videogame series, based on the novels of Polish fiction author Andrzej Sapkowski, as well as the DRM-Free digital PC gaming service, GOG.com, managed to fulfill one of my worst premonitions with their third, and most likely final, ‘Witcher’ game, “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” (“Witcher 3”), in that they took another four years since the last game in the series to release it. Between 2011 and 2015, many things changed in the videogame industry, including both design paradigms and player expectations. “Witcher 3” did meet rave reviews when it released in 2015, with overwhelming numbers of players and not a few critics proclaiming it to be The GOAT (Greatest of All Time). Based on my lukewarm impressions of the second ‘Witcher’ game, I was content to bide my time, knowing full well that a complete and polished version of the game would be available before too long. Two years later, and the Game of the Year Edition containing the full Expansion Pass as well as a plethora of free add-ons hit the magic $20 price point that I consider acceptable for a so-called “AAA” game (even though CD Projekt is more reminiscent of a powerful Indie developer than an “AAA” corporate monstrosity). In playing “Witcher 3,” I was pleased to note that all of my criticisms of “The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings” have been wiped away with the digital polishing cloth. Unfortunately, with the glaring flaws of the middle game in the series gone, CD Projekt found room to introduce some new, though much less egregious, ones.
Presentation
Built on an updated and revised REDengine, “Witcher 3” looks phenomenal. Many games that aim to achieve photorealistic visuals fail to do so, or age so incredibly poorly that a year or two after release they look like a comically bad first effort by a student 3D artist. “Witcher 3” has nothing to worry about, as the detail sculpted into absolutely everything gives it an inherent amount of future-proofing. The environmental visuals strike me as the most impressive thing about the game, with massive, gorgeous skyboxes for both day and night skies; detailed, attractive foliage on plants that sway realistically in the simulated winds; fabulous, reactive water; and the ability to travel to any visible point in the distance. Gone are the graphics engine quirks that caused texture and detail pop-in in “Witcher 2,” replaced by the most vibrantly realistic virtual world yet created. Character models are just as impressive, with a huge number of slightly different characters that make it nearly (but not quite fully) impossible to pick-out two characters with the same face. Men, women, children, and (to a far lesser extent) monsters, have a unique feel about them that makes the world of “Witcher 3” feel like it’s populated by true individuals rather than copy-pasted assets.
The audio in “Witcher 3” is likewise incredibly well-done with plenty of attention to detail. The voiceacting, which features all of the original character actors reprising their roles, plus a slew of new non-Hollywood talent to fill out the supporting cast, is incredibly well-delivered and well-recorded. The soundtrack isn’t the type of thing I would listen to outside of the game, but features a Slavic flare that is a perfect match for the Eastern Europe-based game world.
Technically, “Witcher 3” is very solid. There are a few issues, however, most of which are silly graphical issues that throw a wrench into the otherwise glorious visuals. When a character with a bow strapped to his back is in conversation with Geralt, but his bow is going absolutely nuts twitching around and spasming-out, it’s quite immersion-breaking… same for character belt-pouches flopping all over the place (And why aren’t these overreactive physics applied to wenchly boobs?!). Sometimes characters would be up to their knees in… floor, other times a random deer would get stuck in a tree in the background during a conversation. It’s only natural that a game as ambitious as “Witcher 3” would have some minor visual goofs like this, but I also ran into a single incident where a game-breaking bug forced me to reload a previous save: An enemy I needed to kill in order to open a door had fallen through the floor and was stuck, unreachable, inside the world geometry. I couldn’t backtrack, and couldn’t proceed, so I would have been screwed, had the game not been so conscientious with its auto-saving. One of my beefs with “Witcher 2” was that it auto-saved constantly, but never deleted any of the really old saves, resulting in a save folder that was an unruly mess. In “Witcher 3,” there’s a setting in the options that allows the player to choose the number of auto-save slots to use… I picked 3, which was just right.
Story
“Witcher 3” picks up, narratively, right from the end of “Witcher 2.” However, some intervening amount of time has passed, allowing for the massive, multi-sided war that was the central point of “Witcher 2” to blow-up into the back-drop for “Witcher 3.” Unfortunately, due to the gulf of time between playing “The Witcher,” “Witcher 2,” and this game, I had a very difficult time jogging my memory of a large number of supporting characters, and “Witcher 3,” like its predecessor, has nothing in the way of a recap for returning (or even new) players. I was able to import my “Witcher 2” save (into which I had previously imported my “The Witcher” save), but the only significant piece of carry-over I noticed was the stupid neck tattoo my Geralt got stuck with in “Witcher 2.”
Our hero, Geralt of Rivia – the White Wolf and the Butcher of Blaviken – is a Witcher. These special monster-slayers are essentially the super-heroes of the world they live in. Taken (or given away) as boys, Witcher candidates were inducted into one of the many Witcher Schools, subjected to the Trail of Grasses, which would either mutate their physiology into the super-human or kill them (with a roughly 20% chance of success), then trained in elite martial and simple magical techniques. Of course, this was all in the past, as the Witcher Schools have all fallen into decay, and no new Witchers have been produced in decades.
Why do Witchers exist? Why must they fight monsters and remove curses? Apparently, centuries ago, the world in which the series takes place aligned with a parallel world in an event known as the Conjunction of Spheres, which allowed magic and alien creatures to seep into the ‘real’ world. Interestingly, the Witcher-World’s cosmology includes a whole host of parallel universe ideas, as well as a significantly more progressive stance on science and learning than one would expect for the 12th Century. Un-coincidentally, the Witcher-World also tends to have weak organized religion, with the Eternal Fire, a new – and very belligerent – church formed by the mad King Radovid, who acceded the throne of Geralt’s former boss, King Foltest of Temeria, as the primary example.
In the previous two ‘Witcher’ games, we learned that Geralt was killed by an angry mob, yet somehow resurrected by the Wild Hunt, a cavalry unit of wraiths that gallop across the night sky bringing doom to all who behold them. After extricating himself from the Wild Hunt, Geralt lost his memory and became embroiled in the events of the first two ‘Witcher’ games. After recovering his memory at the end of “Witcher 2,” Geralt recalls his passionate, near monogamous love for a sorceress named Yennifer and his devotion to his adopted daughter (adopted, because Witchers are rendered sterile by their mutations), Ciri… who also happens to be the biological daughter of the Emperor of Nilfgaard (e.g., Witcher-World Germany).
It turns out that Ciri was born with the gift of the Elder Blood, which grants her incredible magical powers – powers that any number of different factions would love to control. Hence why the Emperor sent her to live and train with the Wolf School Witchers of Kaer Morhen as a child, where she met Geralt. The King of the Wild Hunt also desires to control Ciri’s Elder Blood, hence the Wild Hunt’s manipulation of Geralt and his subsequent amnesia, which was all a ploy to lure Ciri out of hiding.
As “Witcher 3” opens, Geralt and the grandfatherly Witcher, Vesemir, are headed into the heart of the Northern war, the war-torn nation of Velen, in the hope of picking up Ciri’s trail. Indeed, the first half of the game consists of Geralt overturning every stone in search of Ciri in order to help protect her from the Wild Hunt’s predations. Upon finally finding Ciri, the narrative switches to offense, with Geralt and his entire crew of friends, acquaintances, lovers, and passers-by attempting to entrap and destroy the Wild Hunt, once and for all.
And thus we run in to my main gripe about “Witcher 3’s” storytelling: The pacing is ABYSMAL. See, while “The Witcher” and “Witcher 2” were both linear, location-based games with roughly 40-hour runtimes, “Witcher 3” is a massive, open-world sandbox, because that’s what gamers have come to expect in the years between 2011 and 2015. While the main story quests would probably take – and this is just a rough estimate, I didn’t keep detailed records – 30 hours to complete, the rest of the game brings the total play time to over 100 hours. Tacking on the add-on content from the Expansion Pass brought my total play time to just shy of 190 hours… which feels a bit too long.
While the main story quests and a reasonable number of closely-intertwined secondary quests are well-written, interesting, and hold some truly impactful moral choices with far-reaching narrative consequences and emotional, evocative scenes, the vast, overwhelming majority of the content in “Witcher 3” is incredibly peripheral stuff, ranging from completely unrelated monster hunts, to trivial dilemmas, to the absolutely unholy amount of treasure hunts, all of which require the player to break out of the otherwise-fine flow of the main and secondary quests to go screw-around with sandboxy nonsense that would not seem out of place in a banal Ubisoft game. Upon entering a new town, Geralt will no-doubt check out that town’s message board for leads, and upon reading all the messages find his world map literally covered with white ?s, each designating a thing that he should go check out. And because every previous ‘Witcher’ game has trained me to do all the things as soon as they’re available to avoid missing them, I found myself taking huge, multi-day (real time, not game time) breaks from pursuing Ciri and the Wild Hunt in favor of sailing around and island chain, looking for Smugglers’ Caches of hidden loot, or something equally tangential. Of course, in a bit of karmic backlash, it turns out that “Witcher 3” has very little in the way of Points of No Return, and the ones there are pop-up a warning box to let the player know what’s up.
As for the Expansion Pass, “Witcher 3” features 2 expanded scenarios: “Hearts of Stone” and “Blood and Wine.” Each of these expansions adds a nice…uhh… tertiary quest line, which is solely self-contained, but completely unrelated to the main story or each other. “Hearts of Stone” revolves around the power of wishes and the dangers of bargaining with powerful beings from other worlds. “Blood and Wine” takes place in an entirely new region, Toussant (e.g., Witcher-World France), and involves lots of assassinations and vampires… and vineyard ownership. Each expansion also includes a number of related secondary quests (so, quests secondary to tertiary quests… this is getting complicated) and interesting new character development features that definitely make them worth experiencing. The Expansion Pass even allows the two expansions to be played either as stand-alone content or as content blended into the base game, which I thought was a nice touch.
Gameplay
I really didn’t like the gameplay in “Witcher 2.” It was just bad, and my review of that game lists my myriad complaints in full detail. “Witcher 3,” however, addressed all of those complaints and turned itself into a fairly decent Action/Sandbox game.
Alchemy and Crafting both received significant overhauls since the last game. Geralt no longer needs to hold onto heavy piles of schematics, but instead instantly adds schematics and recipes to his weightless Witcher Manual (which starts out missing most of its pages). Alchemy items are no longer consumables, but are charged items that can be refilled with a dose of strong alcohol (which is EVERYWHERE) and an hour of meditation. Geralt can guzzle potions and apply weapon oils whenever he wants, including in the middle of combat, or from the paused game menu, making Alchemy feel much more useful and intuitive than ever before in the franchise. Crafting is still kind of misleading, as it is a dedicated end-game activity. Finding schematics and crafting gear while progressing through the early/mid game is just a waste of money and materials, as Geralt will stumble across so many more weapons and pieces of armor than he’ll ever need.
Geralt still has his two swords, one steel for fighting earthly things, and one silver for fighting monsters and unearthly things. He also has a crossbow, which is of very limited utility and is primarily a way to knock flying monsters out of the sky in order to beat on them with a sword. Geralt has four hotbar item slots into which he can equip potions or food (the latter acting as healing items, providing health regen for 5-10 seconds). Geralt can also equip two different alchemical bombs simultaneously, which can be used situationally in combat. Geralt’s armor consists of chest, pants, gloves, and boots. One huge annoyance added in “Witcher 3” is that weapons and armor now have durability. Fortunately, these things don’t just break and disappear when their durability hits 0%, but instead accrue a (small) penalty to their effectiveness. This penalty is so minor, and in the early and middle game repairing gear is so expensive, that I spent over 100 hours letting Geralt beat enemies to death with a completely blunt sword while wearing holey, tattered armor. I don’t understand the point of durability even being in “Witcher 3” other than ‘other games like this have it, so we have to have it too.’
Combat itself in “Witcher 3” is much like that in “Witcher 2”… which I HATED. Fortunately, the Alternative Movement Patch that CD Projekt released for “Witcher 2” after I’d already played it found its way into “Witcher 3” as a toggle in the option menu… and I must say that all of the difficulty and frustration I had with “Witcher 2” completely melted away once the controls no longer felt clunky, sluggish, and unresponsive. (It also helped that some of the controls were re-arranged into a more comfortable setup when using a standard Xinput controller.) Using Alternative Movement, not only was I able to play the game happily on Normal difficulty, I completely destroyed the game’s combat encounters, regularly taking on and defeating enemies that outranked Geralt by as much as 10 levels. Of course, because “Witcher 3” still hasn’t returned to its RPG roots, levels are an annoying artificial construct with layers of fake difficulty that I strongly disapprove of.
See, Geralt’s stats don’t change a whole lot as he levels up. Actually, most of Geralt’s stats are flat-out hidden from the player. Instead of Geralt getting stronger, he equips (marginally) stronger gear (all gear has a level requirement, which is annoying as well), and each level grants Geralt a point to spend on Perks. Geralt only has 12 Perk slots (which unlock as he levels) as well as 4 Mutagen slots that grant a stat boost if the mutagen they contain is the same color as the perks aligned with it on the Perk grid. One of these Perks, ‘Gourmet,’ grants Geralt a whopping 20 minutes of health regen from eating a food item instead of 5-10 seconds, which is a real winner (in my opinion, the single best Perk in the entire game), while others provide percentage-based bonuses to his damage output, damage avoidance, and a large variety of other things. However, “Witcher 3” also appears to apply a secret damage multiplier based on the level difference between Geralt and an enemy. When an enemy exceeds Geralt’s level by more than ~10, it no longer displays its level overhead, but simply displays ??, which means the damage multiplier in effect will allow that enemy to one-shot Geralt, while he chips away at it like a baby chicken after a tray of mash. For the most part, success in unbalanced battles all lies on the player’s ability to dodge, read enemy movements, and simply not getting hit. Yes, it takes far longer than it should, and a single screw-up means reloading a previous save, but the sheer fact that player ability can overcome such huge fake difficulty damage modifiers makes me question why these modifiers should even be in the game at all. Why/how can there be a Ghoul in one place that is level 6 and weak as hell, while another place has level 35 Ghouls that can destroy a low-leveled Witcher? This isn’t the difference between different types of Ghoul… they’re all the same, except for a number over their head that determines a hidden multiplier.
As a Sandbox game, “Witcher 3” feels kind of restricted. Geralt is always Geralt, which means he’s a good-guy, who can’t just charge into town and start murdering priests of the Eternal Fire (no matter how strongly I desired to end their smug, ignorant existences). The closest thing to ‘being bad’ the player can do is ‘steal’ (read: loot) from loot receptacles that are in full view of a guard or other authority figure, which results in a Benny Hill style chase, as Geralt flees from guards that are always 12 levels higher than he is. Always. Player activities are always closely tied to quests, and picking and choosing among them isn’t really desirable, as doing ALL the quests for ALL the experience and ALL of the rewards is really the only way to progress.
Overall
Despite a story dragged down by significant pacing issues due to its new Sandbox nature, combat hampered by fake difficulty from a misbegotten hidden damage multiplier, and a couple of other, smaller issues, “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” is still a very enjoyable new-style Action/Sandbox game, and a fine finale for CD Projekt’s first original game series. While it’s laughable to consider this game worthy of the moniker ‘Greatest of All Time,’ it’s definitely worth playing for fans of Dark Fantasy Action games who happen to have a couple hundred hours to kill.
Presentation: 4.5/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3.5/5
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