After spending a week with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, playing day and night, we’re left questioning just how this game is even possible. It’s not without a few rough spots, but it consistently impresses with complex branching stories, challenging combat and wondrous creature designs, all in a stunning and enormous world that feels as if every corner has had a close, personal touch.
It it consistently impresses with complex branching stories, challenging combat and wondrous creature designs.
Story has always been one of The Witcher’s strongest areas, and it doesn’t disappoint in its third installment. More than ever, the tale feels intimately intertwined with the original books as Geralt follows the trails of two women who have been lost to him for years, his lover Yennefer and his Ward Ciri who is being chased by the otherworldly Wild Hunt. While newcomers may feel hesitant to jump into a series with such a long history, The Witcher 3 does an excellent job of initiating anyone new to the franchise. You are immediately introduced to Geralt’s closest relationships, and past stories are repeated in several ways. There’s even a moment when you can confirm key decisions from the previous game so you can see the effect of those choices even without a save file.
The tone of the story feels mature and grounded. It’s not about saving the world it’s about finding your loved ones. Monsters are just an everyday part of life, and helping get rid of them involves negotiations as if you’re removing an old tree stump. You’re introduced to a rich array of characters with different personalities and complicated relationships. Old enemies might put their grudges aside, and you’re often left questioning each person’s motives. Much of this interaction connects strongly thanks to the expressive facial animation, speaking volumes through eye contact, furrowed brows, and gestures.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper Witcher story without choice, and you are constantly splitting hairs about the right thing to do, at times having to choose your words carefully in order to avoid a fight. While Geralt is tasked with killing monsters, even they make you question whether you should kill a sylvan posing as a village’s god or a succubus who claims to have acted in self-defense. Often you may find that your good deeds go unwanted, clash with local culture, or carry deep, unexpected consequences. While there are many times when you can simply reload a checkpoint and try another option, the results of some decisions aren’t revealed until hours later.
This sense of choice and consequence carries into the quest design, making nearly all of them feel meaningful, whether you’re simply helping an old woman get back her frying pan or spending hours to track down a baron’s missing family. It’s even worthwhile to invest in the local collectible card game, Gwent, as rounds make their way into other quests as well. The most significant quests expand on characters that you encounter in the course of the central plot, deepening your understanding of who they are, while others such as monster contracts can be gathered from notice boards, but even many of these seemingly simple tasks have many great stories to tell.
This sense of choice and consequence carries into the quest design, making nearly all of them feel meaningful.
Interacting with these bulletin boards also places local points of interest on your map, but doesn’t reveal what they may be until you approach. So you have to be prepared for anything as it could be a simple monster nest or bandit camp or it could be a large high-level beast guarding a hidden treasure. Yet thankfully, the Witcher 3 wisely doesn’t reveal it all so easily. Many quests only become available when you cross paths with someone in need on the road, and some of our favorite moments happen as we’re simply trekking through the woods and run across some huge creature we’ve never seen before. There’s an incredible emphasis on the sense of discovery.
To facilitate all this exploration, Geralt is more mobile than in any previous game, climbing rock walls, swimming through underwater caves, taking to horseback, and hopping in boats. These offer a more tangible sense of connection to the world, but controls in these situations can sometimes feel a bit off. Diving and returning to the surface can be a bit unintuitive, and while riding across the countryside works well, your horse seems more likely to get hung up when it matters most during races and chase sequences.
Combat can take a little time to gel, but it’s both challenging and rewarding, requiring you to adapt to each type of enemy you encounter. Simply slashing away rarely succeeds, as you must observe and wait for an opening or make one of your own. Parrying and dodging are essential, and an upgrade allows you to knock arrows back to their sender. However, you have more than just swordplay at your disposal. Five magical signs each have their uses, allowing you to blow back an enemy with a push from Aard or to make a noonwraith vulnerable to attack by laying down a trap sign. New alternate forms expand these powers and change your tactics as well, letting you use your shield to regain health or blast out a continuous stream of fire.
You still have other tools at your disposal too, including various bombs, oils to coat your blade against specific monsters, and potions that provide buffs. All of these speak to an element of preparation. By studying up on a monster’s weaknesses in the bestiary, you can learn which tools will be most effective. A deep crafting and alchemy system allows you to find recipes for all sorts of items, weapons, and armor. You can even dismantle weapons you no longer need to regain materials. The one downside to this comes for anyone who tends to be obsessive about loot. There’s an abundance of items to grab in every house, cave, and castle, and you never know when you’ll find a great diagram and when you’ll pick up a broken rake.
Another new element to Witcher 3 expands on actually hunting monsters through investigative sequences. Holding a button highlights items that stand out to Geralt’s enhanced senses, allowing you to examine clues to determine what’s happened in an area or identify what kind of monster would be responsible and follow its footsteps or scent trail. It lends a Sherlock Holmes sense of solving mysteries to the game and provides a greater sense that there was an event and tale behind what happened.
What’s great is that the world is designed so tightly around some of your abilities.
What’s great is that the world is designed so tightly around some of these abilities. Using your witcher senses allows you to spot loot more easily. You can use your Aard sign to blow open secret passages. The mind control sign, Axii is effective not only in dialogue trees, but can be used on wild animals if you simply want to see that deer up-close, and a blast of Igni can spook horses into dropping their riders.
What’s also impressive is the sheer scope of the game’s progression, not just in land mass, but in how the tone of the game shifts through each act. Just when you’ve think you’ve gotten a sense of how things will feel as you ride across farmlands and battlefields in newly occupied territories, you find yourself moving on to incredibly complex cities. Here sorceresses are hiding from religious fanatics burning people at the stake, you have delicate conversations with leaders of the criminal underworld, and you use your tracking skills to scour the streets in search of thieves. The tone shifts again when you move to the mountainous isles of Skellige with long rides across the waves and cantankerous clansmen. From time to time, you’ll even play as Ciri as you hear her side of the tale, and she has an entirely different set of abilities from Geralt. The tone similarly shifts in later chapters, which we’ll avoid spoiling, but even with its enormous length, The Witcher 3 continues to surprise through turns and scenarios that you simply never see coming.
The landscapes are stunningly beautiful and believable with light shining through trees, leaving trailing shadows at sundown.
The landscapes are stunningly beautiful and believable, with light shining through trees, leaving trailing shadows at sundown. Cities are bustling with life as children play, townsfolk comment on your arrival, and a wide array of lifelike monster designs exist. It’s hard to fathom how much life and character comes through craftsmanship when you consider the enormous scale of it all.
Unfortunately, in our time with the pre-release PS4 version, the game’s performance is somewhat rough around the edges. We ran into a few bugs, elements awkwardly loading in and choppy framerates in particularly demanding areas like the bogs. The developers are working on fixes to go into place before release and beyond, so the experience will improve. Still, even in its current state, the annoyances caused by these rough spots feel minimal compared to the sense of wonder that permeates throughout.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a thoughtful, diverse, and frequently awe-inspiring adventure.
After spending more than 100 hours in The Witcher 3, we’re still left with dozens of side quests to complete, enormous tracts of land left to explore, and monsters yet to fight. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a thoughtful, diverse, and frequently awe-inspiring adventure. Its stories are deep and satisfying, unafraid to touch on themes of personal character, presenting players with choices and consequences that aren’t about turning into a hero or a villain. In the end, it’s quite simply one of the best RPGs ever made.
Reviewed on Sony PlayStation 4.
Written by Daniel Bloodworth.
Summary
This is the new standard for open world role-playing games. There is no such thing as a perfect game, but The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt come as close to perfect as any RPG to date.
