The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015)

It finally happened: I got burned out on Baldur's Gate 3. I started a new playthrough with a custom character because I wanted to roleplay as, well, myself, and sped through the game (which is a relative term, mind) and got up to where I was on my original playthrough, which is the Shadow Cursed Lands. I'm currently in the Temple of Shar doing that stuff and just...gotta stop.

That's okay because now I'm moving on to The Witcher 3. I played this for about 30 hours back in the day, in 2015, when I was still a college student and before I had discovered the absolute majesty of Dark Souls. It's crazy that I genuinely group games like that in my head: before Dark Souls III, and after Dark Souls III.

Anyway, I remember bits and pieces of TW3, but what I didn't remember is how crappy the gameplay is. Don't get me wrong - it's impressive in its own right for what it is and for the time it came out, but today, this game is rough. Movement is simply bad and the sword combat is barely serviceable. It doesn't help that I am coming in with 2,000+ hours of Souls and Sekiro muscle memory, but that highlights what I mean here - this game was designed and created before the Souls renaissance, a time that sees combat being made to be more controlled and deliberate. Here, it's just stylistic and flashy.

But I'll get through the main story as quickly and as fairly as I can - promised a friend I'd do so.

Just finished the game :))

Story, Quests Design, Characters, Aestethic: 10 Not so much to say here. This game feels like a movie from the main quest to the most optional piece of content.

Gameplay: 6 The character controller is weird. Both during basic movement and advanced combat I felt I wasn't in control of Geralt. In my opinion they sacrificed responsiveness for the sake of realism and it backfired... too often I've seen my witcher do stupid stuff but with a very cool cinematographic animation (why a quick attack involves a pirouette? c'mon). Crafting is fine but I'm really not into those kind of mechanics so I'm not going to criticise them. The RPG mechanics are fine but nothing special. It's basically a skill tree with multipliers. Also, I find the leveling up to be quite artificial as only completing quests provide you Exp. Meaning that killing a lvl40 beast at level 1 (masochism) will be pointless if you're not completing a quest. I think that gaining experience like in Bethesda games would have been better, don't you think?

Final notes As of 2024 it's a game so cheap that you have to play it. A wonderful experience that is almost 10yo and that didn't suffer aging (yet). For the future, I wish CDprojekt to be more daring with what they offer. I mean... the exaggerated options menu lets you change almost every aspect of the game, and for how beautiful this may sound, I think it shows that they thought of the gameplay as an accessory to the story. I think the gameplay lacks uniqueness and I hope they'll be braver with the fourth.

Byee

Finished my 2nd playthrough of the game with the goal of completing all the add-on content and main game quests I skipped over when I played it on release....holy hell was it long! I've been playing in my spare time on weekday evenings when I felt like it - Started in mid May and just finished today (Aug 3). I didn't track the total time, but it had to of been at least 140 hours.

It's fun, but I cannot imagine ever setting aside the time to play through the entire thing again. Truth be told, I had to force myself through the later half of Blood and Wine, simply because I was starting to get exhausted from playing it.

I was going to do 2nd playthrough of Dragon Age: Inquisition next, in advance of Veilguard's release this fall, but I think I'm going to have to take a break from any uber-length games instead.

I played this game for the first time nine years after it was released and it still lives up to the hype. I was little intimidated to start it because I knew what a time sink it would be. I put more hours into Witcher 3 then any other game in a long time. I finished all Witcher contracts and side quests, except I avoided everything related to Gwent.

I really never got bored of exploring the world, discovering the question marks, the fighting, or questing. A few of the mechanics seemed kind of pointless but the nice thing is you can ignore parts of the game and focus on what you enjoy. I ignored alchemy for the most part and collected far more items from crafting then I'd ever use. I supposed the magic system could have used a few more spells.

I give the devs credit for putting together memorable characters, a comprehensible winding story, tons of lore, and a huge yet still interesting open world.

I'm debating if I want to get the DLC. Maybe some day, but for now I want to try playing something different for a while.