It took me ten years and four or five attempts, but I finally discovered why The Witcher 3 got 10/10 on Steam and Gamespot, 95% “User liked this on Google”, 250+ awards and Game of The Year in 2015 (!). Turns out it really is that good and people aren’t idiots.
I don’t think I know anyone who has played it and if I had, they could have told me how good it was. So let me be that guy for you, if you have not played it, late though I am: It’s fucking tremendous.
I liked The Witcher 2 well enough, although I remember the learning curve was a bit rough. But I don’t remember much else about it. The cutscene trailer got me very excited for it and I felt I should try it and enjoyed it without being super impressed. I do remember Triss Merigold’s butt though. So when tW3 came out, I was all in to give it a try. For some reason though, I just could not wrap my head around it. 2015, I had a one year old, and maybe just too much going on.
You start off chasing Yennefer (of Vengeberg, although we never meet another Yennefer, so she doesn’t really need the toponymic) and she wasn’t a big part of W2 (because amnesiac Gerry is busy hooking up with amnesiac Triss) that I recall. And I’ve never read the books and I originally played before the TV series (which has its moments), so she wasn’t terribly important to me. Vesemir seemed cool.
But no buy-in for the story isn’t that much of a problem, lots of good games start with you in media res or with no background at all.
I could not understand why everyone kept wanting t play Gwent with me, but I think the big hurdle for me was the starting zone of White Orchard and the subsequent palace scenes at Vizima. Because once you leave these areas – once you step foot in Velen and start the chain of events that constitute The Bloody Baron quest chain, everything comes together, everything fits, it all clicked for me and hoo boy, it’s a great ride.
White Orchard as a starting area has a few quests but a relatively massive area to explore for a starter area. It doesn’t have a lot of gear, it doesn’t have a lot of resources, the merchants are poor and before you get the hang of ALWAYS BE TAKING DRUGS AND PEROGIES, (a really non-optional part of the game, unlike other RPGS) you’ll get mollywhomped by gangs of low level wolves, dogs, bandits, ghouls and drowners. White Orchard is a bit of a drag. I also remember the near constant howling wind being incredibly annoying… but I didn’t notice it this time.
The quests there are are uniformly interesting and well-written, that isn’t the problem with White Orchard or any of the game, for that matter. I was literally completing my third last quest in the entire experience before I ran into the feeling of just being kept busy with running from point a to point b to complete the same task. Ger-bear just isn’t up for collecting 20 rat pelts.
Three playthroughs I slogged through White Orchard and twice I made it to Vizima where you have a lot of talking and zero adventuring to do. Geralt also strolls around in this section at an unbelievably slow speed which makes this section drag a bit more. I misread the point of the game thinking that I should patriotically be fighting off the Nilfgaardian invaders in my first playthrough… it’s not that game. It just wasn’t clicking.
The key was to make it over this hump and then I was good to go. You have to put on 5 levels before you are ready to leave White Orchard and hit Vizima then Velen/Novigrad, the absolutely massive sandbox that makes up a huge chunk of the game. Once you hit 16 you can go to Skellige for some Skyrimish sandboxing of almost the same size.
I am not exaggerating when I say that I could play this game again right now and never visit the same map locations or take the same side quests/witcher contracts outside the main quests. The number and variety of location-based vignettes is phenomenal.
All of the ?s in the three maps below that make up the bulk of the sandboxing are places I haven’t been: not places I haven’t exhausted or completed questlines, places I haven’t even triggered by getting close enough to them by the time I’d finished the game.
I thoroughly enjoyed the main storyline, even though it was in fact a Good Dad Simulator and I didn’t realise that until too late and had to go back and be a bit less of a Not Great Dad. Hopefully life works like that.
I was enjoying the game so much that buying the DLC was a forgone conclusion. I enjoyed CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk2077 (not once but twice) and the Phantom Liberty in my second playthrough was fantastic, but at the time I saw lots of comments that praised tW3 DLC and that CD Projekt Red had set the bar for themselves (especially with Blood and Wine) very high and then succeeded.
Both tW3 DLCs are superb: Hearts of Stone adding details to a section of the Novigrad map and Blood and Wine knocks it out of the park by adding a substantial new map with a deeply different vibe than Skellige and Velen/Novigrad. Both stories are great, although I thought the extra mechanics they added were deeply unnecessary. Just extending the existing systems of mutations and upgrading would have been fine. They make the most sense to play after the main story line and at that point there isn’t much point in the new mechanics.
I’m trying to imagine a better DLC than Blood and Wine and I really can’t. It’s a game all in itself. And it – assuming you succeeded in the Good Dad Simulator of the main story – makes a massively satisfying end to Geralt’s time as the main character. Next Witcher will be Ciri focused and based on how awesome she is in this game, it’s going to be a blast.
There are still a few things that might make the game Not Right For You: It’s huge and playing it, even the least you need to play to make it through the main story, is going to take a while. I don’t know, maybe you don’t have a bajillionty hours. You are dropped into a story that started in the books and short stories and doesn’t have a lot of time to recap those adventures. The lore is deeeeep, which can be a bit overwhelming. The language and tits per mile of game played maybe wouldn’t make it ideal for having little kids around (I think that maybe played a factor in at least one of my playthroughs).
But there are a few things beyond what I’ve mentioned above that should commend it to you. First is the incorporation of slavic mythology and culture, in addition to the very, very usual norse/celtic/Tolkien RPG touchstones. This informs the art style, which is great, and is a shot in the arm to the usual rotation. Second, for a game from 2015, it is still absolutely gorgeous having had an overhaul for modern systems. The Continent appears to have the longest Golden Hour in the universe. That keeps it easily up there with more modern games in terms of beautiful realistic environments/weather/lighting. And thirdly, it’s cheap after 10 years on the market, but per dollar, I can’t think of another RPG that could come close to value for money. If I completed every quest and discovered every point of interest on that map, I’d easy sink twice as much time… three times, now that I think of how much I missed in Skellige. Those ?s are eating at me.
Dear reader, believe me when I say, I even got really into Gwent.
