The Witcher 3 is the latest installment of a series created by CD Projekt Red. The third installment in this roleplaying game series brings you to a world of fantasy and an atmosphere of mystery. In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt you’ll explore new lands, adventures and amazing stories.
You’ll have to make the most important choices in your journey, so keep reading for some tips on what choice to make and how you can continue with your first playthrough.
Geralt of Rivia, a witcher and monster slayer who exists on the border between our world and theirs, has returned once again in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. After spending years in the Northern Realms burying his memories of the hunt for his missing loved ones, Geralt wakes up after having lost all his memories. Concerned about this unfamiliar place and situation he has found himself in, Geralt embarks on a journey through war-torn lands and comes across people from different clans — their fates intertwined.
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The internet is filled to the brim with reviews for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. But every website seems to be talking about the same features, gameplay, and overall similar aspects of the game. Although it’s refreshing to know someone else who shares my love of the game, it’s unnecessary to read page after page of reviews that contain all the same information. Therefore, I’ve created this review on my own personal viewpoint of the game.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of the best role-playing game (RPG) games ever created. It’s just as fun to play today as it was when it was first released, and you’ll find yourself coming back for more. The game’s storyline is complex, but once you get into the game, you’ll be engrossed.
If you’re interested in some hardcore RPG action then The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the game for you. It’s one of the most praised games this year, and rightfully so. It takes place in a vast open world with dozens of hours of gameplay that will keep you coming back to it.
It’s a very large game, filled with mysteries and great side quests as well as incredibly good graphics and gameplay. There are many different strategies in order to beat the main quests and side objectives which makes this a great game for any type of gamer.
I’ve played many a video game on my Laptop, PS4 and Xbox 360, but when I heard of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, I knew it would be something different.
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This game is a feast for the eyes and the ears. Graphically, the graphics are breathtaking, and with an open world that is 40 times bigger than any other before it, this game is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. There is so much to explore on your missions that you’ll never be able to do everything in one play through.
Things to Know about – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
- The game’s story is set in an open world with a third-person perspective.
- Players control protagonist Geralt of Rivia, a monster hunter known as a Witcher.
- Geralt walks, runs, rolls and dodges, and (for the first time in the series) jumps, climbs and swims.
- A new system called “The Path” represents Geralt’s latest destination on the world map, which bends to show players where they need to travel next.
- Players can feel the effort CD Projekt Red put in to develop this game
- You can also use horses to travel, which you can find in stables across the world.
- There are also contracts, or side quests, that you can do if you want to help people with their monster and bandit problems.
- Most of the time you spend playing The Witcher 3 will be exploring cities, fighting monsters and doing side quests for NPCs.
- You can upgrade your weapons and armor by finding diagrams that let you craft them better and by finding crafting materials such as steel ingots and leather straps.
- The main storyline takes around 25 hours to complete and there are so many side quests that you can easily put another 100 hours into it especially if you explore every inch of it.
Dense and deep, The Witcher 3 is a massive open world RPG that has at once made the games in the series intimidating and rewarding. For each immense location in Wild Hunt, there are countless possibilities of what you’ll see while taking in the sights.
You can run across bandits who have staked out their territory, old dilapidated ruins that may hide forgotten riches, or a major city where any number of people might be plagued with miserable illnesses or curses that can drive them to do things the rest of The Witcher 3 society doesn’t approve of. It’s all connected by an intricate web of quests that can be tackled in any order you see fit.
But looks can be deceiving, and thanks to the game’s vast open world and incredible amount of content, it’s also one of the deepest RPGs ever created. It helps that this entry was also the most story-driven Witcher yet and when reviewing the game I found myself highly invested with every character I met along my journey. Simply put, if you have even a passing interest in role-playing games The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is for you!
Storyline
The game opens with Geralt undertaking his ongoing task of tracking down the child of prophecy who will reverse the curse on all Witchers. This quest has been told before, most notably in The Witcher 2; it slips into familiar territory almost immediately.
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But as I ventured off from this core objective – always a pleasure, since you can fast travel across the massive world – and found myself knee-deep in an unrelated but far more interesting sidequest, I realised that this new Witcher stands head and shoulders above its predecessors.
The White Wolf has become an innkeeper on the edge of the Riverdell, and spends his days drinking with his old companion Dandelion. But just when he thinks he’s put his past behind him, a cruel and sinister force reemerges.
Terror grips the small town as Geralt finds himself embroiled in a series of brutal murders. Someone is using their supernatural powers to kill off people known by the community to be witchers…and they’re targeting Geralt next.
Armed with only his knowledge of dark magic and his powerful arsenal of combat abilities, can Geralt track down the mysterious Crimson Killer? You’ll travel across vast landscapes as you seek to solve this mystery that threatens to put an end to your hunting career before it has even begun. Your feline companion, sadly, will not make a return appearance. But fear not: there’s another friendly face that you’ll meet along your journey – Ciri, a young woman who has been on Geralt’s mind for some time now.
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The Northern Kingdoms are a post-industrial vision of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales. Expect huge, bright forests packed with all manner of beasts to hunt down and fell (most payback in blood), as well as sprawling towns that resonate nicely with their real-world inspirations. These little touches make for a living, breathing world that’s as packed with detail as its cast of memorable characters.
I’m happy to say that The Wild Hunt is the most accessible Witcher game yet. As in Assassins of Kings, the prologue serves as a powerful tutorial for both combat and for alchemy. It also introduces you to the basics of Witcher senses, which have been tweaked to be more like Assassin’s Creed’s Eagle Vision. While you can still use them to track monsters or evidence, it now highlights more than one thing at a time and comes in very handy in combat, where it can highlight weapons caches and weak spots on larger foes. As before, you can use Witcher senses in conversations too, but I never found that to be particularly useful. In fact, I often forgot about it altogether.
The game does still suffer from some accessibility issues – getting burned by trial and error is an unfortunate part of being a Witcher – but the new crafting system is a huge step forward
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Whilst you’re wandering around the world, you’ll come across blueprints that allow Geralt to craft new armour schematics or upgrade his weapons. All items can be upgraded up to four times, with each new level increasing its efficacy or aesthetic appeal. Each level requires a certain amount of components – leather straps, steel ingots, and many more things.
Gameplay
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is open-world, but it’s not a sandbox. This is an extremely dense, story-driven game with flashbacks, tough decisions and consequences that ripple out into later missions. It has a sprawling world map packed full of points of interest that you’ll want to visit — but don’t expect to be able to fast travel across the map without spending in-game money to unlock new fast travel points.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt looks gorgeous. Beautiful though the environments are, it’s the character models that shine brightest here. Geralt himself looks fantastic: weathered, grizzled and a little bit dangerous. His hair actually moves as he runs; his eyes are bright and expressive; his scarred face can contort into a variety of expressions — including one in which he looks like he’s about to throw up. The voice acting is also excellent, though it does have an odd mix of accents: British, Eastern European and American all jumbled together.
Geralt controls incredibly well in combat. He can roll out of the way of attacks and has a pretty useful parry move too. Your main weapons are your silver sword for fighting monsters, and your steel sword for humans (and humanoids).
It might seem like a simple thing to say that a game is good, but it’s really difficult to explain why. In the case of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, it’s easier to start with what it isn’t. It isn’t a sprawling open-world game that sacrifices all else in the name of giving you more stuff to do. The Witcher 3 is a better game because it doesn’t feel the need to be everything – and that intelligent focus leads to a level of craftsmanship that few games manage.
The Witcher 3 is built on foundations laid down by the previous two games, which were based on the series of novels by Andrzej Sapkowski. Those games were great, but suffered slightly from being an adaptation of something else entirely. They had difficult beginnings, and some rough edges as they slowly found their feet. The Witcher 3 has none of those issues: it begins strong and never lets up until its moving conclusion.
The Witcher 3’s world is enormous, encompassing sprawling medieval cities, rolling green hills that are perfect for leisurely horseback rides, and snowy mountainous regions that are as foreboding as they are breathtaking. The story initially takes Geralt to Velen, which has been ravaged by war and serves as the series’ take on an American frontier town. It’s a dreary and dangerous place, but there are still communities of people eking out a living amidst the chaos. You can help them by taking on the many side quests you get by talking to these folks and reading notices taped to walls or bulletin boards.
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The main story takes quite a while to get rolling, but thankfully it’s bolstered by some fascinating secondary characters, such as the sorceress Triss Merigold and the bard Dandelion. They’re both familiar faces from previous games in the series (as is Geralt’s former flame, Yennifer), but they have very little screen time in the opening 20 hours of The Witcher 3, and when they do appear, their dialogue is often disappointing.
Now that I’m in the final stretch of my Witcher 3 review, I’ve finally had some time to play around with the game’s alchemy system, and it doesn’t disappoint. Crafting potions and oils is essential to surviving the game’s brutal combat encounters, and tracking down recipes and ingredients is an addictive side-quest unto itself. But alchemy isn’t just another busywork diversion; it adds another layer of strategy to every battle. And though it may be a bit confusing for beginners, The Witcher 3’s alchemy system is actually quite easy to grasp, once you get the hang of it.
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As you progress through the game and find more recipes, the number of different potions you can make vastly increases. More importantly, you gain access more powerful ingredients that boost your potions effectiveness. So even if you stick with a single recipe for a certain potion (say a Swallow potion), its effects will improve as you level up and unlock more powerful ingredients for it.
So here are some tips on how to make the most out of Geralt’s alchemy skills:
Pick up everything: You never know what new ingredient you might find out in the world, so always grab anything that can be useful for survival.
One of the first things I noticed when playing The Witcher 3 was just how quiet it is. This isn’t to say that the game lacks in ambience or musical score, but rather that its presentation is more subtle than other RPGs. Even when exploring towns, where you might expect the hubbub of people going about their daily lives and merchants hawking their wares, most NPCs are subdued or going about their business quietly.
I’ve often felt like the Witcher series has been slightly misunderstood. It’s not about the story, or about Geralt’s journey. The Witcher 3 doesn’t even begin with a cutscene or narration that sets up the setting and characters; it begins in medias res with a training sequence that simultaneously serves as a tutorial, while establishing both Geralt’s fighting skills and relationships with his friends. Like the best books, films and games, it’s about how you feel when you experience it.
It looks and feels like a game designed to cater to fans of big-budget action RPGs, but underneath it all is an epic, nuanced story told in interactive form through your actions and choices. The Witcher 3 is so vast and beautiful that I was happy to wander off the beaten path just to enjoy being in its world and taking in its sights — even if only for a moment before I stumbled into something else that needed slaying.
In recent years, open-world RPGs have largely abandoned the concept of tactically-oriented combat. As is usually the case, this began with an attempt to ape the style of so-called hardcore roleplaying games, where party composition and complex interlocking systems typically drive the player toward specialized builds that are optimized to handle a handful of specific situations. All of this shines through in The Witcher 3’s responsive, brutal real-time combat. Where combat in this series has up until this point felt vague and even a bit clunky, here it’s so fluid and satisfying that I walk around hoping for bandits to jump me just so I can repel their attacks with magical barriers, parry their blows with uncanny precision, and relieve them of life and/or limb with the occasional gory flourish.
A core part of The Witcher 3’s design is the Witcher sense, an ability that helps Geralt track down objects and people, and in combat it allows him to assess threats. It also plays a role in conversation, letting Geralt see which NPCs can be influenced or intimidated more easily during conversations. Geralt’s use of magic has also been revamped. Unlike previous games he doesn’t necessarily have access to spells from the start; instead he needs to craft them (which is done in a surprisingly deep system) and level up his abilities through skill trees.
The verdict
The Witcher 3 is a brilliant game. It’s one of the strongest entries in what’s quickly becoming one of the best RPG series around, and it’s easily among my favorite games of the year so far. It has some flaws, and a few minor combat issues, but nothing to really detract from this amazing experience.
The world is expansive and gorgeous, with plenty of stuff to do and see, and the story is brilliantly written. The characters are engaging, dialogue is well-written, and there are plenty of meaningful choices to make along the way. The combat system is complex, interesting and very satisfying when you get good at it. It’s not perfect mind you – I have some serious issues with how it handles mounted combat – but it mostly works great.
It really is hard to overstate how much I loved my time with this game. The Witcher 3 has somehow managed at once to feel like a true next-generation RPG, as if the previous two Witcher games were just holding us over, and also a true sequel to the original Witcher. Improvements have been made across the board: new combat mechanics feel better than ever, the environments are bigger, more detailed, and more diverse, quests are longer with more varied objectives than in previous games, and sidequests themselves are well-written and often carry the same weight of consequence as main quests. And of course there’s that stellar writing—it wouldn’t be a Witcher game without it. This truly is an epic tale that you won’t want to miss.
Simply put, The Witcher 3 is an RPG masterpiece, the culmination of everything made possible by the genre’s resurgence in the past few years, eclipsing even the likes of Skyrim in its sheer size, scope, and quality. Innovative systems and thoughtful scenarios have been lovingly weaved together to create a world that’s simultaneously beautiful and harrowing—a place full of wonder and excitement even after seeing dozens of hours of what it has to offer. In short, The Witcher 3 is a game that provides many excellent reasons to stay lost in its world that will keep you coming back for more for months on end.
