You’d be forgiven for thinking The Witcher 3 would be another casualty of a post-Skyrim pageantry. Bethesda Game Studio’s current opus had a resounding effect on the state of go-anywhere, do-anything styles of game, and matched that influence with high critical praise and massive financial success. Yes, plenty of games have granted the player enough freedom to do what they desired, but few zero performed with the finesse to manage it all on such a massive scale. Transitioning to a true open world, rather than The Witcher 2’s more segmented and closed environments, it was natural to assume CD Projeckt was going to pay close attention to Skyrim’s established model in the creation of The Witcher 3.
This is true, but only in the sense that The Witcher 3 is an exceedingly large game with quite a bit to see and experience. It’s not so much in competition with the reigning king as it as a sovereign expression of a like-minded kingdom. The Witcher 3 checks all of the boxes you’ve come to expect—a central campaign winding several dozen hours, double that in optional quests, extraneous tasks, loot grinding, monster hunting, and even its own game-spanning Collectable Card Game, Gwent—but presents it all under the paradigm of a stranger in a strange land. We’ve certainly seen pieces of The Northern Kingdoms before, but The Witcher 3’s breadth of content allows it to be experienced more intimately and personally than ever before. Along the way it obeys a handful of high fantasy tropes, but, more often than not, The Witcher 3 is content to oblige its source fiction and tender an utterly unique interactive landscape.
It all starts with The Witcher’s series-spanning protagonist, Geralt of Rivia. The hero archetype typically demands adoration from the surrounding populace. As a witcher, a human who has undergone extensive mutation and physical training from birth, Geralt is exceptionally adept at slaying monsters. Whether it’s Geralt’s biological differences from normal people, his demand of monetary compensation for his services, or regular ‘ol xenophobia, everyone either immediately distrusts or passionately hates Geralt. This is ironic because Geralt’s services seem to be in great need everywhere he goes, but bandits are always looking to kick his ass, townsfolk spit at him and curse his name, and even emblematic quest-givers usually have a list of grievances. With a precious few exceptions, Geralt can’t win.
Geralt’s mannerisms are interesting to watch play out, specifically because he doesn’t seem to express any sort of objective morality. Player-selected decisions, be it what Geralt does or merely says, is a major part of The Witcher 3, but it doesn’t operate under the penalty of fluctuating morality sliders. There is no good or bad, and no ultimate metered reward for always playing it straight. Occasionally The Witcher 3 will tempt the player with obvious invitations to satisfy Geralt’s apparent bloodlust, but it also takes its time to allow myriad of opposing resolutions. Geralt can be thoughtful, funny, angry, and condescending, but it all works because he’s equally certainly capable of (literally) smoking everyone in the room.
Speaking in the clearest of terms, The Witcher 3 isn’t all talk with its able state of affairs. When The Witcher 2 essentially split into two different game based on a binary choice made at the end of its first act, it drew a line in the sand against decisions-focused peers like Mass Effect and The Walking Dead. For its budget and its class, it’s difficult to think of another game that put it all on the line like that and allowed for such a dramatic shift in how the player shaped its narrative. Rather than indulge in a similar maneuver, The Witcher 3 instead pivots to allow greater change on a smaller scale. While the main quest can feel fairly rigid, decisions made during optional quest lines provide weighty consequences hours down the road. Sending people to die, objectively ruining an entire village, and whether or not to trust a particular ghost can have dramatic consequences. In this sense The Witcher 3 offers a greater shot at personal variance than its predecessor, and (perhaps! I only played it once!) more of an incentive to take a second trip through its narrative.
What’s particularly affecting is the dour tone encompassing The Witcher 3’s massive cities and tiny hovels. The world encompassing the Northern Kingdoms, quite frankly, sucks. Still rebuilding after the fall of Temeria, simple townsfolk always seem to have an axe to grind, and even the more refined residents of Novigrad feel like they’ve fallen victim to outrageous cults and generally paranoid behavior. Even the weather spends most of its time raining or with some obtuse mid-day cloud blackout, suggesting that just about everyone and everything has had it with day-to-day life. It’s not a great place to be, which makes for an austere undercurrent throughout the entire narrative. This plays into the player’s personal sense of morality, or at least it did in mine, where I wondered if I could actively make things any worse than they already were (spoilers: yes).
The Witcher 3 simply excels at convincing the player everything they do matters, or, at the very least, has some sort of tangible effect on the greater world. Radiant quests, those seemingly random, instantly-appearing mission opportunities popularized in Red Dead Redemption, are typically trivial in nature, but The Witcher 3 finds a way to make them matter. In one particular instance some overconfident idiot challenged Geralt to a fight. I had the opportunity to decline, but instead I wrecked him. Later, he showed up again with new dialogue, and presumably would have kept doing so had I run into him. There isn’t much knick-knack content to mindlessly endure, but rather purpose-driven instances that sync within The Witcher 3’s grand world.
What you actually do in The Witcher 3 is largely up to the player. Combat is indeed your primary activity, but dedication or investment in that system is wholly personal. Early on The Witcher 3 may feel like a rhythm-friendly clone of Assassin’s Creed’s finest work, with Geralt managing light and heavy attacks against increasingly hostile humans and other nefarious creatures. Truth be told, on easier difficulties and with minimal attention paid to appropriate skill trees, you can probably make it through The Witcher 3 by occasionally guarding, dodging, and belting out basic sword swipes. It’s simple, if you want it to be.
A straightforward approach is fine, but digging into the depths of The Witcher 3’s combat is so much more fun. Ingesting potions that act as buffs is a nice way to get a leg up on any foe, and dropping points into your signs (read: magic) makes for a transformative experience. Typical battles against human foes involved me casting the Igni sign, which set everyone in the vicinity ablaze, and hacking them to bits while they flailed about. Monsters took a bit more active work, usually employing one of my more (admittedly underdeveloped) signs like Aard (telekinesis) and Quen (shield) to passively make my way through. Retreating is usually subject to unwanted shifts between combat and non-combat control, but it’s rarely a true problem.
Combat shines brightest through The Witcher 3’s monster contracts. Most optional missions can be picked up from notice boards in various towns. Sometimes those requests involve Geralt piecing together a brief mystery before ultimately slaying the offending monster. Typically this process involves speaking to witnesses to get an idea of what you’re up against, which, in some cases, involved me specifically crafting potions for very specific circumstances. Checking the glossary also revealed additional tactics, all of which culminated in unusually epic struggles against a variety of terrible, terrible creatures.
Divorced of context, these all-consuming activities can start feeling repetitive. They all follow a similar pattern: speak to someone and absorb lore and/or a mission drive, use your “Witcher Sense” to desaturate the presentation and look for red-colored clues to pick up the trail, and, eventually, follow that trail, either literally or via a waypoint, to whatever sort of violence or incredulity waits around the corner. This forms a fairly predictable pattern, and not one in which The Witcher 3 shows much interest in breaking.
This is fine, mostly, because it is impossible to engage The Witcher 3 without appreciating the context that drives its action. The Bloody Baron quest line, ostensibly a series of tasks involving trading information, melted down into one of the most horrific things I’ve seen in a game. On the other side of the spectrum, Geralt’s time with a rock troll named Trololol is one of the funniest character moments The Witcher 3 has to offer. Whether Geralt’s playing the straight man in the face of relentless insanity or the voice of reason against genuinely conflicted characters, picking what he’ll say and watching what he’ll do allows the player to always come out on top.
If there’s any fault, it’s the traditional ludonarrative dissonance between narrative and action. The titular Wild Hunt, a mysterious and ethereal force of aggression, has its sights set on Geralt’s lost pupil, Ciri. It’s not just that Geralt is tasked with an escalating series of favors in exchange for new information, but rather the drive to accomplish any of it falters under the weight of extraneous questing. At best, one could say Geralt is conflicted between his place as a witcher and his need to resolve his daughter-like affection for Ciri, but mostly it just feels stupid when I’m in the middle of four or more quests and I take three hours to go gather the right flowers and minerals to make improve my armor set. This problem certainly isn’t unique to The Witcher 3, in fact I can’t think of a like-minded title that isn’t similarly afflicted, but it is worth considering in the grand scheme of narrative ambition and game design.
Other annoyances start to add up as well. Geralt can’t swim underwater to save his life. Trying to manage loot is terrible with a controller, as piecing through all of you materials looking for an applicable substance can take forever. Geralt’s insistence on his party-trick of lighting nearby candles gets annoying very quickly, clouding the user-interface with pointless options when you’re trying to do real work. Movement, while eventually evolving into a learned behavior, is non-traditional and weird to get used to. The Witcher 3 also has a very real problem with race and representation, a fact I can’t deny some three weeks after the issue was first raised. In my experience none of these complications were deal-breakers, but, like an obscure inventory item bearing against your encumbrance, it adds unnecessary weight to what could have been a relatively smooth experience.
With all of that in mind, The Witcher 3 still excels at brandishing a frightening amount of worthwhile content. Open-world games, from Grand Theft Auto to Skyrim and back, can paralyze players with their range of stuff to do. Either there are too many options and you don’t want to do anything (human beings don’t deal with too many choices well), or the slightest goal feels like it takes forever to achieve. The Witcher 3 didn’t really have this problem. When many of its peers are content to take my time, I felt like The Witcher 3 let me take my time and make the most of it. It creates a tremendous amount of respect between the player and their time, and feels genuinely crafted to engage at whatever level feels the most satisfactory. This is the mark of a great game, and it certainly feels within reason to grant The Witcher 3 any sort of prestigious label that may come to mind.
