The Witcher 3

As one of the most anticipated games this year, The Witcher 3 has high expectations to live up to, and with the series’ move to a more open-world style game in comparison to its predecessor, it also has to try and match up with the likes of The Elder Scrolls in terms of open-world RPGs.

Right from the start, the game looks and sounds absolutely stunning. Trees blow and creak in the wind, the sky turns black with impending thunderstorms, and the world around you lives and breathes beautifully. As you travel through the land, from the small village of White Orchard, to the war-torn lands of Velen, to the bustling cities of Novigrad and Oxenfurt, everything moves and acts like you would expect a world to feel. Kids play in the roads, guards watch over their outposts, people live and die, and monsters stalk their hunting grounds for the next prey. Everywhere you look feels like the developers took care in crafting this vastly organic world, and it’s rare you are passing through an area that doesn’t have some sort of story to tell.

The main gameplay remains the same from the previous instalment. You fight mainly using one of your two swords (steel for humans and nonhumans, silver for monsters) while also casting magic signs and using various items to attack your opponents. However, you cannot just hurl everything in your arsenal at your enemies and expect them to curl over and die. Every beast has an entry in your bestiary which describes their strengths and weaknesses, and exploiting these in battle is vital if you wish to survive any longer than a few seconds against a group of drowners or wraiths.

One thing that can hurt your progress in fights however is the controls, which can feel very unwieldy at times. Geralt’s movements in combat can be hard to control accurately, sometimes leading to moments where you dodge, only to see the incoming attack still connect, breaking your movement and causing Geralt to stumble and leave himself wide open for other enemies to attack, which in group attacks can be lethal. It’s not helped by the lock-on system, which also is tough to deal with at times, due to its penchant for not always locking on to the enemy you are looking at, and the sudden change in focus can cause you to make the wrong move and suffer an attack that, had the camera not swung around to the wrong enemy, you might have seen, and parried or dodged accordingly.

Regardless of how you fight your battles, you won’t have to search far for something to apply yourself to. Aside from the main story itself, the game is packed with all sorts of side quests and areas for you to explore. In the first area alone, you’ll find plenty of small missions to get you a few coins, a village to rescue, and hidden treasures to loot, and that’s just what I’ve gone through so far in my play-through. There were still several question marks on the map that indicated other things lay out there for the adventurous sort, such as bandit camps, monster nests, and more. Those who don’t just spring through the main story (which might be difficult as doing side quests give you much needed experience points) will be rewarded for their curiosity and patience with a world that is full of deep detail, and easily missed if ignored.

As for the story itself, it wastes no time in driving the main plot forward, as you join Geralt with his fellow Witcher, Vesemir, in pursuit of Yennefer, a sorceress, and Geralt’s former lover. A majority of characters have strong and engaging personalities that grip your interest for your own entertainment and their wellbeing in this dangerous affair. The aesthetics within the Witcher is gritty and lovingly gothic with an enriching and dark mythos that differents from many traditional fantasy epics.

Players who have yet to play the previous two entries may be well inclined to do a quick read on their plot, so as not to get too lost when characters speak of events that occurred prior to Witcher 3. However, for those of you that have played Witcher 2, will be allowed to import your save files, and thusly affect certain quest lines with the choices you made there, with a simulation option being open for those who played the game on a different machine.

A short word of advice for PC gamers, however: Make sure you’ve got the right equipment before you buy this. You need some seriously beefy hardware to manage this game, and only high-end graphics cards can manage Ultra settings. There are also the glitches and lockups that are to be expected in this day and age when a game has just been released, including stuff like Geralt getting stuck in the scenery, although this will in all probability be patched out sooner rather than later, making this a non-issue in time.

Regardless, what small issues there are with this game do not detract from the masterpiece that CD Projekt Red have created. If you have a machine that can handle it, there is no doubt that you should buy this game, which right now stands as the best open-world RPG available for this generation of consoles. Your turn, Bethesda…