I just finished Witcher 3 Wild Hunt, and took me 300 – 350 hours of over all play with the least afk times from the game. The game provided me with great experience and left me very satisfied at the end. How the story was delivered over all was masterful. I thought the story was well written and kept me intrigued throughout the game and mission designs were different except for the overuse of the Witcher sense. The few side quests that i did were similar or even better than the story quests and are quite involved. Open world games generally have an issue of emptiness as filling that world with fun activities is difficult but the Witcher 3 has set a high standard now. You can go anywhere and you will always find something interesting to do and it is a gorgeous game to look at. For new players the story from Witcher 1 and 2 are subtly explained between the character interaction but would recommend reading a wiki to truly understand their past together.
If there are anything resembling “fetch” quests, they’re entirely optional and woven into natural exploration of the map. For example, you might stumble across a monster nest where you kill a number of ghouls and drop a bomb down their hidey-hole to ensure they don’t come back. In other games, someone in town would have tasked you with going out and destroying three ghouls next and returning for a quick one-liner and a small reward. Here, The Witcher makes these moments entirely optional, and though they have the potential to reward you with XP and prizes, CD Projekt Red doesn’t pretending they’re remotely deep enough to warrant “quest” level classification, something other RPGs have done for years.
Comparing The Witcher 3 to last year’s Dragon Age: Inquisition is probably the most jarring contrast you can assemble, especially given all the lavish praise that was bestowed upon Bioware’s game. Both are massive, sprawling RPGs with a lot of characters and side-quests, but so often Dragon Age would force players to get bogged down in minutia, tasking them with itty bitty nonsense quests like I’ve just mentioned in order to even be remotely the proper level to take on story content.
The Witcher, from what I’ve found so far, is the opposite. It shoots a shotgun blast of quest types at you, of all different levels. I have some that are far below me, and others 20 levels too difficult. But for the most part, it’s easy to keep progressing in the main questline which hovers usually somewhat close to your level, if not under it. Rather than throwing up a wall that locks the “good” missions until you do a bunch of smaller useless ones, The Witcher 3 allows you to forge straight ahead with big quests if you want, and as an added bonus, the smaller quests are far from useless as well.
The problem this has created? The next time I’m tasked with collecting 10 or 20 anything in quest, or killing a specific number of enemies in a zone, I’m going to think “The Witcher did this way better.” Even “great” RPG-style games like Dragon Age, World of Warcraft, Skyrim, Fallout and more have been given a free pass on this for eons. Now, The Witcher has come along and shown that a smaller studio can create a more involved, complex, enjoyable game than the giants of Bioware, Blizzard and Bethesda in many ways. What’s going to be their excuse if they continue with more of the same?
The Witcher 3 is a wholesale improvement over the already-good Witcher 2, combining the free-roaming exploration of Red Dead Redemption with the complex branching storytelling of Dragon Age and the tightly designed melee combat of a Monster Hunter or a Dark Souls. It doesn’t always execute those things as well as the games from which it draws inspiration, but thanks to some sharp writing, smart design, and marvelous technical wizardry, Wild Hunt is engrossing despite—and even occasionally thanks to—its many familiar elements.
The game’s map is very large:
Which is impressive on its own. Every tiny road on that map is a road you can walk down, every little patch of green is a full forest you can explore. To put things in perspective, the city of Novigrad (to the north), which looks teeny on that map, is properly city-sized. Here’s the view from the southwest side of the city’s port:
There are still areas and alleyways in Novigrad that I haven’t seen. There’s a yellow quest exclamation-mark waiting for me in the western part of the city, but I haven’t visited it yet in part because it’d take so long to walk over there. That whole city takes up but a tiny portion of the northern tip of the map.
What’s more, that map doesn’t even really convey what’s remarkable about The Witcher 3’s scale. (For starters, it makes Skellige look much smaller than it is; it’s hard not to boggle when you arrive there after countless hours in Velen only to find a map that feels just as large.) What stands out to me about The Witcher 3 isn’t just its geographical size, it’s how much there is to do within that space.
The Witcher 3 is a currently in a league of its own. Still, I’m not sure everyone grasps just how massive it is. You can’t even compare a single region with Dragon Age: Inquisition as a counter part. I would say Skyrim or GTA V would be a better comparison to it, but it still holds its own with vast number of things you can do with the places you can visit.
But that’s what you would expect iIguess :). I don’t see why people are complaining about graphics etc… me personally thought the graphics were amazing and even though it might not be on the same quality it is still the one of best looking games out there. You can always do away with SweetFX to get more presets on enhanced graphics for Witcher 3 check my first entry on Witcher 3 Wild Hunt here.
“Wild Hunt” is actually a pretty good subtitle for The Witcher 3, but it could just as easily have been called The Witcher 3: Hello Ladies. There are more beautiful women in this game than you could shake an enchanted tree branch at, and you sure can have sex with some of them. (Indeed, you can even do it while sitting astride a stuffed unicorn.)
The Witcher series has always been unabashedly sexy; as you meet people aware of Geralt’s legend, it becomes clear that he’s as well known for banging sorceresses as he is for slaying monsters.
Wild Hunt is a grand adventure that feels distinctly of its time. It manages to set new standards for video game technology while accentuating the fleeting nature of technological achievement as an end unto itself. It is a worthy exploration of friendship and family, mixing scenes of great sorrow with scenes of ridiculous lustiness, tempering its melancholy with bright splashes of joy and merry monster guts.
For whole 300+++ hours I have enjoyed it and the only bad thing is. The geralt story is finished :(.
If you haven’t completed it, oh man you need to, ITS GREAT!
Mord's Journal 