The Witcher 3 - Review | The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Updated v1.1)

Note: This article is an updated version of my previous review from 2016, with extra sections and edits from my recent replay. You can view the original article here, or watch this article in video format on my YouTube channel. 

I've had nothing but tremendous respect for Polish developer CD Projekt RED ever since I played their 2007 debut, The Witcher. That game quickly vaulted its way into my short list of all-time favorite RPGs because of its deeply sophisticated quest design and its uniquely dark-fantasy-folklore atmosphere. Their 2011 followup, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, lost some of the original game's charm and appeal for me, but was still a solid game in most respects, and I especially admired how the middle portion of the game branched in completely separate directions depending on your choices. What they and their parent company have been doing with GOG.com, meanwhile -- picking up licenses for older games, updating them to work on modern platforms, and selling them completely DRM-free at reasonable prices -- combined with their continued support for TW1 and TW2 by putting a ton of effort into the Enhanced Edition of both games and releasing the updates completely free, has made them a shining example of a game company doing good within the industry and treating their customers right -- current controversies with Cyberpunk 2077 notwithstanding.

The 2013 and 2014 E3 previews for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt generated a ton of hype, leading many publications to declare it their most anticipated game of 2015 and cumulatively bestowing it with over 200 awards before it even released. Understandably so -- how could you not be excited over the prospect of CD Projekt's masterful storytelling and quest design applied to a vast open world, with such fantastic-looking preview footage and such high production value? I was skeptical when it was first announced that the game would be open-world, because I already knew from first-hand experience how badly the process can go when trying to adapt a beloved series to a huge open-world format in its third installment, but I held out hope that CD Projekt could pull it off, given their track record of success and how much they seem to understand game design. The Witcher 3 was subsequently released in May of 2015 to universal acclaim, and shattered records for the most "Game of the Year" awards ever bestowed upon one game. I figured, at that point, that CD Projekt had defied my expectations and managed to craft a huge open-world RPG that captured all the best elements of open-world games while still retaining the unique soul and elements that made The Witcher series so great in the previous two installments. And then I actually played it.

It turns out that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is not the perfect masterpiece so many people claim it to be. It's still pretty good, mind you, and I'd say it easily deserves to be in the conversation as one of the best open-world action-adventure-RPGs ever created, especially in terms of games with mainstream appeal. Though not among my personal favorites, I can definitely see the appeal that leads so many people to enjoy it so thoroughly. But that sort of praise and distinction don't shield it from criticism, and the fact remains that there are a lot of critical areas in which TW3 comes up short, outright disappoints, or else simply isn't as good as it could've been. There's a lot of stuff to talk about with a game this size, so I won't even try to craft this review into a paragraph-by-paragraph flowing essay; instead, I'll break it down into more targeted bullet points and categorize them based on three of Clint Eastwood's timeless criteria: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

 

Watch this article in video format.

  DISCLAIMER

Before jumping into the full review, I want to point out that I'll be making some seemingly contradictory statements throughout the review; I might say one thing and then later state the opposite, because some issues are a double-edged sword, with two sides to every coin, both positive and negative, and other similar idiomatic expressions, and I wanted to make sure I was covering every valid angle when I could or found it appropriate to do so, especially over subjects that left me with mixed or conflicting opinions. I also make a lot of generalizations because this is a long game and I can't always remember every little detail about it, even though I take a lot of notes on specific things that I notice as I'm playing. These statements are not absolutes; they're generalizations because they tend to apply a significant amount of the time, or often enough to be noteworthy, even though there are typically exceptions to those claims, which I try to acknowledge as often as possible, though they sometimes appear in different sections. Because this review is so long, with so many random topics of interest, I've put timestamps in the description for each category and each specific topic, so feel free to jump around to whatever sections interest you most. If you understandably don't want to watch the entire video, I'd encourage you to at least look over the topic statements for each section, or else watch the conclusion for an overview of the main ideas presented in this review. If you haven't already played the game, let it be known now that this review will be spoiling a lot of quests and main story elements, and I can't tag every possible spoiler individually so just treat the entire thing as spoilers. Also note that I haven't read any of the books or watched the TV show, so I'm approaching all of this purely from the perspective of the games themselves. The bulk of this review is adapted from my original written review from the summer of 2016, but I've updated it with extra sections and details from my recent replay in late 2020. Finally, this review is based on playing just the plain, "vanilla" version with all of the latest official patches, with the sole exception of a hair mod to add extra customization options for Geralt's grooming.  

#1: The audiovisual aesthetics are outstanding.

The Witcher 3 has some of the best graphics I've ever seen in a video game, especially for a game of its time. Mind you, I didn't have a blistering rig that could run everything at UltraMaxx4KHD™ back when it first came out, and I don't play a lot of modern, cutting-edge games against which to judge it. I'm also not someone who cares much about graphics; I rarely write about graphics in my reviews because I'm ultimately much more interested in how a game feels to play than how it is to look at, unless I have something noteworthy to say about how the visual design contributes to the atmosphere or something like that, but in the interest of giving credit where credit is due, I must stress how good TW3 really is in this department. It looked amazing on my PC build from 2016 on mostly high and medium settings, and replaying it with modern hardware at 1440p and all settings at max, with a framerate of 80+, it all looks really good and still holds up extremely well five years after release.

Typically in large open-world games like this, draw distances can be an issue, with things in the horizon rendered at such low detail that they look like blurry smudges, and things fading in and out of existence as you move towards or away from them. When a game is rendering a ton of things over a long distance, it has to cut corners somewhere for the sake of performance; TW3 implements these typical performance-saving measures, but it's in such a subtly smooth and effective way that I rarely ever noticed it. If I stopped for a moment and really focused on a building or some trees in the distance, I could tell that it wasn't being rendered in full detail, but everything looks so good, even in low detail, that I never gave it any notice. Shadows and vegetation extend far enough that I almost never saw the cut-off point, where the game stops rendering them, unless I was at a really high altitude looking down on everything. Even then, the transition between rendered and un-rendered vegetation was smooth enough that it never stood out to me, and never pulled me out of the experience.

The amount of stuff that's crammed into every frame, everywhere you look, is simply astounding. Never before have I seen so much vegetation and underbrush in a video game; it's so thick in some areas you can't even see the ground beneath it. There's so much stuff in people's houses, littering shelves and tables, crammed into corners, and even hanging from the rafters. When you walk into Novigrad, the big city in the North, you find so many NPCs bustling around market squares, shipping docks, and other major hubs of activity that you can't even walk down the street without bumping into someone, or someone bumping into you. I was impressed when I zoomed in on Geralt's shoulder and could vividly see every individual link in his chainmail armor in high detail. Nvidia's HairWorks adds tens of thousands of tessellated strands to characters' hair, allowing each strand to react to movement independently of one another, but even with it turned off (for the sake of performance), hair still looks really good thanks to the multiple layered meshes that still flow and react to movement.

Dialogue scenes are really engaging because they have such a strong cinematic style to them, not just in terms of camera angles and the like, but also in terms of "acting" and directing -- in other words, all the deliberate decisions someone had to make in terms of how a character should be acting during a scene, and crafting their animations to capture that feeling and framing the camera in an interesting way that also highlights different elements of a scene. I usually don't like it when games strive to be like movies, because it tends to ruin the gameplay when an invisible game director yanks the camera and controls away from you to show you something exactly as he envisioned it, instead of letting you just be in the game experiencing things for yourself, but it really works in TW3 because it's such a heavily story-driven game, and it helps to make the characters and the story itself more interesting. And ultimately, the dialogue and cutscenes make up only a small percentage of how you spend your time in the game, so they feel more like pleasant additions to the game, instead of an obnoxious detraction.

The dialogue sequences also showcase all of the great facial expressions and animations. When you think about it, the difference between emotions and how they appear on one's face can be incredibly subtle, and I'd imagine it's one of the most difficult things to do when it comes to graphic design in video games. And CD Projekt pulls it off really well, conveying several dynamic emotional ranges for a single character within just one scene. Just take a look at this conversation between Geralt and Yennefer; in just a few seconds she goes from exasperation to concern, which then becomes almost pleading optimism. She then becomes pointed when discussing what must be done, and when she mentions there being one more thing, she gives a look of annoyance before addressing it. Finally, there's that look in her eyes when she realizes that Geralt interpreted her instructions for how to use the detector with sexual innuendo. It all makes going back to The Witcher 2, which looked great for its time, feel much older and more primitive with its NPCs often staring into the void with dead-eyed, empty, expressionless faces most of the time, in comparison to The Witcher 3's vastly superior animations. Other games have handled facial animations better, of course, but those tend to be in pre-rendered cutscenes, or else are much smaller, more linear games with a budget for motion-capturing -- not massive open-world games with hundreds of characters being designed concurrently for multiple languages, which makes it all the more impressive in The Witcher 3. 

The music is top of the line as well. The soundtrack uses a lot of traditional folk instruments to capture the sort of medieval, folklore-fantasy atmosphere in which The Witcher is set, and in fact, a lot of the music was actually composed and performed by a real Polish folk band that took its name and inspiration from The Witcher novels. They actually perform a lot of their music from the game during live concerts. This song of theirs, Silver for Monsters, is used as combat music, and it has this really awesome, raw tone that just gets me so pumped, with that primal scream and the vocal chanting over top of the droning tones, pounding drums, and accented string rhythms. Other songs, like The Fields of Ard Skellig by CD Projekt's own composer, are just so beautiful and tranquil that, when I washed up on the shores of Skellige, I stopped everything and just slowly trotted around on horseback in awe of the sights and sounds. Likewise, any time I warped to outside of Novigrad, I'd often linger in the outskirts for a moment just to appreciate the music outside the Tretogor Gate, which might be my favorite track of the entire game. I love how weirdly moody and atmospheric it sounds, with the contrasting styles of the typical city-scape lute, flute, piano, and clavichord melodies juxtaposed against that ethereal, other-worldly vocal line, which I feel perfectly captures the unique tone and atmosphere that these games are supposed to strive for. The Ladies of the Wood, likewise, has a really haunting and foreboding sound to it that really brings the grotesque horror and impending dread of that whole questline to life. 

#2: All characters have personality and motivation.

Every, single, character in TW3 is fully voiced. That itself is not unusual in this day and age (in fact, it's expected from any major studio), but the scale to which it applies, here, is almost beyond comprehension. According to information gathered by IGN, the script had over 450,000 words of dialogue (supposedly four novels' worth of text), and 950 speaking roles. It took 2.5 years just to record all the dialogue. Even that, though, really isn't all that impressive; that just means it took a lot of time and resources. What's impressive is that every single character, from Geralt's most important and closest companions down to the most insignificant of random people asking for help by the side of the road, has some kind of personality and motivation that shows based on how they talk, and how they behave in the dialogue.

When you have a world made up of thousands of people, with 950 people who will deliver some sort of vocal lines, it's really easy for the writing to devolve into terse exchanges that simply check the boxes of what needs to be accomplished in the conversation, and it can start to feel bland and repetitive after a while. But the writing and voice acting in TW3 brings every character to life in such a believable and engaging way; even if a character is someone you'll only ever talk to once, for just a few minutes, they feel genuine because someone (whether it be the writer, the director, or the actor) made a conscious decision about why a character is saying the things he or she is saying, and why a character is the way that he or she is. Not every character is totally unique or memorable, but every character fits in where they belong in the grand scheme of things, and none of them stand out in a negative way.

The main characters, in particular, are fleshed out extremely well, showing all different sides of their personalities and often struggling with internal conflicts over what they want and how they should act. Yennefer, for instance, is rather brusque and pragmatic -- she's short and to-the-point with people, not caring how her words or tone might affect someone's feelings, and resorts to dark sorceries, breaking the law, and sabotaging ancient mystical relics without a second thought when it serves her interests in a more efficient manner than another alternative -- but most of her actions in the game are guided by a deep love and concern for Ciri and Geralt. While others typically only see her as a cold, manipulative witch who's always scheming behind people's backs, usually for her own self-gain, we see her getting into whimsical pun battles with Geralt, crying out and worrying when Ciri is in danger, and yearning to put the sorceress politics aside and settle down with Geralt and grow old together.

#3: Recurring characters keep the story connected.

Most of your usual friends from the previous games like Vesemir, Lambert, Eskel, Dandelion, Zoltan, and Triss make appearances in TW3 and help you out on your main quest of finding Ciri, and most of the main characters stay with you over the course of the entire game, coming and going as quests and meet-ups call for their presence. A lot of side characters, like Cerys and Hjalmar for injstance, end up involved in multiple quests and main story cutscenes that take place in different acts of the game, which helps to build a rapport with them so that you care when they're involved in later events, because it's something happening to someone you know and care about as opposed to some new person you've just met, or some other generic NPC. Similarly, a lot of characters you meet and help out over the first half of the game come back to help you later when you have to cash in a favor for a favor, which lets you see how people's situations have changed since you last saw them 50 or 100 hours ago, thus giving the world a greater feeling of lasting permanence, that things exist beyond your own limited scope as the player-character.

#4: Small details make the world feel more real.

With a lot of these big open-world games, there's a common tendency for the worlds themselves to feel phony and artificial, like theater stages built solely to accommodate the main player-character, because the designers just churn out landscapes and paste a bunch of content all over the map with little concern for how anything relates to anything else, why things are the way they are, or how the world exists and operates independent of the player character. The world in TW3 has a very precise, hand-crafted feel to it -- there's something interesting to see just about everywhere you look, environments rarely feel like they've been copy-pasted or procedurally-generated, and seemingly everything inhabiting the world exists for some kind of logical or narrative purpose, whether it's explicitly stated by the game or to be assumed by the player. The amount of stuff that happens around you, meanwhile, sometimes beyond your control or whether you're there or not, really helps to make the world feel much more real, natural, and immersive. What's really interesting, though, is how much backstory and atmosphere you pick up just from all the subtle, ambient details.

For instance, when you visit the Bits in the big city of Novigrad, you see a lot of houses in major states of disrepair, one of which is precariously leaning to the side but is being held up by support braces, obviously added sometime after the fact to keep it from falling over. At first glance it just seems to be a bit of environmental storytelling meant to showcase how poor, miserable, and neglected this whole district of the city is, but then you can actually overhear a conversation that explains the backstory of why that house is in such bad shape. So, not only does this house do a good job of visually showcasing the current state that this world is in, but the game also goes so far as to establish the "how" and "why" behind this area for deeper world-building. Furthermore, you see workers up on those beams actively trying to shore it up and reinforce it, which helps to make the world feel more alive and lived-in, when you see people actively trying to fix problems in the world. 

On a larger scale, the game is also set during a time of war, with the Nilfgaardian empire trying to push its control further north. The game doesn't beat you over the head about being a war game, however -- you simply see the effects of the war, never actually taking part in it, as if you were any common citizen. You see scorched battlefields where the dead are left to rot in their suits of armor. You see villages that were once raided by invading armies, still struggling to recover. You encounter wounded soldiers from either side seeking refuge in an abandoned shed, or about to be lynched by villagers. You see squabbles and brawls in bars over which kingdom's insignia should be on display. You find a ton of currency from the previous regime, which is completely worthless until you take it to a bank to exchange for real money. And so on. It's a cohesive theme that permeates almost everything in the game, and it gives you a strong feeling that, even though you're not actually seeing the battles being fought, this war is serious and is taking its toll.

#5: Fast-travel and horseback from the beginning.

The size of the world map in TW3 is supposedly bigger than GTAV and Skyrim combined. I'm not sure I believe those numbers, but I do know that TW3 is pretty damn big. With a world that big, there need to be measures in place to help you get across it quickly and conveniently, because it's not very fun to have to spend 10 minutes at a time holding down the "forward" key to get anywhere. On the other hand, you don't want to make alternative means of travel too quick or convenient, because you want players to feel rooted in the game world as opposed to continually skipping by it. The Witcher 3 balances these two issues pretty well with its inclusion of fast-travel and horseback, both of which are available to you from the very beginning of the game.

Fast-travel is restricted to the use of signposts, which are present outside of cities and villages, and also found at major roadside intersections. If you want to warp somewhere instantly, you have to make your way to a signpost first, and you can only warp to other signposts you've already discovered. You therefore have to explore the entire world on-foot -- even if you warp somewhere, the signposts aren't at every single location on the map, so you still need to get to your final destination the old-fashioned way -- which helps you to become more familiar with the world and feel more physically attached to it. And yet, getting around without the benefit of fast-travel is never a tedious, time-wasting endeavor because you always have access to your trusty horse companion, Roach. Just whistle and she'll run in from somewhere off-screen, ready to help speed you along to your next destination. So even though the world is really big, it's never a chore to get around it, and yet the various fast-travel options still give you a sense of physical connection to the world itself.

#6: The world shows signs of dynamic elements.

With worlds this big, they tend to remain pretty static throughout the game, rarely reacting to your presence in any kind of significant way. This, I imagine, is because the sandbox nature of these games typically requires that the designers allow for any possibility at any time -- if you change the world-state too much, or too drastically, then it could start to conflict with other quests. The Witcher 3, being itself one of these vast open-world games, can only change the world so much and still allow you to access all of its content, but it still manages to change its façade over the course of the game, sprinkling in enough changes to make the world seem like it's reacting to your presence and even affecting quests in a few ways.

The biggest examples center around the city of Novigrad. With King Radovid turning the city upside down in search of witches to burn at the stake, he eventually puts the city under lockdown while you're away so that, when you come back, the guards deny your access unless you can produce a gate pass. Later, if you complete a side-quest to help the mages sneak out of town, the witch hunt sets its sights on non-humans, and you're greeted with elves and dwarves being executed outside the main gate as you return to town. If you've completed that side-quest before getting to a certain point in the main quest, then it affects your options since your dwarven friend Zoltan is no longer able to roam around the city, because he's afraid of being lynched by the city guard. Likewise, many side quests can be affected by the main quest and become unavailable if you advance too far in the main quest before completing them, because the condition of the world will have changed somehow. 

Similarly, your actions in one area can affect your interactions somewhere else nearby. When you arrive in Velen, the point in the game when they take the training wheels off and let you loose in the giant open world, your first objective takes you to a local tavern to gather information. Once you're there, you're confronted by some of the Bloody Baron's henchmen, the self-proclaimed ruler of Velen whom you have to go through to progress the main quest. How you deal with his henchmen affects your relationship and interactions with the Baron before you've even met him, and can make the initial goings tougher or easier when trying to get into town to talk to him. 

#7: Interesting quests with engaging storylines.

Most of the quests, whether they're part of the main story or trivially inconsequential side-quests, have something interesting going on, with some reason for you to care about seeing them through to their conclusions. In one quest, you accompany Triss to an elegant, high-class masquerade ball to help an alchemist get out of town before the witch hunters come for him, but all you really do is walk around talking to people, not even making a lot of important decisions. It's a pretty simple quest in terms of gameplay, but it's fun just to be there witnessing the events, listening to conversations, and simply appreciating the unique atmosphere. Plus, because this quest has such heavy involvement with a recurring character like Triss, who has played a pretty major role in the previous two games, you have more reason to care about helping her out than if you were to do this for a random, contracted employer. If the unique setting and premise of the quest doesn't capture your interest, then the character interactions with Triss would surely make up for that. 

One of my favorite quests, "A Towerful of Mice," has you working with the sorceress Keira Metz, who wants your help lifting a plague-like curse that's afflicted Fyke Island, where the former lord of Velen and his daughter died. The island itself has this really ominous, spooky vibe about it, with you using a magic lamp to hunt for ghosts and trying to piece together the island's history while weird, supernatural things seem to happen around you. Eventually, you meet the ghost of Annabelle, the lord's daughter, who asks you to take her bones to her beloved, whom you discover lives in a nearby fishing village. With her bones buried by her lover, the curse, she says, will be lifted. At that point you have a couple different options about how to proceed, both of which result in a somewhat tragic success.

I remember one quest in which a village asked me to help defend one of their people from bandits, and I almost rolled my eyes at such a cliche premise, but went along with it. The bandits showed up and their leader tried to explain her side of things, but I wasn't going to be persuaded that easily and fought them off. It turned out she was a werewolf, and upon looting her corpse I discovered a letter from her parents that gave her an entire backstory. Apparently, she was born of a human and werewolf, and lost both of her parents to a show-trial execution because one of the villagers snitched on them. Her parents wrote to her before their deaths telling her that they loved her, that they believed lycanthropy was not a thing of evil, and implored her to lead a good life. She was just out to avenge her parents' deaths, and I felt kind of bad about killing her. What I thought was going to be a simple one-and-done, forgettable quest ended up having a surprising amount of narrative purpose to it.

Even the game's infamous frying pan quest, where you simply fetch an item from a house literally right next to the quest-giver in what is mechanically the most simple and mundane of all quests ever created, has some interesting and engaging elements going on, what with the character's backstory of how she came to lose her pan, fun interactions when she comments on why Geralt's talking to himself, the detective element of deciphering the scene and figuring out what happened, and some foreshadowing for a plot point that will come into fruition later in the game. If you boil the quests down to their most basic and fundamental gameplay elements, they're ultimately no better than most other games of this style, as it consists primarily of the usual "go here, talk to this person, fetch this, kill that" type of gameplay scenarios, but the quests are all elevated by the wonderfully rich and detailed narrative framing that contextualizes what you're doing in this world -- and why you should care -- in a far more engaging and interesting way than so many other, similar types of games. 

#8: Tough moral dilemmas.

There was a time when games had a bad habit of portraying moral and ethical issues in pure black and white, emphasizing "good versus evil" with little room for anything in-between. When The Witcher came along in 2007, it made a deliberate effort to blur those lines into more realistic shades of gray with no clear right or wrong -- just two choices, and two different outcomes, which will often have some sort of unintended consequence sometime down the road. The Witcher 3 continues to carry that torch by frequently placing you in situations when you have to make a tough choice, which adds a lot of extra weight to the gameplay and forces you to think long and deep about what you're doing.

At one point you come across a Nilfgaardian soldier about to by lynched by three locals; if you choose to stay out of it and let him be killed, you can check his corpse and find a letter on him that reveals him to be an honest, well-intentioned family man who was deserting the army to go back to his wife and child. If you decide to stand up for him, before learning any of this, then you have to kill the three villagers in self-defense, and Geralt makes a comment to the soldier, when he expresses his gratitude, that if he hadn't have gotten involved only one person would've died instead of three. In this situation, knowing the two outcomes, would you choose the option that results in the loss of less life, or the one that saves one life you think to be good at the expense of three others that you don't really know? It's a classic "lesser of two evils" situation where there's really not a right answer. 

In another quest, you come across another witcher from the school of the cat, who slaughtered an entire village after being cheated out of payment for a contract and getting stabbed in the side with a pitchfork. The guy was clearly way out of line and did not warrant killing all those innocents, but when faced with a decision, I couldn't bring myself to kill him because I didn't feel like it was my place to judge him. Later on, you meet up with some old friends who're conspiring to assassinate King Radovid because his madness is leading to a lot of civil unrest and war-torn bloodshed, and you have the option to go along with their plan or back out, and I struggled big time trying to figure out if regicide was really the right choice or not. One of the best examples comes during the Whispering Hillock quest, in which you're given the choice to kill or free the spirit trapped under the Great Oak Tree -- the thing just feels like pure evil, but it's bargaining to help rescue orphaned children if you release it, so can you really trust it or will something incredibly bad happen if you do? Plus, you also have to question the Crones' motives for why they would want you to kill this thing. Some of the game's books will shed more light on this situation, if you've read them and remember the stories told therein, but you just can't know what'll actually happen when making that decision and will just have to live with whatever consequences appear down the road. 

#9: Meaningful consequences for decisions and actions.

Many quests require you to make some kind of choice about how to resolve it that will lead to branching outcomes, but even when decisions are ultimately superficial and have no lasting impact on anything beyond their own self-contained storyline, the great atmosphere, storytelling, and tough moral dilemmas do a good job of adding significant weight to the decision. A quest like Wild at Heart gives you options about whether to spare people's lives when a werewolf is tricked into murdering his wife while under the influence of his beastly transformation; the outcome of that quest won't affect anything beyond the fate of those characters involved, but it still feels like a meaningful choice because you're making such stark decisions in those characters' lives, who're surprisingly well-developed and realized for being minor characters in a minor side quest with such little screen time. Even though the choice doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, it can still weigh on your conscience if you've found yourself immersed in the setting and story of this world, which is pretty easy to do because of the rich narrative framing of these quests. 

A lot of other quests, however, can have lasting effects that will influence character relationships, main story events, and future quests. Most quests involving Triss, for example, will yield meaningful outcomes -- whether you choose to help her or not will determine the course of events in Novigrad, with the witch hunters either continuing their hunt for the witches in town or changing their sights to persecute nonhumans; whether you let her leave or tell her to stay will impact her availability for other side quests, like the transformation statues or in deciphering Philippa Eilhart's megascope crystal; and whether you romance her or not affects how she and Yen will act around Geralt in future cutscenes. 

The choice of whether to free or slay the spirit trapped under the Great Oak Tree in the Whispering Hillock quest affects the outcome of the Bloody Baron's questline and what becomes of his wife, what happens to the orphans in Crookback bog, how the Crones treat you, and the fate of the local village Downwarren. How you respond in dialogue -- like when Madman Lugos is making inappropriate remarks about Yen -- can open up or close off other questing opportunities, change how scenes play out, or alter your relationship with that character. If you fight him in that situation, you can get an extra sub-quest and earn his respect in the process, whereas he'll remain a bit of an antagonist if you drop the subject and move on. Some seemingly small decisions can even come back to affect you later on, such as with Skellige's Most Wanted -- a quest in which you're confronted by sentient monsters trying to scare you away from their turf because of your famed reputation as a monster-slayer. That quest plays as sort of a cumulative effect for how you've treated sentient monsters in previous quests; if you've chosen to help sentient monsters previously, or spared their lives, then you're able to argue your case and avoid a bigger confrontation. Other quests like Reason of State, in which you have the possibility of assassinating King Radovid, or the King's Gambit in which you determine whether Cerys, Hjalmar, or Svanrige will become the next ruler of Skellige, each have a major influence on the war with Nilfgaard and thus affect the ending slideshows. 

#10: Three different endings.

Multiple endings is kind of a standard thing in RPGs because it's one of the prime ways developers can show different outcomes for your actions, to show that your decisions had a significant impact on the game. This happens all the time with individual quests, but a lot of games still tend to force a single outcome on its main story. The Witcher 3 allows you to experience one of three different endings, which is nice in and of itself, but what's really impressive about the three endings is that their seeds are sown throughout the entire game, with each ending being the culmination of several small, seemingly insignificant moments based on how you interact with Ciri. This isn't a matter of simply playing the game and then picking one of three branching paths near the very end; you're stuck with your outcome based on decisions you made previously, and you never could have known, at the time, that the decisions you were making were actually going to influence the ending. That, I feel, makes the endings much more natural and organic, because it's all based on how you role-played Geralt over the entire story, not just at the very end or at obvious critical branches. 

#11: A satisfying epilogue.

It feels like, with a lot of games, you spend the entire game building up towards the final boss fight, and then everything abruptly ends soon after the final boss's health drops to zero, with the game going right into an ending cutscene or rolling the credits. That can feel pretty anticlimactic in a lot of games because of how suddenly the game comes to an end, without really giving you a chance to exhale and let the dust settle on your grand adventure. The Witcher 3 breaks that trend by actually offering a satisfyingly calm resolution to the main story, where it gives you the opportunity to see the resulting aftermath of the main plot's resolution and some of the more notable effects of your role-playing decisions, based on which of the three endings you got. It's especially nice to see this happen through actual gameplay since it makes the ending feel like a continuation of the actual game and story, as opposed to something that's been superfluously tacked on to the end, and it makes the ending feel much more poignant since you're not just being told what happened -- you're getting to see and experience it for yourself. The three epilogues, meanwhile, all feel like equally satisfying and valid conclusions to the story; even the "bad" ending, which is horribly depressing, has a lot of artistic merit and feels beautifully tragic. Even though it's arguably the worst ending, it's probably my favorite just because of the strong emotions conveyed through that ending. 

#12: Strong character building elements.

One of the things I find most satisfying with RPG-style leveling systems is deciding how I'm going to build my character to maximize efficiency within my desired playstyle, and The Witcher 3 does a pretty good job of providing interesting and meaningful decisions when it comes to character building. Skills and playstyles are generally broken into three main categories: swordplay, magic signs, and alchemy, each of which has its own dedicated skill tree and various equipment types and modifications meant to further enhance those playstyles. Ostensibly, it's a pretty simple system with you simply allocating a limited amount of skill points into a limited amount of skill slots, but those limitations are what make it so compelling, because there are way more skills than you have active slots for, and so you have to really think hard about what skills you actually want to invest in, knowing that you'll have to forfeit a lot of others that might be equally compelling to you. More advanced skills deeper in the tree require increasing amounts of points invested in that tree to unlock them, and so you have to plan out a roadmap to get you those requisite points invested, and whether it's even worth it at all to go deeper into a particular tree just to unlock an extra tier of skills. 

These skills combine with other things like mutagen slots, decoctions, and equipment sets to further incentivize clever allocation of limited resources. If you want to maximize the skill bonuses you get from mutagen slots, since they give extra bonuses for matching skills from the same set, then you want to efficiently group skills together as you unlock more slots and gain access to new skills, which can affect the timing for when you choose to learn skills as you level up, based on what slots are currently open. Decoctions can have a pretty strong effect on gameplay and your statistical prowess, but even with maximum toxicity you can only have about three active at a time, so with dozens of decoctions to choose from you have to whittle the selection down to two or three that seem most useful, or that synergize best with other skills and decoctions. Equipment sets, likewise, provide different bonuses based on their own individual attributes, sometimes enhancing specific magic signs or providing other unique bonuses, but the various armor skills add an extra dimension to the character building since the type of armor you equip can enhance certain stats by 20% or more. 

All of these different dimensions combine to create a really engaging system that rewards ingenuity and clever allocation of your limited resources. Unlike some other games where you just mindlessly take the next available skill along the tree, or that have little restrictions preventing you from just indiscriminately learning everything you could possibly want, The Witcher 3's leveling system has an almost puzzle-like element to it, ensuring that you'll only get the best results if you play smart and solve the puzzle, so to speak. That, I feel, makes leveling up and making build decisions much more compelling than other, similar types of games. 

#13: There is a ton of content.

The Witcher 3 is a long game, with a lot of stuff to do in it. It's so long that it took me 134 hours over the course of three-and-a-half months to "finish" the base game when I played it for the first time in 2016. Normally, I don't find that to be indicative of a game's quality, because a lot of games in this genre can pad their total playtime with tediously repetitive content and designs meant to deliberately waste your time, but I rarely ever felt bored or disinterested along the way to completing this game. Even though some of its side content, like monster nests and smuggler's caches and bandit camps can be extremely simple and repetitive, other things, like hidden treasures still manage to inject a bit of story and character into the simple process of searching a nearby area for some loot, each of which has its own unique premise. The landscapes are all generally interesting to traverse, with some decent exploration to be had in areas if you disable all of the mini-map icons, and the quests, of course, are all so engaging that it felt compelling for me to seek out as much content as possible. In this case, it's not just the amount of content that creates the value -- it's the fact that so much of it is of such high-quality, with so much attention to detail. 

#14: A buttery-smooth, well-polished experience.

I originally played TW3 over a year after its initial release, in the summer of 2016, so it had received extensive patching long before I even started playing, and even received a few major updates while I was playing, one of which was a major overhaul of the user interface. I can't vouch for how the game felt at launch, but in its current state, TW3 ran buttery smooth for me and felt almost completely bug-free and well-polished.

Other than a few crashes, most of the problems I encountered were minor graphical glitches that happened in such highly specific, idiosyncratic situations that I really can't fault the designers for their appearance in the game, although some of them were extremely bizarre and really pulled me out of the game when they occurred. The worst bugs that I encountered, mechanically, was a moment when the dialogue interface disappeared and I had to navigate out of it through trial-and-error and guessing as to what I was selecting; Triss's pathing glitched out during a major quest with her, causing her to hang back the entire time and not follow me through the sewers; and I had a boat awkwardly sink underwater like it was falling into quicksand while still in good sea-worthy condition. Obviously, the game isn't perfect, and I'd guess it's practically impossible to iron out every single potential bug in a game of this size, with this many systems and moving elements to it, but it feels like CDProjekt tried to take care of everything they possibly could, and so I'm willing to excuse most of the remaining issues given how much extra time and effort they've put into enhancing the game post-release, at no extra cost to the player.

#15: I really like the Skellige isles.

The bulk of the game takes place in Velen and Novigrad, which consist of one giant map with zero loading zones. Both of these areas have good atmospheres and theming, with Velen's murky swamps and dreary half-dead forests really bringing out its reputation as "No Man's Land" and Novigrad being one of the biggest and most well-realized cities I've ever seen in a fantasy RPG, but I found myself especially enamored with the Skellige isles out west, which evoke a strong Nordic vibe with their snowy mountains and honor-bound clans of warrior-societies. After spending 60 or 80 hours slogging through a swampy hell-hole and a dense, contemporary city, it was a breath of fresh air to explore such beautiful islands in an all new map. In keeping with the great audiovisual aesthetics elsewhere in the game, Skellige looks and sounds as fantastic as you'd expect, but I find its landscapes far more visually pleasing to look at, especially in conjunction with that wistful music.

Skellige also sets itself apart from the other regions of the game in terms of its gameplay mechanics. The mountainous terrain gives each island a lot of vertical space to explore, which literally adds extra depth to the exploration since you're not just exploring forward, back, left, and right, but also up and down. The vertical levels hide a bunch of content out of sight, on the other side of a mountain face, or underground, or in a narrow ravine, whereas practically everywhere else in the game is relatively flat, where exploration is a more simplistic process of seeing something on the horizon and simply making a bee line for it. So discovering places and exploring the world in Skellige feels like a much more engaging and involved process. I also appreciate the islands being divided into smaller spaces, while still giving you a pretty sizeable main island at the center, since that helps to guide exploration when you have more defined areas with some sort of central focus; each island is designed around its own main quest and storyline, so besides just having a more structured area to explore, it feels like there's a greater purpose to everything you encounter in that space. Whereas I felt compelled to turn on the "Undiscovered Points of Interest" icons in Velen and Novigrad, because of how big and spread out those maps are, I turned them off for the bulk of my time in Skellige and had a lot more fun just exploring and discovering things on my own, which felt more realistically feasible given the smaller size and greater density of content in the Skellige isles. 

#16: Lots of tie-ins and references to TW1.

One of my biggest issues with TW2 is that it didn't really feel like a Witcher game to me because of how much it strayed from the themes and gameplay mechanics that were established in the first game. The Witcher 3 feels pretty similar to the second game, in terms of gameplay and presentation, but I really appreciate how much effort CD Projekt went through to tie it in with the first game. Given how old and (arguably) out-dated the first game was by 2015, it would've been easy and maybe even justified to sweep it under the rug and ignore it as the black sheep of the series, but CD Projekt went out of their way to add a bunch of content that would appeal to fans of the original game. It was really nostalgic to go back to Kaer Morhen and spend time catching up with your fellow witchers Vesemir, Eskel, and Lambert, who were all completely absent in the second game, and it was cool how that whole section of the game dealt so heavily with what life is like as a witcher, and how it shed new light on things like the trials of becoming a witcher. The central premise of TW3's main plot, meanwhile, is incidentally laid out by a specific line of dialogue said by the King of the Wild Hunt to Geralt in TW1. There's also a really neat easter egg in the bookshop of Novigrad in which you receive a letter from one of the main characters of the first game, plus references to other characters like Kalkstein, Berengar, and other things like getting to visit Leo's grave, and finding Salamandra notes describing their plan to attack Kaer Morhen before the start of the first game. As a big fan of the first game, I loved seeing all these references. 

#17: Humor and easter eggs.

You wouldn't expect, in a world as serious as the entire Witcher saga, to find as much humor and fun off-the-wall moments as there are in TW3. Geralt himself can be a wise-ass at times, dropping witty one-liners, insults, and dry puns at the drop of a hat. You're in for some smiles any time you interact with a troll, and basically any quest with Dandelion is sure to end up with some kind of theatrical absurdity. Other scenes go in hilariously unexpected directions depending on what you do, like if you try to romance both Yennefer and Triss, or if you decide to get drunk with Lambert and Eskel. All-the-while you run into a ton of easter eggs and pop-culture references, like the killer rabbit from Monty Python and Holy Grail, Jango Fett from Star Wars, what might be the skeletal corpse of Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, Tyler Durden from Fight Club, and more, which are all fun and amusing discoveries that add little bits of excitement to the exploration. 

#18: Elaborate journal, beastiary, and quest entries.

There's a ton of information to process in TW3, some of which is backstory and lore to which we're never actually witness through the games, given that so many characters and events are lifted from the novel source material, but thankfully the user interface does a great job of helping you keep track of everything. From the menu, you can access detailed character biographies (helpful in case you forget who certain characters are, or if you've never played the previous games and therefore never met them, and want to learn more about them), beastiary entries that let you read up on the lore of all of the Witcher universe's unique monsters, and quest entries that narrate each step of the quest in the form of a story. None of this is absolutely essential for the game, and it all has zero effect on the actual gameplay, but it's a really nice touch just to have this information available if you desire to enlighten yourself more. In a game as big as The Witcher 3, it's easy to forget certain details, or even who certain people are sometimes, so it's great to have a type of in-game encyclopedia to consult as reference. 

#19: A more useful inventory screen.

The Witcher 1 had a pretty solid grid-based inventory system that let you see everything at a glance, just by looking at the icons for every item. Then, for some reason, TW2 turned the inventory into a text-based list with abstract item weights attached to everything. It was a pain and a bother to use. Thankfully, CD Projekt went with a more TW1-style inventory this time around, giving us grids with graphic icons for items, and even allowing us to sort items by tabs like in TW2. It's a small thing to be sure, but since you spend so much time dealing with your inventory in this game, it's a nice quality of life feature that the inventory screen be sleek and easy to use.


#20: Custom map markers.

This is something I've been asking games to do for a long time, and relatively few actually do this; The Witcher 3 lets you put custom markers on the map to keep track of things you've found but need to remember to come back to later, as well as waypoints to help set your own personal destination on your mini-map navigation. The markers can be yellow exclamation points, like if you think it's something quest-related, blue inverted triangles if you simply want to mark a spot, or red skulls if there's a strong enemy in the area. With a world this big, it's a tremendous blessing to be able to place your own reminders, because without them, it would be near impossible to remember where everything is that you want to come back to. There could stand to be more varied types of markers, of course, but the mere fact that we get any at all is to be praised. 

#21: Alchemy is much more accessible.

A lot of people complained about the alchemy systems in the first two games, saying they were too convoluted, too inaccessible, and just generally not very appealing gameplay options. CD Projekt took those criticisms into consideration with TW3 and revamped the system to make potions and blade oils a viable option for all playstyles. Potions, blade oils, bombs, and decoctions are a lot easier to brew, and maintaining your supply is almost effortless, with the game automatically refilling everything as long as you have alcohol in your inventory when you meditate, meaning you can focus your efforts on just playing the game (and using your alchemical creations) instead of spending a bunch of time hunting down resources and staring at a menu screen to brew everything all the time. You don't have to invest a bunch of points in alchemy to make good use of potions, and you can brew them anywhere and use them at any time for constant, convenient access to that whole gameplay element.

#1: Horrible first impressions.

When I played the game originally in 2016, I was really put-off by the early stages of the tutorial because everything felt like a horrendous mess. Movement controls felt stiff, clunky, and unresponsive, causing me to constantly bump into things and struggle simply walking through a doorway, in addition to the intro featuring a ton of heavy-handed tutorials that pause the game in the middle of the action to bombard you with walls of text explaining how things work, even going so far as to describe background lore that isn't relevant to what's actually happening in-game at that moment. The heads up display looked so cluttered and busy with five different gauges clustered into one corner and a bunch of different icons everywhere, that I didn't really understand what was going on with all of it. And the combat was so rough trying to get a feel for everything that I spent 15 minutes dying and loading my save, just trying to survive the first fight that happens literally seconds after you finish the tutorial and are finally let loose in the world, with no checkpoint save before the fight thus forcing me to skip through the long dialogue sequence with Vesemir every single time I died and had to try again.

Were I not a seasoned gamer with the patience to endure rough starts and put in the time getting used to things, I might not have made it past the opening 30 minutes. Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I didn't feel start to comfortable with the game until I was over an hour into it, and didn't really start enjoying myself until about two or three hours into it. In the grand scheme of a 134 hour playthrough, those first couple of hours are pretty insignificant, but it's never a good thing to start off a new experience on bad footing, because some people might not have the patience to stick around until it supposedly "gets better." It's worth pointing out that none of these issues really bothered me when I replayed it four years later, in 2020, probably because I was already familiar and comfortable with everything, but it definitely bothered me during my first playthrough. 

#2: Game balance is non-existent.

Typical game balance involves easing the player into the game by making things slower and simpler at the start, giving you time to figure out how the game works as you start getting your feet wet, and then slowly increasing the difficulty towards the game's ending so that, as you become more experienced and develop greater mastery of the game, it gets harder to match your increasing skill level, thereby pushing you to get better over the course of the game. The Witcher 3 is almost the exact opposite of this; it starts the difficulty out at its absolute hardest, right from the start, and maintains a decent amount of challenge for only 10-20 hours. Around that point in the game you start crafting your first set of witcher's gear and finally start unlocking enough skill slots to finally get some decent bonuses, thereby resulting in a steep drop-off in difficulty as the game instantly gets easier, even more so as you get the hang of subjective things like the feel of combat, and continues to get progressively easier over the entire rest of the game as you continue to level up.

While it's true that there's some satisfaction in getting stronger and eventually breezing your way past all the obstacles that were giving you so much difficulty in the beginning, that point happens so ridiculously early in TW3 that it's more pitiful than satisfying. It's like playing a game of basketball where you're up by 60 points at halftime, and don't even need to play the second half. In my first playthrough in 2016, I started out on the hardest difficulty, "Death March," and had to take it down a notch almost immediately because the game was kicking my ass so badly while I was still struggling to get a feel for the combat. But then, around 30-40 hours in, the supposed hard difficulty ("Blood and Broken Bones") started to feel more like easy mode. I considered bumping the difficulty back up to Death March, but felt like that would just prolong every fight by simply inflating enemy health values and making every fight longer. When I replayed the game just now in late 2020, I started on Death March and played through the whole way with hardly any trouble at all -- I was routinely killing enemies 10 or 20 levels higher than me just by virtue of my understanding of the combat system and the enemy AI, because the game's difficulty curve apparently deals more with just getting used to the rhythm and flow of combat and figuring out how the various systems work together, as opposed to through proper mechanical and statistical balancing of the leveling system. 

So not only is the game simply not hard enough in general, but it doesn't ramp the difficulty up sufficiently as the game progresses to properly match the pace at which you improve as a player, or statistically as a character, while the fact that player skill can completely trump statistical deficiencies of the player-character almost defeats the entire purpose of the leveling system in an RPG like this. To be clear, I'm not advocating for level-scaling enemies to keep the difficulty level up, and I'm not saying that the game getting progressively easier is inherently a bad thing -- rather, it's that leveling up doesn't really feel necessary because not enough content is gated behind level progression. Once you get the feel for how combat works and figure out a few basic strategies, there's almost nothing stopping you from defeating any enemy and completing any quest you might come across, other than the possible limitations of your own patience sitting through horrendously long and drawn-out fights. Getting stronger doesn't really unlock access to new content or more difficult challenges, in other words, it just makes what you're already doing faster and easier. 

#3: Combat is shallow and boring.

Combat has never been all that sophisticated in this series, but it's mindlessly simple in TW3. Melee combat, at its core, consists of five main actions: fast attack, strong attack, parry, dodge, and roll. That's not a bad foundation to work with, but sadly it all boils down to button-mashing; every fight against almost every enemy basically amounts to spamming fast attacks and hitting the dodge button when an enemy is about to attack you (which is blatantly telegraphed by their health-bar flashing red at you), and then going right back to spamming fast attacks. There are exceptions, of course, such as if an enemy has a shield, or if it's a weird monster with a unique special ability, but you spend the vast majority of the game fighting the same basic enemies over and over again, all of which fall victim to this simplistic, repetitive pattern of attack attack dodge, attack attack dodge, attack attack dodge.

Enemy AI is just so simple that you almost never have to deviate from that successful pattern, because most enemies behave exactly the same. It doesn't really matter whether you're fighting a wolf, a bear, a drowner, a nekker, a ghoul, or even a werewolf because they all just come straight at you and do some generic close-range one-or-two-hit attack. Against most enemies, you don't have to worry about what type of attack they're doing, or where they're aiming it -- you just dodge or parry when you see them telegraph an attack. Some enemies fall victim to really simple, repetitive stun-locking patterns that leave them almost completely helpless to defend themselves. Meanwhile, you don't have a lot of different attack options at your disposal; with only two types of sword attacks, the system is even further limited by the fact that there's hardly any reason to use strong attacks (unless you invest heavily into those skills) because they're so much slower and are therefore easier for enemies to interrupt, while fast attacks do roughly the same damage-per-second and are harder to interrupt because they keep enemies stun-locked longer.

The inclusion of potions, bombs, blade oils, magic signs, and a crossbow are supposed to add extra depth and variety to the system, but these aren't particularly exciting options, either. The crossbow is insanely under-powered and only ever worth using to knock airborne foes out of the air, or to one-shot underwater foes. Blade oils and potions are all passive stat-boosters that don't change the gameplay all that significantly, with the possible exception of the Blizzard potion that slows time around you, while you move at normal speed, for a time after each kill. Bombs can be thrown like a grenade to cause damage or special effects to an area, like freezing enemies in place, or preventing the use of magic, which can certainly be helpful against large groups of enemies or against tougher boss-like enemies, but I rarely felt the need to use them, even in harder difficulty modes.

Magic signs would seem like they're more fun, since there are five of them and each one gets an alternate casting mode (for essentially 10 different signs), but they, too, become shallow and repetitive after just a little while. As a pure mage in my original playthrough, I discovered that signs made combat even simpler and more boring, because I spent basically the whole game using Aard to knock enemies down and killing them with a one-hit finisher, or spamming Igni as often as possible and dodging until my stamina regenerated enough to cast it again. Against some of the stronger enemies in the game, it was faster and more effective just to cast Quen and reflect their damage back at them instead of actually fighting -- I just stood there and let them kill themselves. As with the melee combat, every single fight was just a matter of repeating the same basic strategy, rinsing and repeating until everything was dead.

Ultimately, I feel like you basically have to play as an alchemy/sign build hybrid in order to get any fun depth or satisfaction out of the combat system, since melee combat is so rudimentary in general and the sword skills so generally bland and uninteresting. There are only two skills in the entire combat tree that grant new sword attacks, while everything else consists of passive stat boosts and weird, gimmicky stuff with adrenaline, the crossbow, and dodging. As previously mentioned, the crossbow is basically worthless making 20% of the Combat tree worthless by extension, while adrenaline just passively boosts damage and isn't actively used by very many skills. At least with a sign build, you get 5 or 10 active abilities to use in combat, and have an extra dimension of tactics involved with managing your stamina gauge, while the toxicity bonuses from the alchemy tree can let you use more decoctions at a time, which can have pretty fun and serious effects on combat strategy, depending on which you choose to use. 

#4: Gameplay doesn't evolve as you level-up.

A cardinal sin for an RPG, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't feel like your character evolves as you get stronger. You can invest in 80 different skills, most of which have 2-5 tiers of investment that unlock extra effects as you put more points into that individual skill, thereby allowing you a ton of freedom to customize Geralt into your own unique build. The vast majority of these skills, however, are passive modifiers that don't actually change your gameplay; deal 5% more damage when using fast attacks, increase maximum toxicity by 1 for every known level 1 formula, extend the duration of Yrden sign traps by five seconds, and so on. Sure, they all make you better and stronger at the game, and these skills have a tremendous cumulative effect as you rack up more and more of them, but few of them add new abilities to the game. For the most part, the skills simply make you more effective at what you're already capable of doing.

Once you gain access to the crossbow a few hours into the starting area, you'll have seen and experienced 90% of what the combat system has to offer. From that point on, the only variety comes from different bombs, potions, and blade oils you unlock, but again, with the exception of a few bombs and potions, these are mostly just passive stat boosters. Of the 80 skills, only 9-10 of them introduce new abilities; five of these are the alternate sign-casting modes, which can be unlocked relatively early, while the two new melee attacks, whirl and rend, are buried deep in the skill tree. The only skill that does anything new outside of combat, meanwhile, is the Axii skill "delusion," which lets you jedi mind trick people in dialogue, and can also be obtained pretty early in the game. As a pure mage, I unlocked all of the game-changing skills in that tree about a quarter of the way through the game and just passively watched my stats go up for the remaining 90 hours. When replaying the game, the only variety and evolution that I experienced in my build was on two occasions when I chose to completely re-spec into all-new fields and different hybrid combinations, the variety of which stemmed entirely from me undoing previous decisions as opposed to making new decisions along my current trajectory. 

#5: Progression is slow and unrewarding.

The rate at which you play the game by exploring the world, defeating enemies, completing quests, and so on, doesn't match the rate at which you level-up and gain skills. The Witcher 3 is an incredibly long game with a massive world to explore and a ton of content to complete -- people spend an average of 100 hours playing this game, but the leveling system feels like something from a 50-hour game that's been stretched to fit a game twice that length, by virtue of simply slowing down the rate at which you unlock new skill slots as you level up, and down-scaling quest rewards as you inevitably out-level the game's content to the point that they just stop giving experience rewards altogether. The game's scale is so big that progress just feels incredibly slow.  

Every time you level up (or discover a new Place of Power) you earn a new skill point, which you can invest in any of the game's three primary skill trees (or the fourth auxiliary branch). Skill points by themselves are fairly insignificant, however, since individually they only grant a meager 3-5% boost in something, but sometimes acquiring a new skill point won't give any bonus at all if you've maxed out your currently-active skills and don't have an open skill slot. Early on you unlock new skill slots every two levels, but this rate slows down as you level up, first increasing to every three levels around mid-way through the game, and then every four levels in the final quarter, meaning it's possible and frequently likely that you'll wind up in situations where you go several level-ups at a time before being able to actually use your skill points. And as a result of new skill slots becoming more and more scarce later in the game, you effectively hit a soft level cap well before the game officially ends; although you can easily reach level 35+ by doing everything the game has to offer, everything slows down so much around the early-to-mid-20s, with the final skill slot unlocking at level 30, that it feels like progression just comes to a complete halt with not much left to look forward to, and still dozens of hours of gameplay left to complete. 

It's also possible that, depending on how you've been building your character, you may find yourself in a position where new upgrades don't even benefit you that much. After 80 hours of my original playthrough, having still not been to Skellige or even completed chapter one, I found that I just had no reason to upgrade anymore, with still 54 hours left in the base game. As a pure mage, my sign intensity was already so off the charts that upgrading my signs any further would just give me diminished returns, and branching out into one of the other two skill trees (physical combat or alchemy) would result in less benefit from my mutagen slots, until I achieved another 10-12 level-ups to unlock a new mutagen slot. In that playthrough, I finished the base game at level 34 with 15 skill points that I literally couldn't even use in my sign build, because there just weren't enough active slots for me to continue learning new skills. 

Ultimately, it's a little disappointing that, of the 80 skills you can choose from, you can only ever equip 12 of them, meaning you hit a hard cap at level 30 and can no longer equip any additional skills. You can still learn other skills, of course, but you're always limited to only having 12 active at one time, meaning any new skills you learn will require you to swap out an old one to activate it. Normally I like those kinds of limitations in games, and I specifically praised it earlier in this review because of how it forces you into tough decisions, weighing the pros and cons of different abilities and forming your own more-specialized build, but it feels almost criminal to spend so much time in this game building towards such few abilities. When replaying the game, I found myself wanting to jump into the DLC expansions halfway through the base game if only to give myself new ways to upgrade my character via Runewright abilities and the new Mutagen enhancements, because the base game's progression felt like it was already running out of steam with still half the game left to play. 

It's also frustrating how the mutagen slots kind of force you into specializing early on, since they only give a bonus to matching skills from the same skill tree, effectively punishing hybrid builds until you're half or three-quarters of the way through the game, when you finally have enough mutagen slots to group skills together to take proper advantage of the mutagen bonuses. Simply put, if you try to branch out too early in the game, then you're just deliberately handicapping yourself, and that can be a little too restrictive to feel like you're being arbitrarily forced into specializing in one field instead of doing something more varied that you might ultimately prefer. 

#6: The world is too big, with too much content.

I know I praised the game earlier for having so much quality content and for being such a good value for your money, but there are two sides to this coin, and in the case of TW3, having such a big world and having so much content in it can also be a bad thing. When you create a world this big, there's necessarily going to be dead space because you can't fill every area with interesting content; the world is as big as it is to create a more realistic sense of scale and geography, but that comes with the consequence of spreading everything out and forcing players to spend more time traveling across it, and to spend more time than really should be necessary searching for the good and worthwhile content.

For every hour I spent doing a fun quest, or tracking a unique monster to its lair and having an epic showdown with it, or discovering some cool area off the beaten path with a hidden treasure chest, I spent half an hour wandering around the wilderness picking flowers and generally finding nothing of interest. A lot of times I'd discover a cool-looking place that simply had nothing going on in it. Even major landmarks on the map, like the Wolven Glade or the Devil's Pit, for instance, had all these interesting structures that looked like they should've been part of some quest, but ended up serving no purpose whatsoever in either of my playthroughs.

On the flipside, I frequently ran into situations when I was being overwhelmed with quests and things of interest popping up from everywhere, all the time. In trying to get to a quest marker across unexplored terrain, I stumbled into a bandit camp and had to defend myself, and ended up picking up a quest to find a family sword. So I figure "I may as well do this quest while I'm here," bring up the journal, and discover it's pointing me far away in the opposite direction. So I head that way and stumble into another quest because a cyclops ambushes me on the side of the road. So I investigate the area and find a note which sends me off in yet another direction to complete the quest, at which point I gave up and ignore both of the quests I just picked up, opting to go back to what I was doing originally. 

Then you've got the abundance of marked locations like Monster Nests, Smuggler's Caches, Bandit Camps, Hidden Treasures, and similar such encounters that basically just amount to "Go to a place, fight some enemies, and open a treasure chest" in what might be some of the most simple, shallow, and repetitive content in the entire game. The majority of map markers in Skellige are literally just submerged treasure chests that you have to spend minutes at a time sailing across completely empty seascapes with nothing else to see or do along the way, where you're then forced to awkwardly fight a bunch of airborne enemies with hardly any solid footing on which to stand, or else dive underwater and mindlessly one-shot everything with the crossbow's auto-target feature. You'd seriously have to put a gun to my head to make me want to go around clearing that map of all its content.  

The effect of having so much content in one game is that it dilutes the overall experience. With a game this size, some of the content is just going to be better than all the rest, and a lot of other stuff is going to end up being completely forgettable. Even though nearly every quest has some kind of decent setup and characterization relative to other games of this scale, a lot of these less-significant side-quests pale in comparison to what else is in the same game, or compared to smaller, more tightly-focused games.  You could argue that, if the boring stuff is truly that boring, then just don't do it because it's all optional, but you never know what quests or points of interest are going to be outstanding or mundane until you complete them, so you basically have to explore everywhere and do everything you come across if you want to experience all of the best content that the game has to offer, which means wading through a lot of relatively boring content to find the good stuff.

#7: Exploration is unrewarding.

As a result of the world being too big for its own good, exploration doesn't feel all that rewarding. The thing that makes exploration satisfying in games is that feeling of discovery you get when you find something off the beaten path that others might possibly miss, thus making your experience potentially different from someone else playing the same game. These discoveries can be cool quests, special loot, or just fun easter eggs, but a lot of stuff that you find in TW3 ends up being either completely worthless or completely pointless.

All of the best gear in the game, for instance, is witcher gear that you craft yourself, and then upgrade over the rest of the game. I made my first set of witcher gear at level 11 and eventually realized that nothing I was ever going to find in my adventures would ever be better than what I already had, which somewhat hurt my motivation to go out exploring. It makes me wish the game didn't have witcher sets at all, and instead made all of the equipment like the non-witcher sets, which use a Diablo-style rarity system with random attributes; early on it was fun to find new pieces of equipment and weighing the trade-off of different extra effects, but once I started crafting witcher gear that whole dimension of equipment progression just completely vanished, because nothing ever really seemed to out-class the Griffin set for a magic-heavy sign build. Most of what you find, otherwise, is just worthless junk that only exists to clog up your inventory as vendor trash, or blueprints for gear you won't be able to use for another 20-40 hours because the level requirements to use them, once crafted, are so much higher than when you find them. 

Meanwhile, you get so little experience for killing monsters and discovering locations that you can spend several hours exploring and make virtually no progress towards leveling up. And with the map as big as it is, you spend a lot of time running all over it just looking for content, sometimes in vain. I'd often spend 5-10 minutes at a time running around an interesting-looking area finding nothing but useless plants and maybe a few random crates full of junk, or some random low-level enemies. So, you either put up with spending all this time aimlessly wandering around, or you cut to the chase and just follow the marked points of interest on your map that tell you where basically everything worth finding is before you've even been there -- useful for cutting down all the wasted time, but they make exploration feel like accounting, like you're just going around checking boxes off a list, as opposed to actually exploring and engaging with the world on your own.

#8: The world doesn't always feel alive.

Earlier I praised the game world for feeling real and showing signs of dynamic elements, but that doesn't mean it always feels alive. There are thousands of NPCs in this game, but 95% of them can't be interacted with in any kind of way whatsoever. Not that you'd want to, of course, but it makes a lot of them feel like lifeless filler characters pasted into the environment to occupy space. Although many can be seen performing ambient activities in their daily lives, others just stand in place not really doing anything, and they don't always react to your presence or actions very realistically, either, seeing as no one bats an eye when you go barging into their homes and stealing everything out from under their noses. It sometimes feels like running around in an MMORPG with how many generic, nameless, lifeless NPCs you encounter, and by virtue of people standing around with an exclamation point over their head waiting for you to come by and initiate dialogue with them. 

There's a small camp near the starting area in Velen, for instance, where prisoners of war are being put to work mining rocks or something. The area, I suppose, is meant to showcase some of the harsh consequences of war and the toll that Nilfgaard's conquest is having on the region, but it feels like window dressing in a display case because there's no interactive or immersive way to engage with that area. You can't talk to anyone or pick up any quests associated with this area, and there aren't any meaningful conversations to overhear, or scripted scenes to watch, either. It seems like you should be able to witness guards ordering the prisoners around and keeping them in line, or maybe they'd yell at you for getting too close to the prisoners or trying to talk to them. Maybe you'd hear prisoners grumbling under their breath about how difficult the work is or lamenting why they're there in the first place, or local peasants might comment on the state of the war and how it's affected their work in the local quarry -- just something, anything to bring this area to life in an interesting way. As it is, everyone just seems to go about their business like animatronic robots at a theme park, with the only deliberately scripted activity going on being two women talking about Nilfgaardian genitalia -- everything else is just random, generic commentary. They do sprinkle a tiny bit of world-building and characterization into some of the dialogue, but it's drowned out by everyone else saying random unrelated things, or deliberately ignoring you, or making odd bodily noises, instead of doing things more appropriate for this particular area and situation. Without those little details, it was hard for me to suspend my disbelief that this was a real place and not just a phony video game backdrop, or some place that they'd started designing and then kind of forgot about.  

#9: Simple, repetitive quest mechanics.

The quests in TW3 may have a lot of engaging storylines and characters in them, but the actual mechanics for solving quests tend to be pretty shallow and repetitive. A strong majority of quests follow a simple formula of "talk to the quest-giver, go to the location marked on your map, investigate using your witcher senses, follow a glowing trail, fight something, and return to the quest-giver." Other quests consist of a lot of straightforward dialogue where you just walk to the objective, watch long cutscenes, cycle through all dialogue options, watch more cutscenes, walk to the next location, and repeat. Occasionally, they'll throw some kind of utterly trivial, pointless, unrelated fight at you just to give you something to do between walking to your next objective.

Witcher senses, in particular, feel like a lot of missed potential. On the one hand, it's cool that you can press a button to hone in on things a witcher's heightened senses would pick up on, that we as mere ordinary humans would never notice, like subtle animal tracks on the ground or scent trails, but this takes a lot of self-satisfaction out of the quests because you're not actually solving the quest yourself -- you're just pressing a button to highlight the solution and following a dotted-line to its conclusion. There's one quest, for instance, that tasks you with solving a puzzle by putting a wine bottle in the correct spot based on its year to open a hidden passage -- Geralt suggests it might be based on Dandelion or Ciri's birth year, but instead of having the player recall information they've been told previously, or find another clue in the environment, or cross-reference information in the glossary, or decipher the layout of the wine rack to find the right spot, you just hold right-click to highlight the solution, and then left-click to interact with it. Even though the game explicitly tells you to "solve the riddle" you don't actually do anything to solve it, as it all happens automatically. 

Another quest tasks you with tracking down a serial killer, but there's no active decision-making or problem-solving on the player's end, because all you do is use witcher senses to let Geralt make all of the critical observations and deductions on his own, with only one real decision coming at the very end with a painfully obvious correct option. You're not really solving a murder mystery, in that case, you're just being told a story with passive gameplay that merely moves you from one plot point to the next. Compare that to a similar quest in The Witcher 1, when you're trying to figure out who's working with Salamandra by interviewing multiple suspects, interpreting evidence, cross-referencing their alibis and evaluating their possible motivations before picking a suspect -- it's a complicated web of quests with tons of branching paths and outcomes based on how you choose to approach each step of the quest with you making connections entirely on your own, and with ample opportunities to get it wrong if you aren't diligent, whereas The Witcher 3 is basically just a linear trail of bread crumbs where you just walk around using witcher senses clicking on everything and exhausting all of the dialogue options, that eventually leads to an obvious red herring where the correct choice is the only logical, sensible option -- that being to remain inquisitive when you have the suspect cornered instead of automatically jumping to conclusions and launching into a vindictive rampage. And even if you make the right choice in that situation, figuring out the "Whodunnit" is still a passive, reactive process as you're merely told at that point who's responsible. 

And unfortunately, witcher senses are a mandatory part of the game, they're not just there as a crutch for more casual gamers who don't want to put in the work figuring things out for themselves; you typically have to use witcher senses to solve these things because there's literally no other information to go off of. Without them, you'd just be bumbling around aimlessly, hoping to stumble into solutions randomly. So in effect, they cause you to just shut your brain off while mindlessly following highlights to make the game move forward on its set trajectory. Consider that the bulk of quests in this game revolve around Geralt performing some sort of detective work to solve a problem -- he has to investigate a scene, collect evidence, talk to witnesses, figure out where to go, get suspects to cooperate with him, and so on -- and yet you do barely any detective work as a player, since the game forcibly guides you along the path the entire way while Geralt does all the work himself. That's fine if all you want is a context for interesting stories to be told through an interactive medium, but misses out on a lot of the unique problem-solving appeal that these types of games can provide. And even if you like the stories that are being told within this type of quest structure, it can still get to feel repetitive and degrading far too quickly in such a long and drawn-out game. 

#10: Decisions often feel trivial and unimportant.

While it's true that you can make a lot of important decisions that can affect the outcomes of major characters and even lead you to one of three different endings, most of the decisions you make in TW3 have little effect on anything, either because the outcomes are utterly inconsequential and only exist for role-playing purposes (which is totally fine, I suppose -- it's better than having no choice at all) or because you actually, in fact, have no choice at all and are forced to do exactly what the game intended all along, regardless of the fact that you were given an apparent "choice."

At one point in the main story, I thought I had a chance to effect a major branch in the main quest line, to pursue a hint of Ciri's whereabouts by pursuing either Dandelion or Triss and Yennefer. I decided to go with Triss and Yennefer, because that seemed like the more logical guess -- I couldn't recall any mention previously that Dandelion even knew Ciri, and I knew that Triss was in the city and that Yennefer had a history with Ciri -- only for the game to say "That was the wrong answer, you're gonna go after Dandelion for help." Why even give the player a choice in that situation, if Geralt is ultimately going to make that decision himself, or if there isn't going to be any sort of consequence for picking the wrong choice? If you're intending for the scene to play out a certain way, regardless of the player's input, then just show it how you envisioned it instead of putting a meaningless false choice into the mix. 

Meanwhile, a lot of your dialogue options are considered flat-out wrong, according to the script. In one major conversation after finding Ciri, I said I didn't want to get the Lodge of Sorceresses involved because I didn't trust them and was told "Too bad, we're doing it." Ciri then protested, saying that she should have some say in things and that she can take care of herself, so I said "You're right," and was promptly told "No, she needs to be kept completely out of danger." She got angry and ran off, so I said "I'll go after her," and was then told "No, she needs to work this out on her own." This was three things, all in a row, where the game slapped my wrist and said "no you're wrong, this is how this cutscene is going to play out," and I was left to wonder why I was even given a choice if nothing I said was actually going to matter.

#11: A lot of restrictive gameplay.

Like with the dialogue options, there are a ton of instances in the ordinary gameplay when the game forces you to play a certain way, either by arbitrarily restricting your actions or by preventing you from doing anything else. Every now and then you run into situations where the game just doesn't let you run, and you have to walk to your next destination, or you end up in places where you can't jump, draw your weapon, or cast signs. Particularly infuriating is how combat is a completely different gameplay mode from non-combat, since it completely alters the way movement, controls, and inputs work; while in combat you can't jump or interact with anything, which often led to me getting stuck in places because I couldn't jump or climb a ladder to get to the enemy so I could kill it and get out of combat mode. I remember trying to complete a quest in Skellige where flying enemies suddenly ambushed me from out of nowhere, sending me into "combat mode" right before I pressed the "jump" button, which resulted in Geralt performing a roll-dodge off a cliff instead of doing the jump I intended him to do, and also got stuck on a tiny little platform unable to jump or move off of it because the game just wouldn't let me perform normal platforming actions with enemies nearby. 

There was another time when I walked into an NPC's house and found it being ransacked by looters who then attacked me, and the game forced me into a fist-fighting mini-game. When I tried to draw my swords, or cast signs on them, that familiar message popped on screen saying "You can't do that here." And I thought, "Why not? They're criminals, I don't want to give them a fair fight or take it easy on them." Even if the game is trying to force a non-lethal outcome to that fight, why can't you use Quen to protect yourself, or Axii to stun them, or Aard to knock them back? What about using a Samum bomb, which acts like a flash-bang to daze and temporarily blind them? It's annoying when any game does this type of thing, but I think it's even worse in an open-world RPG, the whole point of which is having the freedom to play the game how you want, which is not always the case in TW3.

#12: Too much reliance on linear scripting.

Continuing with the previous point, the restrictive gameplay often feels like you're being shoe-horned into following highly-scripted storyboards, where you're only allowed to do things in a very specific order, or in the one way that CDProjekt intended you to do it. In many cases, deviating from the intended order of operations, or trying things outside of the script's limited scope, results in a clunky, awkward, unsatisfying, immersion-breaking dead end. In White Orchard, for instance, I remembered from my first playthrough that an herbalist lived in a certain hut, and thought I'd go there to buy and sell alchemy supplies, only to discover her door locked and her absent from her hut because she apparently isn't spawned into the world until a main quest sends you to talk to the local herbalist. Likewise, while exploring I ran into a guy with a bloody wound in obvious distress, but couldn't interact with him in any capacity whatsoever because I hadn't picked up the requisite side quest to be able say "Hey, are you alright? What's wrong with your arm?" At the very least, there there should've been some kind of programmed response where you try to interact with him, and he says "I'm fine... leave me alone" until you have the right quest active to know there's something else going on.

Later on, there's a major side quest where you're tracking down a serial killer by following a trail of clues, and finally catch him in the act, thus triggering a frantic chase through the grounds of a noble's estate where you're eventually confronted by the guards who believe you to be the assassin. According to the game's script, you're supposed to stop and fight these guards to trigger a cutscene in which the killer gets away, and the deceased's daughter rushes in to clear your name. But, if you do the only logical, sensible thing and instead choose to ignore the guards (because you don't want to spill innocent blood and realize that doing so would slow down your progress of apprehending the culprit), then the trail of footprints just abruptly vanishes and the quest comes to a screeching halt, leaving you to awkwardly wander around with no more clues to follow and the quest no longer advancing, as you wonder what's going on and what you're actually expected to be doing. In lots of other occasions, you discover areas during exploration that are apparently intended to be used for some quest, but which are inexplicably closed off without the requisite quest active, and which inexplicably open up once you're doing the right quest. And there are tons of situations where it would be most practical for Geralt to jedi mind trick someone into cooperation, but because that would ruin the wonderfully-crafted script you inexplicably can't use that option. 

This type of stuff is really frustrating to encounter in a supposed RPG, especially an open-world one, the whole point of which is typically to allow players the opportunity to explore the world and solve quests in their own unique way. But because of the game's heavy-handed reliance on following these linear scripts, by virtue of everything being so heavily story-driven with gameplay sequences that seem to exist primarily as a means to move the player from one storyboard moment to the next, that whole element of player agency gets reduced significantly. Instead of being presented with a problem and using your own wits and character skills to solve the problem, you're basically just along for the ride passively following the script and watching scenes play out, until the game expects you to fight something or make a critical choice in dialogue. To be fair, that works in this type of game where the goal was clearly to tell a story (or a bunch of short stories set in an open-world), but it's a little deflating if you're coming into it expecting more mechanically-driven quests where the story emerges from your own gameplay, like you'd find in more mechanical, systems-based RPGs and immersive-sims, or else if you enjoy the stories being told but want to play a more active role within that story.

#13: The main story bogs down like crazy.

The game begins with a pretty clear and concise objective: find Ciri. Finding her is not that simple, however, as you have to go to every single region of the Continent and speak to a variety of people in each location, usually doing some obligatory sub-quest for each and every person you find just so they'll point you in the next direction. This premise is fine for a little while, at least in the early stages of the game when you have little to no information to go on and are dealing with what I consider to be some of the better main quests with the Ladies of the Wood and the Bloody Baron, but it really bogs down once you finish the main quests in Velen and you get to the big city in Novigrad.

So you spend dozens of hours in Velen looking for Ciri and doing a bunch of arbitrary sub-goals for other people, where a major character is deliberately withholding information and stringing you along, only to have her trail go completely cold with the Bloody Baron finally saying "She's not here anymore, go look in Novigrad." The Velen quests don't end on any sort of compelling cliff-hanger, as they effectively wrap up almost every loose end in that area, and they don't lead or continue directly into Novigrad as there's a clear separation between the two stories and the two environments, since they're actually intended to be doable in either order, despite the game clearly starting you in Velen. Once you realize that the quests in Velen conclude in a huge dead end, it makes all of the preceding effort feel like a waste of time, and the realization that you now have to start the search all over again with zero leads in an all new environment, just brings the game's momentum to a screeching halt. 

So then you go Novigrad, and have to turn the entire city upside down looking for her while following an endless string of wild goose chases looking for other people all-the-while feeling like you're not making any progress towards actually finding Ciri, because the main plot almost seems to forget about her at this point. The whole point of the quests in Novigrad is that you're trying to find Dandelion, because he supposedly met up with her and might know her current whereabouts, but it turns out that he's missing, too, which triggers a quest to work with Sigi Reuven (aka Dijkstra) to find Whoreson Junior, so that you can find Dudu, so that you can find Dandelion, so that you can find Ciri. There's like four degrees of separation from the main quest at that point, and I got so fed up with it that I quit playing early one night and impulsively started reading The Last Wish, the introductory book in the series, because I was losing all interest in the game's story. It was a real chore to get through the game's first act, at times, the entirety of which consists of finding Ciri, because it just bogs down with so many roadblocks and arbitrary sub-goals from unrelated people in unrelated areas that it stops feeling like a story and starts feeling like tedious video game busywork.

#14: Meandering, conflicting pace.

The whole point of finding Ciri is that the world is at risk of an apocalyptic event should the Wild Hunt ever catch up with her, and she's also Geralt's adopted daughter whom he cares deeply about and doesn't want to come to any harm. That should be a pretty big deal, either way you look at it, and yet the game (and the rest of the world and all of its inhabitants) don't really care if you find her or not because the whole purpose of an open-world game like this is to take your time exploring random places and seeking out side content. In fact, you're mechanically obligated to ignore the main quest if you actually want to get the most out of the game's open-world design, since many side quests will get cancelled if you advance the main story too far before completing them. Geralt, meanwhile, is content to lie around brothels with random prostitutes, work his way up the ranks in horse-racing and fistfighting tournaments, and pursue a life becoming world champion of a collectible card game instead of looking for his daughter. The main story is at direct odds with the core gameplay design, in other words, with the meandering pace of the open-world design taking a lot of narrative thrust out of the main story and basically every other quest. 

In effect, the game just doesn't know if it wants to be a laid-back open-world sandbox experience, or a narrative-driven story game; it tries to do both, but they don't really work together in the same context. In order for the story to work as written, the rest of the world and the side content needs to be greatly streamlined to facilitate a more accelerated pace appropriate for saving a loved one and the entire world from an impending cataclysm, and in order for the open-world design to work as intended the story needs to have less of a pressing, time-sensitive, and highly personal element to it. As it is, everything just feels really incongruous, like those two conflicting design aspects are constantly undermining one another.

It's all very inconsistent, too. During main quests, we're treated to frequent moments where characters like Yennefer are throwing out cliches about how there's "no time" to explain her plans or to take more delicate measures, while also berating Geralt for wanting to take on witchers' work instead of focusing on finding Ciri, as if she fully understands the gravity of the situation and that they should be trying to find Ciri as quickly as possible. But then on the flipside, she's alright with putting their search for Ciri on hold to resolve personal matters like her romantic connection with Geralt, and even makes comments in brazen defiance of the main story's ticking clock element -- when she's been implying the exact opposite throughout other quests. She seems like she's in a big rush to find Ciri, but then is perfectly alright with Geralt taking a week to ride to Kaer Morhen by horseback instead of insisting that she warp him (and Roach and Uma) there in less time. To be fair, she makes a comment about how she can't warp all three of them there at once in order for the game to justify Geralt's week-long journey, but I don't see why she can't just warp them there one at a time, even if takes a couple days recharging her power to do so -- it would still be faster than waiting an entire week. Is Ciri in grave danger or not? Which one is it?

#15: The whole third act is underwhelming.

The main story is broken into three segments, with Act 1 being the search for Ciri, Act 2 being the preparation and eventual Battle of Kaer Morhen, and Act 3 being the retaliation against and final confrontation with the Wild hunt. Act 1 takes up the bulk of the gameplay, with finding Ciri being the longest, most involved process of the entire game, complete with the most open-world, side-quest hunting gameplay. The fact that finding Ciri takes so long makes it feel like the game is building up to this grand, epic showdown with the Wild Hunt, leading into the Battle of Kaer Morhen which feels like the game's climax, and then Act 3 feels incredibly simple, mundane, and straightforward in comparison to all of the preceding action and build-up. Most of what you do in Act 3 is small tasks here and there, like fetching a Sunstone from an elven crypt, visiting Avallach's lab, or talking to the Emperor, before launching into a heavily scripted, highly linear final battle where you fight or run past a few groups of enemies, face a couple of bosses, and then it's basically over. The final battle is extremely anticlimactic, without much engaging gameplay or interesting story elements going on, and practically zero meaningful character interaction between Geralt and Eredin, the main baddie. Afterwards, there's no resolution to the actual battle, with no opportunity to talk to your friends to see who made it out alive, what happened elsewhere in the battle, and so on. Even though there's more preparation and build-up to the final battle in Act 3, the Battle of Kaer Morhen in Act 2 feels way more epic with much higher stakes, and does give you a proper resolution with lots of character moments along the way. In comparison, Act 3 feels like it's rushing towards the end of the game while running out of steam. 



#16: Alchemy is oversimplified.

By streamlining alchemy to make it a more appealing gameplay option, they removed almost all of its depth and complexity. Potions now have zero negative side-effects, so there's absolutely no reason not to use them, and you no longer have to stop fighting to uncork a potion and actually drink it, meaning you don't have to worry about positioning yourself and finding the right moment when you can afford to drink a potion -- you just press the hotkey and the effect triggers instantly. There's no more variety in brewing a potion by mixing your own ingredients with dominant substances to create special versions with bonus secondary effects, or using trial-and-error to brew your own potions without a formula, and you only really have to brew a potion once, because from then on everything will automatically replenish every time you rest, as long as you have a single bottle of alcohol in your inventory, which you find everywhere in your travels -- in other words, there's virtually no cost for brewing and replenishing your supplies. The fact that you can brew potions anywhere, at any time, also reduces elements of survival and resource-management, since you no longer have to plan out or make critical decisions about when you use your limited substances. Similarly, there's no consequence for applying oil to your blades, so you may as well run around with a constant damage boost and swap the oils out every time you start a fight against a new enemy type. And even though the blade oils have a limited number of uses per application, there's no limit to the number of times you can apply the oil (which happens instantly during the pause screen), thereby making those arbitrary limitations completely pointless. All of which combines to make alchemy feel like a bunch of generic, passive buffs instead of a fully-developed gameplay system, since there's no more realistic grounding with how you have to prepare and maintain your supplies. 

#1: Movement controls feel weird.

One of the hardest things to get used to, when I played the game originally in 2016, was simply moving Geralt around. Geralt has a significant weight to his movements, with momentum affecting how he starts moving, comes to a stop, and even changes direction. This has the benefit of making you feel more realistically rooted to the game world, but it also makes simple tasks like walking through doors or turning around more of a nuisance than they should be, since it takes so much effort to get Geralt moving to make minor corrections to your positioning, and Geralt's momentum will frequently make him stop short of what you expected, or push him further than you intended to. You can turn this movement scheme off and enable an alternative system, but then Geralt stops feeling like a real person and just floats around like a video game character. Interestingly, I didn't have as much of a problem with the movement scheme on my recent replay, either because I was subconsciously used to it already, or because I was playing with a controller instead of the keyboard, which might handle the inputs a little differently and possibly a little better than a keyboard. Regardless of your chosen input method, trying to control your movement while swimming is an absolute nightmare, since Geralt seems to have the turning radius of a luxury yacht, and you can't aim his movement up or down at precise enough angles to get out of tight spots easily. 

In fact, the physics for movement just feel uncooperative in general. The game likes to force a lot of physics-based reactions on the movement, independent of your actual inputs, which constantly leads Geralt to doing weird things you didn't intend. Sometimes it makes sense, like how he'll slow down when walking up a steeper incline, but this effect seems to trigger at inappropriate times when you were moving fine over a similar incline and then get suddenly forced into a slow walk when there was no perceptible change in the slope, and then he'll stubbornly refuse to even attempt to move faster while you're mashing on the sprint button. But then he'll randomly lose his footing and just slide all the way down the hill, and there's no way for you to halt his momentum or "catch yourself" other than to awkwardly jump, possibly resulting in him rolling some weird direction when he lands. Trying to get out of a body of water by walking up a steep incline an act of obnoxious futility, where Geralt will slowly trudge out of the water, only to slide backwards and then launch into a diving face-first animation back into the water and swim several strokes out from land. It's especially frustrating how often you find yourself incapable of jumping or climbing out of a shallow body of water. Sometimes you try to jump onto or over something and the game decides that, instead of just doing a normal jump it's going to shift into a climbing animation. The whole effect is that movement just feels inconsistent and unresponsive a lot of the time. 

 

#2: Imprecise combat controls.

When I played the game originally in 2016, I noticed major issues with dropped inputs not registering, leading Geralt to stand around awkwardly not doing anything after I'd clearly pressed a button intending for him to do something while coming out of another action. I'm not sure if that was due to problems with the input queuing system (if there even was one), or if it was some sort of input lag that caused the input to not register, but it made the combat feel extremely clunky and unresponsive. Fortunately I didn't run into that problem in my recent replay. I can't verify if that was a problem with my hardware back in the day, or an actual problem in the game's code that has subsequently been fixed in later patches, but I'm mentioning it here because I know other people had similar issues, at the time, and it had a serious impact on my enjoyment of the combat system when I played the game initially. 

Unfortunately, the combat system is still not without problems. The fact that Geralt has so many different attack animations still messes with timing and positioning a little, since you might be intending Geralt to perform a quick attack only to find him going into something with a longer wind-up that covers more distance than you expected, which can leave you exposed to enemy hits or cause you to miss a window of opportunity. The targeting system isn't especially helpful, either, since the lock-on feature prevents you from positioning the camera to see behind you, so against groups of enemies you basically have to play unlocked to tell what's going on around you, at which point you're at the mercy of the game's soft-lock auto-targeting system to decide which enemy Geralt's actually going to move to attack when you press the attack button. As previously mentioned, I especially dislike the fact that combat controls are a completely different "game state" from normal gameplay, since it prevents you from performing basic actions like jumping, and awkwardly slows Geralt's movement to a snail's pace and prevents you from freely running around the battlefield and weaving in and out of enemy attacks, short of using the built-in roll and dodge buttons or spending limited stamina to sprint. Overall, the combat controls aren't bad, but don't feel as tight or consistent as some other, similar games out there. 

#3: Witchers aint got time for these trivial tasks.

Witchers are not altruistic paladins crusading for the good of all living beings, protecting the down-trodden and the oppressed while fighting for social justice. They're monster-hunters for hire. They stay out of politics, mind their own business, and don't intervene unless there's significant pay involved, or else have personal reasons to, or if a confrontation is simply unavoidable. As Geralt so eloquently stated in the first game: "I'm a witcher, neutral as all hell." In actuality, Geralt's moral compass is far more complex than that, and yet, you basically have to be an altruistic paladin if you want to experience as much content as possible, or else you'll end up just skipping a lot of quests and events altogether, thereby missing their stories, experience points, and rewards. Geralt shouldn't have the time (or the interest) to stand up for every troubled person he comes across, or to do menial chores for people, and yet the bulk of quests in the game consist of going out of your way to help other people, or doing simple favors for random people that any non-witcher could be doing. Why, for instance, is famed witcher and alleged kingslayer Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf, the Butcher of Blaviken, looking for someone's stolen horse, or stopping by the side of the road to help someone fix shrines? If you were to play as a true witcher and only do the monster-hunting contracts, main story quests, and favors for personal friends, you'd probably end up skipping over half of what the game has to offer. So besides feeling out-of-character for a witcher, it feels like the game is forcing you into role-playing a certain way just to see more of the game's content. 

#4: No penalty for stealing from people's homes.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, alternatively sub-titled as The Witcher 3: Petty Theft Simulator, is a game in which you can steal everything that isn't nailed down, from every peasant and noble citizen's home, right in front of their eyes, with no repercussions whatsoever. This is part of the reason the world doesn't always feel alive, because no one makes any reaction to you barging into their homes and taking everything off their shelves. The only time it matters is if you steal within sight of the city guard, but that situation almost never comes into play because the city guard isn't stationed inside people's homes, and a lot of containers that are within sight of guards aren't marked as personal property, so the game doesn't consider it stealing when you loot their contents. Even then, when the goods are specifically marked as personal property, it's inconsistent whether the guards will actually care to apprehend you or not, and there's not enough of a warning that you're about to actually steal something to be able to back out of the interface in time if you don't expect it and are just going through the motions on auto-pilot. It's not a game-breaking issue, but it does break my suspension of disbelief that no one cares about their personal property, or even their privacy, and it can be frustratingly inconsistent at times.

#5: Too much useless junk cluttering inventory.

You loot a ton of stuff in this game, most of which is completely pointless junk like forks, plates, broken rakes, or melted candles, to name just a few, or components like plants, leather, minerals, and monster parts used in alchemy and crafting. Everything in the game technically has a use; junk can be sold to shopkeepers to increase your income, or can be dismantled to form crafting components, which are themselves used to create new gear and other, more advanced crafting components. The problem, here, is that you're simply bombarded with an excessive, overwhelming amount of stuff, most of which you'll never actually use, and then it just sits around cluttering your inventory. I actually reached a point in the game when I had so many crafting and alchemy items that the game would lag out for a moment every time I opened that tab of my inventory screen and tried to deposit stuff into my storage box.

#6: Nothing to spend money on.

Since you either find or craft all of the good stuff you'd ever use in the game, money has essentially no value and no purpose. The only things worth spending money on are recipes for potions, bombs, and blade oils (but these become fewer and fewer as you play the game), rare herbs that you can't find in the wild or that simply don't exist elsewhere, strong alcohol for creating more advanced alchemical substances and potions, and repairs for your weapons and armor (which becomes less of a necessity as you accumulate more and more repair kits). These purchases make up only a tiny fraction of your total income. You end up with tens of thousands of coins and nothing to spend them on, which contributes to the overall feeling of not progressing and not getting stronger that permeates the entire game, because gold is treated like a reward for quests and exploration but in reality it does you no practical good.

#7: Quest rewards scale down as you level up.

Point of fact: you are going to become over-leveled in this game, even more so if you're a diligent explorer and completionist who does everything he can before moving on to another area. When this inevitably happens, quests that are deemed too low-level for you start giving less experience and less reward to a point when they eventually stop giving you rewards altogether. The intent, I suppose, is to slow down your leveling so you don't out-level everything in sight, but that still happens at an alarmingly fast rate, even with this down-scaling, which yet again contributes to the overall feeling of slow progression. And because there are so many quests in the game, it's inevitable that you'll end up with greyed-out quests in your journal that you've simply out-leveled, that you know will give practically zero reward for completing them. That's not such a big deal if the quest at least has an interesting story to make it worthwhile, but can feel like a waste of time for shorter, simpler, less interesting quests. 

#8: Long, frequent cutscenes hold players hostage.

I encountered what felt like a lot of instances when the game forced me to keep playing much longer than I intended because cutscenes, dialogue, and story sequences would seize all control from me and force me to sit through everything before putting me back in control so I could save and exit the game. On one occasion, I wanted to just turn in a quest and go to sleep, but upon doing so I ended up having to sit through 20 minutes of cutscenes, and then got dropped into a five-minute gameplay segment which didn't feel right to interrupt by saving and quitting because it would've ruined the narrative pacing to delay the story's continuation until the next day, and then had to watch another 5-10 minutes of cutscenes before it was all finally over. On a night when I had to be up early the next morning, the game unexpectedly forced me to stay up an extra 30 minutes later than I wanted. By the same token, I'd often be in situations where I only had a limited time to play and just opted to not even start playing at all, because I couldn't be sure the game wouldn't lock me into long story sequences at inopportune moments. Similarly, it's fairly common to get stuck skipping through tons and tons of mandatory cutscenes if you make a mistake in dialogue or else want to go back and see a different outcome, or trigger a cutscene you didn't mean to trigger, because the game likes to string multiple cutscenes together, back-to-back-to-back-to-back, and there's no way to interrupt those cutscenes to bring up the menu so you can load a save or exit out of them. 

#9: The Battle of Kaer Morhen is a little disappointing.

The Battle of Kaer Morhen is the main climax that the game spends up to 100 hours building towards, the grand culmination of your quest to find Ciri and fight off the Wild Hunt. You go back to everyone you've met over the course of the game cashing in favors so that they'll come help you, assembling a Super Team of badass allies. When you're ready to start preparing for the fight, you meet everyone one-by-one as you work your way from the entrance of Kaer Morhen up to the inner keep, and get to see what everyone's planning and how each individual will offer unique assistance. You then get to make a few seemingly important decisions about how to prepare for the battle (such as to either brew some potions or lay traps around the castle's exterior, or to either reinforce the walls or clear the way to the armory). But then you don't actually get to do any of the prep work yourself, a lot of stuff seems to have little to no effect on the actual battle, and the entire fight is broken into a bunch of tiny, self-contained sections separated by loading screens, cutscenes, and linear, highly-scripted objectives that force you to focus on one little thing at a time, one after another.

As with the dialogue and storyboarding of the main quest-line, it felt to me like the Battle of Kaer Morhen was designed to play out in a very specific way, with only a couple variables changing the outcome (or the path to the outcome) in any significant way. It was supposed to be this grand, epic castle siege as you try to fight off hordes and waves of Wild Hunt soldiers, but the scale felt so tiny and claustrophobic to me because you're always in these tiny, instanced scenarios: "Go here and kill that, go there and close that portal, go there and flip the lever," and so on, with no concern whatsoever for any greater, over-arching goal, because the instanced scenarios made it clear nothing was ever going to happen off-screen, and you never had to worry about possibly failing. Plus, having the game inexplicably deactivate my various buffs and decoctions after switching back from controlling Ciri was kind of frustrating. 

I would've much rather preferred if the Battle of Kaer Morhen had been just one, big fight with you having to defend multiple angles of entry, perhaps with status meters indicating when a side was getting overrun, or when a wall was about to collapse, thus forcing you to react to these different situations and making your own choices, kind of like a tower defense game, instead of simply following a linear series of events that are totally scripted beyond your control. Maybe you could set up defenses yourself before hand, or assign different characters to different spots, use special quest-items to call down magic support from Triss, or individual characters could have their own limited health bars and get knocked out of the fight, making it subsequently harder if you don't defend them in time or properly assist them, and so on -- just something to make it feel more like an epic siege with meaningful gameplay, as opposed to a glorified interactive cutscene. I mean, there are literal fights scenes where I'm sitting there going "Boy that looks cool, I wish I could play out this fight and actually experience it for myself instead of just watching it happen." 

#10: Playing as Ciri.

Occasionally throughout the main story you get to play flashbacks as Ciri, to see from her perspective what she went through at each step of her journey, while Geralt is always two or three steps behind her. Some people might like getting to play as Ciri, but I always found it jarring; you spend 100 or more hours as Geralt building an association with that character and tailoring his skills and equipment to your own desires, and then suddenly the game says "Ok, now you're a completely different person, and none of the stuff you've been doing to improve your character applies here." It's kind of cool that you get to feel how Ciri gets stronger over the course of the game through actual hands-on experience, but I still found it annoying every time I switched to her, and it was kind of boring playing as her in the second half of the story when she's one-shotting everything with lightning-quick ninja moves that take no effort on your part to pull off.

#11: Minimal exposition for new characters.

The Witcher games are based on a series of books, with a lot of characters, locations, history, and backstory being lifted directly from (or else inspired by) what came before in the books. However, the games were originally meant to serve as sequels to the books, essentially setting themselves apart from the source material so as to have the freedom to tell their own stories without conflicting with established precedents, while also helping to ease the player into the world without any prior understanding of the written novels -- that's the whole reason Geralt has amnesia in the first game, so that he can be reintroduced to the setting and characters at the same rate at which the player is. When I played the first two games, it was always clear that there was more to the world and story than what was being shown in the games, but it felt like the games did a good enough job establishing themselves that you didn't need to have read the books to understand or appreciate the games. I'm sure being familiar with the books makes the first two games more enjoyable to play, but to my ignorant perspective it felt like I was mostly missing out on references and easter eggs while not having as deep of a familiarity with the greater world in which these stories are set, and I was fine with that. 

Then suddenly with The Witcher 3, CDProjekt decided that they wanted to start incorporating more canonical, main story elements from the book series, which had been almost completely ignored in the previous games. Yennefer and Ciri, for instance, made no appearances in either The Witcher 1 or The Witcher 2; they're only briefly mentioned during animated flashbacks and certain dialogue sequences, and frankly I'd forgotten a lot of that by the time I'd played The Witcher 3 because it was fairly meaningless to me in The Witcher 2. So going into the third game in this trilogy, having not read any of the books and being rusty on the finer details of the second game, I had no firm grasp of these important characters because they were never fully established in the games. The game makes it clear that Geralt has a long and deep personal history with Yen and Ciri, but I had no prior experience with either of them, which made their sudden involvement in The Witcher 3 feel awkward and jarring to me. 

Besides not being set up very much in the previous games, the beginning of the third game offers barely any exposition to actually introduce these characters to the player -- all we get is one brief flashback of Geralt and Yen making playful banter with each other, and then a flashback of Geralt training Ciri, before those characters are dropped almost completely from the story while also serving as the ultimate point of Geralt's quest. After another brief business-like meeting with Yen in Vizima, she runs off to Skellige and isn't seen again for 60 or 80 hours of gameplay, throughout which you're given extensive role-playing options to romance other characters or remain faithful to Yen, and having to make reactions to how other characters talk about her while having had hardly any meaningful interaction with her as a player. The whole time I felt like I wasn't actually role-playing as Geralt, but was trying to guess what the game considered the "correct," canonical choices for his character based on what little it had told me about him and Yen.  

You can read up on some of their history through in-game books, but unless you've actually read the original source material then I feel like you can't properly understand who Yennefer is and what she's supposed to mean to Geralt to make informed role-playing decisions. Even the helpful glossary, which normally helps to explain some of the characters' backstories, isn't very informative -- you can certainly fill in some of the gaps with logical reasoning, but it feels like a case of the game merely telling us that Geralt is supposed to be deeply in love with Yen, without ever showing us that or letting us get to feel it ourselves until much, much later in the game, after many of those critical role-playing moments have already passed. It's really weird, for instance, to have spent two whole games with Triss, even possibly romancing her in both games, to then have the third game come along and say "No, Geralt loves Yen."  You're still given the option to romance Triss, if you'd prefer, but it feels like the game is always pushing you towards Yen the whole time because "that's what Geralt would do." Even if that's more accurate to the source material, it's not really supported by the games themselves and feels awkwardly forced. 

Then there's the fact that Yen is supposed to have an entire backstory with Ciri and Geralt, where they were like a family to one another with Yen and Geralt acting as Ciri's parents, which is barely explored in the game at all, since we're never treated to any flashbacks of Yen and Ciri interacting together, and I don't think there are even any in-game books that explore their relationship, either. All we get are off-hand comments here and there, some of which only come about after you've already found Ciri, which made me wonder why she cared so much about finding Ciri when their relationship had never been established in the actual game; you just have to take the game at its word that they were like a mother and daughter to one another, because it's never really portrayed that way, even after they're reunited. Similarly, when Geralt finally catches up to Ciri and thinks she's dead, it's supposed to be a deeply tragic and heartbreaking moment for him, but I couldn't really empathize with him because I, as a player, am nowhere near as privy to their relationship as he is as a character -- I understood his emotions in that situation, but I couldn't feel any of it myself. 

All of that is just for characters like Yen and Ciri, but there are plenty others that show up out of nowhere with no exposition. When Dijkstra is introduced, for instance, they make reference to some previous encounter where Geralt left him crippled, and all of their subsequent interactions are based on an established history; he's a fun character and you can definitely get a good feel for him throughout the game, but it was really jarring to me playing the game originally and trying to remember if he was some minor character in the second game that I'd forgotten about, or if this was some brand new history they'd pulled from the books that I'd never seen before. Likewise, when Avallach is introduced, Geralt makes some comment about how he's met him before and that Avallach can't be trusted, but again, this is never established in any of the other games so I'm spending the entire second and third act of the game wondering what's supposed to be so sketchy about Avallach and why Geralt would be instantly distrustful of him. Even the Wild Hunt goes without much exposition, which is problematic when they're supposed to be the main antagonist threat in the game. I get that they're supposed to be ancient beings who are seen as an omen of war, and who're likely playing a role in the impending White Frost and thus should be considered a serious threat, but the game doesn't do much to establish why they're so feared, and doesn't give us much reason to be scared of them as the bad guys. All we see is the aftermath of a few villages being attacked, but it kind of looks like just a basic slaughter that could've been performed by any group of armed bandits, and you can read a few books about how they're supposed to be a sign of the end times, but it all feels rather unsubstantiated, like they're a vague abstract concept the entire time as opposed to an actual threat. It's another case of the game telling us they're a big deal, without ever showing it. 

To be clear, I'm perfectly ok with the games leaving details out from the book series, and there's enough in the games that you can follow along without being completely lost. However, I feel like the game could've done a better job introducing new characters and plot elements to the player so that they could exist as more stand-alone elements in the game series, as opposed to requiring you to read the books to properly understand character arcs, motivations, relationships, backstories, timelines, and so on, all of which play a pretty important role in this game's story. Like why, for instance, are there not more flashbacks of Geralt with Yen and Ciri? Why do all of the major quests with Yen happen so late in the game instead of getting sprinkled in a little bit earlier? Why couldn't Geralt still have had some lingering amnesia about characters like Avallach and Dijkstra to better introduce them to the player? In lieu of that, why don't he and Dijkstra reminisce about their past adventures a little more, or why doesn't Geralt explain to the other characters what happened in the past that makes him distrustful of Avallach? This isn't a huge deal or a game-breaking issue, but it's something that bothers me and thus earns a spot in the "ugly" section for things that I feel could've been executed better.

#12: Lots of repeated ambient conversations.

As you explore populated areas, you frequently overhear conversations between NPCs; these do a tremendous job in helping to flesh out the world with bits of lore and backstory, besides just making the world seem a little more lively, but unfortunately these conversations seem to repeat themselves indefinitely, leading to you hearing a lot of the same bits of background dialogue in the same exact places, over and over and over again. I guess the idea behind repeating them is to give players a chance to catch the dialogue if they missed it initially, but it gets pretty grating hearing the same exchanges in high-traffic areas that you frequently have to return to -- like that kid singing the nursery rhyme about Emperor Emhyr in White Orchard every time I make a trip to visit the blacksmith. Really, I wish these conversations could be more varied, or else if they just wouldn't play literally every single time you walked past them. 


#13: Gwent is pay-to-win.

Gwent is a card game that CD Projekt designed and put into TW3 to replace the dice poker mini-game from the previous games. It now exists as its own stand-alone game, and you could even, for a time, buy physical decks to play in real life. It's a fun little game that reminds me a lot of Blue Moon Legends, an actual card game by Reiner Knizia that I own and rather enjoy, which made me really intrigued once I realized that the card game in TW3 is actually a good, interesting game system, and not just some gimicky mini-game. That said, as it exists in TW3, Gwent is pay-to-win with no real system for balancing the strength of one's deck of cards, which I find fundamentally flawed in a competitive card game.

In a nutshell, Gwent works by playing cards from your hand, which you draw from your pre-built deck, with the ultimate goal of having a higher total value of cards in play than your opponent at the end of a round. The game lasts up to three rounds, with the winner being whomever wins two of the three rounds. You draw all of the cards you'll have for the entire game at the beginning, so there's a strategic element about which cards to play during which rounds so that you don't waste too many cards and also save enough for later rounds. So, the crux of the gameplay is baiting your opponent to play cards a certain way so that you can, essentially, spring a trap on him, while also making sure that you're pacing yourself for all three rounds, possibly forfeiting a battle so that you can win the war. It's a fine enough system, and like I said it's worked well in real life card games, so I like the core mechanics of Gwent. 

The problem, as it's implemented in the game, is that there are relatively few restrictions on how you can build your deck, and with different cards simply being more powerful than others, a deck that's loaded with higher-value cards will basically always win against a weaker deck. They start you out with a crappy beginner deck, and if you want to make your deck stronger you have to spend in-game currency buying better cards, or else win better cards by beating other players, which is kind of a catch-22 because you often need better cards in your deck to beat certain players in order to win better cards. In competitive games like this, there need to be rules for balancing the playing field for each player -- it's why boxing uses weight classes to group fighters into similar strength and size ranges, or why miniature games like Warhammer implement point systems so that both players will field armies of similar strength values -- but Gwent doesn't have any sort of balancing like this, meaning that it's possible for one player's deck to be simply stronger than another's, having been loaded with higher-value units with more devastating special effects. 

In a way, Gwent's implementation in The Witcher 3 feels like an extension of the RPG mechanics, where you start as a low-level player and have to level-up to face more difficult opponents, with some being just so high-level that you stand no chance against them until much later in the game. When viewed in that light, the lack of balancing is an acceptable way to translate that feeling of leveling up and getting stronger, kind of like you do in a Pokemon game, but just looking at it in the context of a stand-alone, competitive card game, I find the lack of balancing fundamentally ruins the fun and satisfaction for me. In my original playthrough, I had fun playing a few matches early on, but once I realized that individual decks can be so highly imbalanced and that you have to spend a lot of money buying better cards, I swore it off and never touched it again, and made no subsequent attempt to get into it during my replay. Ultimately, I'm not playing an open-world RPG like this for its mini-games, and if I want to play a competitive card game like Gwent, then I'd rather just play Blue Moon Legends in real life, instead. 

#14: Not much variety in builds and playstyles.

Given how many different skills there are in this game, and how few skill slots you unlock over the course of the game, it would seem like there's a lot of potential for creating unique build varieties to offer uniquely different gameplay experiences. While the skill system does provide for tons of different unique combinations that can have a fun effect on gameplay, the whole system is still limited to such a narrow scope of options that different builds really don't change your playstyle or what you actually do in the game all that significantly, because it's all based around one pre-conceived notion of what a witcher's gameplay should be like. In essence, your build mostly just determines how effective your character is at different things that you're already capable of doing, and what portion of the gameplay systems you'll put a little bit more of your focus on, because even though you might choose to specialize in one of three different fields, you're still going to be using the core elements of the other two due to a combination of pure necessity and a simple lack of restrictions on the other, unused fields. 

As a pure melee character, for instance, you don't have much use for stamina throughout most of the game, until you unlock Rend or Whirl, so there's no reason not to throw occasional magic signs out there whenever you have the opportunity, because there's no real detriment or cost to using magic signs and they only contribute extra firepower to your arsenal. Likewise, you have plenty of toxicity at the start of the game to make use of multiple performance-enhancing potions at a time, in addition to things like blade oils and bombs, all of which can improve in strength over the course of the game independently of your build decisions -- once again, it costs you practically nothing to use alchemy options and they only increase your total damage output, so you may as well use them. Conversely, an alchemy build is still going to have to rely on swordplay for basic damage output, and the same principle as magic signs still applies in that case -- you have stamina that you're not using for anything else, so you may as well use it to give yourself extra damage, defense, or crowd control options. A pure mage, meanwhile, only has one sign that applies direct offensive damage, and you typically have a few seconds of downtime between casting while you're waiting for stamina to recharge, so you may as well occupy that time dealing extra damage-per-second with your sword, while other signs like Axii, Aard, and Yrden still rely on you getting in close with your sword to deal damage. All-the-while that toxicity gauge is sitting there completely un-used so you may as well benefit from potions that further enhance your sign-casting abilities or whatever else you might desire. 

In practice, no matter how you choose to build your character, you're still going to be a prototypical witcher using some combination of swords, signs, and alchemy in basically every situation with practically every build, unless you deliberately choose to handicap yourself for no real reason. We can obviously justify or excuse this because you're playing a preset character in a preset profession, so of course gameplay is going to be based around a certain preset archetype, and we can also argue that it's basically always been this way throughout the entire series, but it still seems like the different branches should be able to provide more significant, gameplay-altering effects that actually branch out in completely different directions as opposed to being more like minor extensions from a single core path. Why, for instance, are there not more active skills in each tree that actually alter the gameplay in a significant way, or more restrictions preventing you from effectively performing different types of actions without investing sufficiently into those fields or abilities? After playing through the entire game twice and trying several different build combinations that focused on completely different things, ranging from pure mage to pure melee to pure alchemy and various hybrid combinations, it felt like I was always doing the same basic things in each instance with only minor variations, because it's all based around the same core gameplay formula from which you don't have very much freedom to deviate. This isn't an inherently bad thing, per se, seeing as this was clearly an intentional design choice based on the type of character and story they wanted to portray, and there's still enough different skills to allow for interesting decisions and unique combinations when it comes to character-building, but it can get to feel a little stale and monotonous over the long haul. 

IN CONCLUSION

That was a lot of criticism in both "the bad" and "the ugly" sections, and perhaps "the good" section didn't do the game enough justice, so let me be clear at the top of my conclusion by saying that I liked The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It has a lot of good things going for it, and in a lot of ways it deserves its reputation as one of the better open-world action-adventure RPGs ever made, but that almost says more about the state of open-world games than it does about the game itself. Open-world games tend to have a lot of inherent problems, usually to do with pacing, balance, and depth of mechanics that frequently aren't compensated for by more sensible design choices, and TW3 suffers from nearly all of them, albeit not as badly as some other games. The sheer size and length of the game, meanwhile, make all of its weaker elements stand out even more as the game drags on and begins to outstay its welcome.

As it stands, the story elements, quests, and characters are all strong enough to keep the game engaging all the way through, while the small details in the environmental storytelling help to flesh out the world in an interesting way, but a lot of the actual gameplay proves to be somewhat crude and deceptively shallow. Although the quests usually tell interesting stories with meaningful consequences for your role-playing decisions, the actual gameplay in solving them tends to be a simplistic matter of following glowing highlights and clicking on everything in sight with little regard for your actual input, until reaching a critical decision point. Combat feels like an incredibly simplistic and rudimentary system of mashing the attack button and periodically dodging when the enemy's health bar flashes red, with hardly any challenge to be experienced once you get a feel for the timing, even on the hardest difficulty setting against vastly higher-level enemies. The leveling system presents some interesting decision-making in terms of how you allocate limited skill points into limited slots, with fun combinations of various stacking effects, but feels dreadfully slow and unrewarding with how sparsely those points and skill slots are spread out over the second half of the game. The massive world offers a ton of quality content to experience, but feels like it's been stretched a little too thin with a little too much filler in places, and with too much of a reliance on icon-hunting to facilitate exploration. All-the-while, the game's disparate blending of open-world gameplay design with a heavily narrative-driven story premise feel at odds with each other and prevent either one from excelling as much as they could have. 

I firmly believe that TW3 could've been a leaner, tighter, and more satisfying game if CD Projekt had trimmed some more of the fat and given us a somewhat smaller but more tightly-focused game. Both of the previous Witcher games, for instance, used a semi-open hub-based world design which gave you a lot of open areas to explore with plenty of opportunity for non-linear questing, but tied those areas into the main quest a little better so that everything flowed with the heavily narrative-driven story, which I feel is a better fit for what they're trying to accomplish by combining open-ended exploration with a heavy emphasis on storytelling. I'm not saying The Witcher 3 needed to take that same approach, as I'm fine with the concept of the third game being truly open-world, but it was hard for me to appreciate the open-world design due to the looming threat of a cataclysmic event that I was mechanically obligated to ignore in order to experience the game to its fullest, and the main story lost a lot of its narrative thrust because of all the distractions in the open-world design. In other words, I feel like they could have struck a better balance between the two, by either giving the main story a less pressing threat, or else by making the world design tie in to the progression of the main story a little more closely. 

Consequently, I don't find it as fun or enjoyable as some other, similar types of games that I've ultimately enjoyed more, but none of those games come close to matching the epic scale or production value of TW3. And there are, in fact, plenty of valid reasons to praise and celebrate The Witcher 3 -- if you're looking for an RPG-style game with great characters and storytelling, or want to play a huge open-world action-adventure-RPG with a lot of high-quality content, or want to get lost in a fairly immersive and uniquely captivating fantasy-folklore setting, then you'd be hard pressed to find anything significantly better than this. Lots of games are better at those things individually, but few wrap them all together with such high production value and accessibility. Plus, it is a fairly unique, one-of-a-kind experience despite having so many superficial similarities to similar types of games. Perhaps most importantly, of all the other massive open-world games to have come out in the wake of Skyrim, at least of those that I've played, The Witcher 3 is one of the best at making your choices and actions feel like they have some kind of meaningful impact on the world. Sadly, its gameplay mechanics don't always live up to the rest of its high aspirations, so I can't claim it to be some kind of masterpiece against which all other games of this type should be judged. It's still not what I would consider ideal for this sort of game, and it certainly has its fair share of problems and shortcomings, but I still find it more appealing than most of the other, popular alternatives in the genre. 

DLC REVIEWS

If you're interested in my thoughts on the two DLC expansions for The Witcher 3, check out my separate articles on each one:

The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone - Review
The Witcher 3: Blood & Wine - Review