And I don’t just mean the fact that all open-world games (including Witcher 3) are incredibly buggy. On the other hand, The Witcher 3’s excellence casts the genre’s stupidest flaws into stark relief. This living world-this sense of a past and a future-is what makes The Witcher 3 a genre-defining game. It can even be as simple as Geralt getting drunk with old pals, spending the night rehashing old brawls and talking about what they’ve all been up to. It’s blowing Geralt’s cover because you never bothered to play the card-based minigame Gwent in the preceding twenty or so hours, and as a result you’ll need to kill your way through a house instead of bluffing your way to the boss. It’s running through town and hearing two characters wondering where someone from their village disappeared to. It’s the fact the game doesn’t highlight every single location or quest on the map, thus rewarding off-the-beaten-path exploration.
You could honestly spend days picking apart The Witcher 3 and discussing what makes it work so much better than other open-world games. There are plenty of side quests in Witcher 3 you would swear were part of the main story, were it not for the fact they’re categorized under “Secondary Quests” in the menu. It’s what makes even simple “Go here, kill this” quests a bit more complicated (and thus more engaging) than games like Dragon Age where the “kill this” part of the quest is literally your only motivation.Īnd that’s apart from the side quests that do have consequences. But that sort of morally-gray choice is rare in games, and in The Witcher 3 it’s a feature of nearly every quest, nearly every random encounter. I don’t know if there’s a consequence to either action. I looted the soldier, only to find a letter from his wife desperately begging him to come home. When the peasants walked away, there was one more corpse hanging by the side of the road. So bad that I succumbed to the perennial video game advantage-I reloaded.
To make a good RPG, conventional wisdom says strip away as much “character” as possible and let the player impose his or her own personality.Īnd I felt bad. The RPG is an old and entrenched genre, and at its core is the idea that the player is the character.
#The witcher 3 wild hunt rating professional#
You’ll undoubtedly notice that early on, when you enter the town of White Orchard for the dozenth time and run past the same damn kid singing the same annoying song for the dozenth time and getting grounded for the dozenth time.īut in general, The Witcher 3 does a remarkable job mimicking a living world around the titular witcher (read: professional monster-hunter) Geralt-and does so without making Geralt conspicuously the focus. Do some of the programmed reactions get old after a while? Sure. Do characters always react appropriately? No. The Witcher 3 is not an “open-world.” It is a world. Assassin’s Creed just throws icons at a map as if that makes for a compelling world, when really it just highlights how dead every unplanned encounter feels. Baldur’s Gate II built a world of enormous size and scope, but it wasn’t very flexible or reactive. Fallout 3 and New Vegas justified their open-worlds, but only because you expected a post-nuclear wasteland to be…well, mostly empty and devoid of life. Dragon Age: Inquisition artificially gated approximately fifteen hours of main story with forty or fifty (or more!) hours of pointless filler. Contrast that with some other open-world games.
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