The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition

200+ hours do i need to say more

Graphics and music are nice. The gameplay varies and is topped by Fallout 3/NV. There is no real speech way, companions are just NPCs, quick travel is limited. The game is such a quest fest: Though diversified every quest requires you to do three things. Reapeating this obvious mechanic for 40 hours lets you finish the main storyline. Example: find bait, create a potion (3 ingredients), fight the monster. Find guards, find marketing, play in theater. Ask three women about someone. Get three cards (from three persons). Find three companions of some irritating dwarves I'd rather beat up. Help child1, then child2, talk to the parents. Not even story friends grant you favors. I failed mainline subquests on purpose due to all that just to reach the end sooner and it made me never care about people in this world besides Triss. According to the Steam achievement, only 1/4 of all players finished the story. The plot is alright but it did not motivate me. I had no connection to Ciri and only followed her because the game forced me to (by an asshole emperor and Yen keeping me in the dark all the time). Traveling this large world sucks: paths are small, too many objects are in the way, the horse does not always follow the dots leading to the objective and you can only quicktravel from special places. Boat traveling is even more frustrating: long distances during which you cannot do anything and of course get attacked by strategically placed flying enemies destroying the boat... so I left the boat in the middle of the ocean and dived all the way without being molested. Balancing sucks. Even on story mode difficulty the final battle was only doable by god mode and killall cheats. Nothing fun about being bashed by an overpowered, teleporting, unbeatable magic casting asshole of an enemy. Also I played a monster hunting quest and got utterly destroyed - revisiting two levels later with the same equipment it was easy as pie... The epilogue skipped the fates of all comrades.

There's little I could say about Witcher 3 that hasn't already been covered in exhaustive detail elsewhere, but for what it's worth, here's my 2 cents: It's not perfect. Balance is a little wonky sometimes, especially with equipment, & it's difficult from a pure numbers perspective (vs skill) to fight above your level. Geralt's animation is smooth but his movement can be janky & unpredictable. I got very little mileage out of bombs or bows except in the instances specifically intended for their use - I'd never waste an upgrade on them. The Sign tree provides by far the most fun, variety, & combat effectiveness, IMO. Combat is distant 2nd, but the upgrades typically do little to change your playstyle. Alchemy is last: tho the upgrades can be interesting, most make you tankier vs deal more damage, which goes against my preference for glass-cannon combat with quick and intense duels. The environment in general is pretty & spectacular, but not usually individually memorable - as a counter-example, I could draw a map of F:NV's Mojave from memory, even though it's a much less technically impressive map. The main antagonists are certainly intimidating, but a total bore from a story perspective - tho they do get a little bit of interesting backstory later on. The DLC's villains (especially HoS) are MUCH better. Exploration can get repetitive, with a multitude of places that do little more than add an empty checkbox to the map that provides only middling loot. But it's a good game. I like it, it's impressive both in worldbuilding and scale, and it prob deserves its spots in many a Top Of All Time list. There is a TON of content. The story takes a lot of twists & turns, & involves many characters with their own motivations & flaws. Your decisions do matter, tho they can sometimes feel arbitrarily limited or have unpredictable results (realistic perhaps, but irritating as a game mechanic). The DLC is awesome, better than the main game in a lot of ways. Team Triss for life.

One of the last and best RPG of the last decade ending in 2010-2020.

I wanted to enjoy the game but my god. The audio, specifically speech, stopped working on my game! Worked fine until I made it to the Red Baron. Saved game, continued a few days later and now I cant hear the voice acting. Just the subtitles. All the other audio is fine. Tried restarting the game etc. and the voice acting is still mute. No settings were changed so don't understand the voice acting becoming mute. All this time, I heard about how fantastic this game was, finally gave it a try. Just a few hours in, it goes stupid on me! Starting completely over is not an option. If it did it to me a few hours in, what if I did 100s of hours than it bugged out on me? The problems were drowned out on this game because people claimed it was so great. All hype! At least Skyrim didn't bug out on me like this game did!