The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

I bought this game months back and i never finished it due to some kind of loss of data and gog not refunding my money or giving me my game back. But even without all that the game itself feels very very clumsy and slow when you try to move theres a huge delay where geralt tries to walk and eventually starts to jog. The combat is extremely clunky and you absolutely have to rely on magic instead of going pure melee because everything from giant golems to tiny imps will stagger you with unblockable and unparryable attacks. Merchants are cheapskates who are only willing to buy a monster head that is worth 1000 gold for only 100. Now there are mods out there, a plethora of mods that can fix alot of things this game does wrong but like make it look better with retextures and new lighting because despite being called "dark fantasy" this game is super bright and saturated like a typical happy fantasy game there is no atmosphere or dark gray skies to indicate that the world is not in a time of happiness. Overall i can't even imagine why this game was voted game of the year over things like ori and the blind forest, undertale, or bloodborne, except for the fact that you can tell they put a lot of work and detail into the tits of every girl you have sex with even the whores.

CD Projekt Red have shown how to make a Sequel. The witcher was a decent game, great story, gameplay was meh, The Witcher 2 was a good game, great story, gameplay was decent. The Witcher 3 is a fantastic game, amazing story and amazing gameplay. CD PRojekt Red are constantly improving their games and the Witcher is one of the best games I have played in years, the last time I had as much fun in a game was the release of Assassin's Creed 2 when Ubisoft showed that they knew how to make a Sequel (and then it all went to shit when the promptly forgot). Now that I have the praise for the company out of the way onto the meat of the game. The saying, 'You get out what you put in' is so fitting, you want to just play the story on the easiest difficulty fine, it'll force you to diverge a little to level but otherwise it's a decent game, but where it really shines is when you explore and talk to people all these interesting stories and ways to do stuff, roleplaying is fun and some of the choices are grey or just difficult others shape who you are and I even had a choice form the tutorial area come back to haunt me many hours later. This also stretches to combat, explore and get alchemy ingredients and you're going to have fun from bombs, to oils, to decoctions and potions and some of the craftable armour is just so nice but it's all satisfying and that's what the strength of the game is, I feel satisfied playing it, even just dicking around the map on no particular quest is fun and I feel like nothing is wasted. Complaints, this is the interesting bit because there's very little I could complain about, mostly involving a few glitches with npc's I'm meant to follow, particularly triss and some floating npc's which shouldn't be where they are. Other than that aiming to loot stuff behind things can be a pain and I found myself stuck on a few objects. Going into combat caused me to die a few times as I was jumping between ledges as it'd happen at the last second and instead of jumping I'd dodge off a ledge and horses can be a slight pain to control but other than that it's all put together pretty well.

It's been years, years, since the last time something like this happened. For a game to be hyped this badly and then to not only live up to it, but actually surpass it and surpise me... it is almost unheard of. This game is the pinnacle of RPGs, nay, dare I say of all third person open-world games. Masterfully crafted story with so much attention to detail, so well written, so well acted, so well presented it's downright criminal, and for the first time in video game history: a proper choice system. No longer are you forced into a good-evil dychotomy, no longer are you forced into a bad-worse dychotomy, no longer are the consequences of your choices made readily appearant to you(random joe approves +10!), but you make choices in a nuanced, believable way. Sometimes the consequences are immediate, sometimes you may just be exploring the world hours after making a choice and you'll come across something that shows what the effects of that was. And this is true not only for the main quests but even the smallest ones. As for the combat, I personally like it. It isn't the best, nor is it the most demanding ever, but it's great fun nonetheless and complex enough to keep you on your toes all the way through. No idea what people are complaining about, it is a better version of the Witcher 2 combat system, so it's good. And if it ever gets stale, you can always try a different method, go sign-heavy instead of melee. This is becoming long, so I'll list the rest of the pros here just quickly: characters, graphics(yes, even with the unfortunate downgrade of the particle effects, still amazing), aesthetics, the open world and the size of it, and the soundtrack... have I mentioned how amazing the soundtrack is? But that is not to say the game doesn't have it's flaws. Some pretty big ones as well. I'll not list them, since I don't have any more space, but I'll say this: while annoying, they don't in any way negate the achievment that this game is. So buy it.

The Witcher 3 takes the best parts from action, character-driven and sandbox RPGs and throws it all together inside two massive open-world zones. The game easily contains over 100 hours of content without having to start a new save. Both of the two main zones - "Velen" and "Skellige", feel like the entirety of other open world RPG's on their own. Both zones deliver a masive amount of content all at once without loading screens interrupting your experience. Loading screens only trigger when transferring between zones/story segments. Other than that, you are free to climb on your horse and journey through this incredible open-world that CDPR has crafted for you. This causes the game's quests/events to truly feel natural and organic. You actually do get to immerse yourself in the role of a "traveling witcher". What's more important than the sheer amount of content, is that it truly does feel like meaningful content. You are constantly stubmling upon quests in the open world that feel highly detailed, similar to what you would expect from the "main quest/storyline". Of course every game has technical issues and TW3 isn't any different. I've personally run into visual glitches, NPC pop-ins and a couple of "day-one" crashes - but nothing has rendered the game unplayable. For the most part, the game feels very polished with a few bumps in the road here and there. The game runs smoothly and the crashes/lock-ups have been solved by CDPR's patches. It's easy to be skeptical of games that promise huge amounts of content. Of course, most start out strong, but it's very common for the experience to "burn out" or to become repetitive. The true value of great open-world games is when the game keeps you engaged for dozens of hours past the point where most games end up repeating themselves. The Witcher 3 started out as a very strong open world RPG, and after about 100 hours (still not finished), I now feel like it is one of the best open-world games I have ever played.

"2015. The world is heating up. People bring guns to a Church and a newspaper office. 'Gamers' aren't 'dead'." I remember being saddened by the abysmal framerate this game ran with on my computer as the gamer community's showered unequivocal praise on the game. Three years later, with all three games behind me, I just want it all to stop. Putting in about 154 hours together into this game (through GOG Galaxy) and its expansions (through Steam, where the GOTY edition costs less than 5 USD in INR during discount seasons), I realised that I cannot appreciate what is, to me, a combination of a third-person walking simulator with cues from Ubisoft, and an sword combat game poorly mimicking "Dark Souls" combat, having lost its RPG roots previously. "But the quests are some of the best in all of videogaming," you may say. True. And that CD Projekt Red provided options that would let you miss out on some of these quests is certainly brave of them. Yet, most of the game involves moving to a place and fighting creatures or humans: combat is easier to design than cutscenes with dialogue that tries too hard, after all (seriously, Yennefer can go henpeck herself). Velen was great, with forests you could fly through that would have previously been level boundaries. But in Novigrad, the checklist quests and the claustrophobia taint the whole experience. Skellige, with its uneven level geometry your horse stops for and giant bodies of water to slow you down further, does not make it better. The story is not particularly great either, with Ciri, Geralt's adopted daughter, apparently in grave danger but conveniently waiting for you to finish dealing with the locals' problems. This places the game next to Bethesda's 2015 release in main quest design. There is much to be appreciated, yes, but why couldn't CD Projekt Red just focus on providing a better made conclusion instead of this mess? I mean, I know why, but that is because I am not a gamer. Kind of glad that that is so.