The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition

It's not just game. It's something more.

The Witcher 3: - Is beautiful - Is huge and expansive - Has an outstanding story - Has mostly great acting - Is complex, lore driven, and has a superb crafting system that really drags you in But The Witcher 3 also: - Has godawful combat, problems with hit detection and a parry system that barely works. Moves designed for a much faster fighting system are slowed down by animations and make combat unresponsive and irritating. It's slow to respond to everything. You swipe right through enemies without hitting you, and they'll swipe right through you without hitting you. - Does not respect your time. You can't fast travel unless you're at a signpost and in some areas signposts are a long way apart, meaning that instead of keeping the gameplay flowing you're just travelling. There's only two places to mastercraft items, and you have to walk 200 paces to get to them, they can't mastercraft all items, and you still have to walk back and forth between your stash. I've spent a lot of my time in this game just moving between places. It detracts from how good other parts are. - Has too many pointless monster encounters: they're everywhere. While you're manually travelling between places, they slow you down even more. - Drags on, even in the main story. It just never seems to get to the point. - Is repetitive. Witcher contracts are all variations on three themes. - Has an extremely unrewarding levelling system, where if you're a couple of levels above the recommended, you end up with very low exp and coin rewards. It makes you just avoid secondary and contracts because there's no point. - Has fixed levels for its weapons, which makes doing any other quests, or tackling the main overlevelled, unrewarding because the game no longer rewards you. You can't upgrade anything but witcher gear. Mastercrafting is laborious and grandmasters are frankly ridiculous. Spare 60 hours? On sale? Go for it. Otherwise, nah. Skip the grind, read the books.

It is very seldom, that a game can be called 'perfect', but in my opinion the witcher 3 deserves to be called that: amazing gameplay and stunning graphics (which look better than a lot of more recent titles). Thanks to wine and dxvk it also runs great on linux (I've been playing it on ultra graphics on ubuntu 20.04).

This is one of the best games ever made. I've played just over 300 hours (one playthrough), it never got old, and there are still some things left to do. They really refined Geralt as a character, and the other characters are fantastic as well. The main storyline was great, as was the two expansions. Even the side quests have interesting stories. This game really upped the ante on open-world games, and I can see how it improved the genre as a whole. 10 out of 10.

I am very big on gameplay and don't usually bother with the sort of games that lack a decent challenge or that don't have interesting combat. Also, I think open world is a great idea on paper but so far has been proven to be a problematic concept that simply doesn't translate to fun. In most cases I'd say the open world ends up a detriment rather than an asset. Sooo... Witcher 3 is an open world game with bare bones gameplay, uninteresting mechanical character development and no good loot to be found. However, despite all this I can excuse these flaws. Why? Well, it's because of creativity. The sheer amount of fantastic things you can see in this game have moved me to tears on more than one occasion.. The desperate weeping trees in Velen, the wonders and societal layers of Novigrad, the deep, rich side quests with all their beautiful moments. The excellent cprg writing that employs brevity and humor to build stories in a magical world, realized with more color and personality than I've ever seen in any game before or after. The tender moments Geralt shares with the memorable people around him. It is sometimes overwhelming the beauty this game can conjure. Once you finish this game you will never forget it and you will forever take any chance you can to tell people to go play it. Even if you dislike "interactive movie" games, even if you are jaded by all those times playability was coldheartedly thrown out of the window in favor of more impressive graphics, even if you think modern gaming is a sh*tshow, even if ALL this applies to you: You need to play Witcher 3. And play the DLCs after!