The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Hearts of Stone

Just finished the expansion and I feel quite disappointed, the story was great new characters also were interesting just one thing that really annoy me is the romance with Shani. I expected that she will be a new romance ending choose for Gerald. It is so annoying because I really expected that from their conversations true the game, but as in the first game Gerald remain the player. By the way I still didn't regret spending money on a game.

The story begins brilliantly, but tragically undermines itself. The characters are quite well fleshed out, perhaps with even more detail and dialogue than those in the base game, and the initial fights are an engaging step up from the end of vanilla. I was initially very impressed, and this continued through most of the expansion. The added world content like treasure hunts, bandit camps, and other side activities were welcome additions. Unfortunately, the nature of the dangerous antagonist is too obvious, and the ending entirely unsatisfying and the choice completely binary. Denying one utterly evil character a victory should not mean that Geralt decides to completely ignore the faults of another very evil man, especially when he has the opportunity to confront him about everything he is responsible for at the end. Moreover, this character was so fundamentally annoying that the prospect of killing him was the my main motivator for getting to the end. Hearts of Stone is certainly the right name for the expansion. Other than Shani, and one very minor bit-part, there isn't a single character introduced that doesn't either deserve some kind of comeuppance, or somehow becomes incredibly annoying to the point that any sympathy I had is lost. Even the somewhat likable criminal characters you meet as part of a heist are still criminals, though they are at least somewhat less unlikable than almost everyone else. Even the victimised wife that we meet and whose past we painstakingly reconstruct, seeing in detail how she became estranged from her husband and more or less stopped caring about him, suddenly asks whether her husband has been saying anything about her, like the stereotype of a shy teenage romantic off a bad TV show. The later boss fights/ encounters are tedious in the extreme, and don't translate well at all into Witcher 3 gameplay, being more at home in an MMO. It's a terrible shame. I was completely sold on the brilliance of this expansion, until nearing the very end, Credit to CDPR for an amazing game, and a well-crafted, meaty expansion worthy of being sold as such – unlike DLCs in many other titles, you’re certainly paying for real content. Sadly, the annoyance-overload the characters subjected me too, the excessively restricted choice of endings, and some of the boss fights really undermined the experience and ruined my enjoyment of the material.

The story and the main villain don't fit the Witcher games at all, it feels more like lazy fan fiction than an actual Witcher DLC.. half the DLC feels like it was written by stupid people who never read the Witcher books. CDPROJEKT have stayed true to the novels for the most part in all their games, but in this one it just doesn't stay true to it and they venture away from the lore and create a mess. Geralt is turned into an errand boy for assholes for the whole duration of the DLC, you never feel like a Witcher during it, at all! then the game forgets that it's a Witcher game and thinks it's GTA V and have you going on a heist and choosing criminals to go with you. Everything felt out of place! Blood and Wine on the other hand is fantastic.

Don't get me wrong, with this package you will get a load of content for your coin, but it might leave you frustrated, as it did to me. Just after i had finished the glorious campaign of the base game i immediately started the quest line of Heart of Stone. While there are no new original regions, there are still new buildings and places in well known regions near oxenfurt. Boss fights will be more challenging and action packed while conversations with new characters will be quite gripping. There is a big "but" though. The dlc implements story mechanics that scramble and even ridicule achievements of the base game. It makes Geralt look like a fool at times and you are nearly forced to play the quest line in one session, because there is an ingame penalty if you haven't finished it already. I can't get into details without putting out spoilers, but for all those who loved the rich story of the base game skip this dlc and get "Blood and Whine" instead.

PERMANENTLY ALTERS THE BRAIN