Just beat The Witcher 3: Complete Edition on PS5 and I feel like I have finally broken an ancient curse.
I first approached this game on PS4 back in 2017 and I gave up on it after about a month, having beaten less than half of it in that time. I had very mixed feelings about it back then and frankly it has only gotten worse with the Complete Edition as the developers have had seven additional years to address what irks me about the game and while they have improved some of those things they have barely scratched the surface in my opinion.
PSA: The Witcher 3 is a Polish national treasure. It is the biggest thing my country has achieved since freeing itself of communism. Questioning its greatness should be considered an act of treason and beating it should be a condition for receiving Polish citizenship.
Okay, back to my review.
Of course, the writing's great, there may not be another game out there which combines such scale with such high production value, the voice acting is top-notch, there's the iconic soundtrack which goes "yaaaaaaah" whenever monsters jump out of the bushes or you insult someone's mother, the atmosphere is mesmerizing and so on. It has gore, full frontal nudity AND progressive messaging. It's a game where the average side quest is more emotionally engaging and intriguing than the main plot of most games out there. Especially the narrative team and the quest designers deserve medals. Admittedly I don't think that the main plot is all that great and in Novigrad I got flashbacks from the cursed Vizima chapters in the first game but it does its job, my complaints aren't all that serious here.
That said...
I honestly believe that literally anything other than the narrative and presentation is pretty much ass in this game. It's a mild improvement over The Witcher 2 but still ass. Seriously, every single aspect of the gameplay is mediocre at best. There's mediocre combat, abominable character progression, atrocious loot, terrible alchemy, abysmal platforming, ridiculous horse riding, laughable balancing, shoddy UI, crappy pacing - I would keep going but I'm out of words and too lazy to grab a thesaurus. I have played my share of ARPGs and I swear to God, in every aspect other than content The Witcher 3 is one of the worst ARPGs I have ever played. Yes, the content is so good that practically all is forgiven - just functional gameplay is good enough for it to be a great experience given the quality of its content.
And they almost would have gotten away with it too! It would almost be one of these games that I can give a 9/10 or perhaps even a 10/10 rating in spite of substantial flaws. Alas, it's too damn long! It's so long that the only things I kept playing it for lost almost all of their charm long before the credits rolled. I love fantasy whodunits as much as the next guy but come on, even with the best writing the pattern does get old after what feels like the 500th time. It's like a TV show that starts out great but then gets stretched out for ten seasons, 24 episodes each, just because they could.
And the thing is, a game could engage me and keep me entertained this long but it would also need good gameplay or at least a highly addictive loop but as I said above: The Witcher 3 just does not have those. The moment-to-moment gameplay isn't particularly fun, the progression isn't giving me anything to look forward to and frankly the game also doesn't make particularly good use of an open world. It's not a highly systemic game like, say, TES where you can keep trying crazy things, it's not a game that constantly throws unexpected stuff and you in already explored areas and it's not a game where you explore the world organically - much like in a Ubigame that big immersive world soon turns out to be a checklist that you just keep going through like you're grocery shopping. I probably binged it too hard but in my defense: the narrative is so intricate that it's hard to get back into it after taking a longer break. Heck, after doing a number of side quests I barely remembered that the main plot is about the Wild Hunt even though it's right there in the title!
Finally: in terms of technical quality the game is still in a pretty terrible shape, probably worse than the GOTY version was on PS4. Sure, the performance is good, the load times are short (once you notice that you can skip the cinematics by pressing square) and I can live with Roach tap dancing on slopes and spawning on roofs. Ah, that silly horse... What I can't forgive is that at some point I gradually began losing slots for manual saves and eventually it was up to a coin toss whether the game would save at all. Or that the game reset all settings every time it crashed. And it did crash a lot. On the PS5 in this regard The Witcher 3 is rivalled only by... Cyberpunk 2077. I wish I was joking but I'm not.
And in spite of all that... it's still pretty great game. I refuse to give it anything more than an 8/10 out of principle, given the serious shortcomings in its gameplay and the simple fact that most of the time I spent with it was frustratingly boring, but what can I say? It is a massive package of top quality content and often an amazing experience. I'm harsh and honest but not insane or ungrateful.