I've been a gamer for almost 26 years, starting with Commodore 64, through Amiga, SNES, Playstation One, PS2, and finally PC. I've played countless games, with a keen interest in RPGs. I've always held games like BG2 and PS:T as highest pinnacle of game design. This all changed when I played TW3. It's hard to pintpoint what exactly make this game stand out, as there are so many things that are just brilliantly designed. Starting from a fact that on release this was the open world RPG game with fewest bugs - so little of them that I don't remember a single one except the silly Roach air walks. This game has it all - beautiful graphics, one of the best soundtracks, amazingly unique quests (no generic "go clear X number of caves" or "collect Y number of Z", incredibly detailed open world, a diverse casts of NPCs, brilliant voice acting...everything you can think about is made to perfection in this game. It took me 100h to finish the game on the first run, while pretty much rushing to end in the last 30 hours. My second walkthough is at around 110h and I'm yet to get to half point of the game. There's plenty of stuff to do, and yet you will rarely get bored by the game. DLCs are absolutely amazing, to the point it's hard to say which one I like more. Hearts of Stone weaves a brilliant, heart touching story of deceit, love, treachery and is brilliantly paced, with the start of the quest being centered around a care-free wedding night, only to turn quite sinister at the later stages. Blood and wine on the other hand doesn't bring such a tightly written story, but it brings a whole new world to explore. If I had to mention one last thing about this game it's this - rush to get to Skellige. Skellige is one of the most brilliantly designed areas in any game I've ever played. The combination of visuals, music, quests, voice acting...it all comes together in this part of the Witcher world and makes you weep when the Spikeroog tunes kick in. Buy this game.
