PROS: • Pretty environments. • Cool cutscenes. • Decent plot and worldbuilding. CONS: • Until endgame, Geralt feels like a total weakling. Both magic and sword blows have little effect on his opponents. Too much grind is required to defeat them. You always have to roll around them and try to hit them in the back. You can’t break through the armored enemies’ defense stance. • The game forces you to abuse Quen (magical shield) a lot, since Geralt is incredibly vulnerable to damage. You have limited opportunity to cast other signs (spells), since stamina regeneration is blocked while it’s in use. This translates to a monotonous gameplay. • Unfair character progression. The skill-tree makes it seem like you should focus on one of three paths (mage, alchemist, swordsman). If you don’t invest talents into certain abilities (e.g. riposte—counter-attack), however, you’ll put yourself at a big disadvantage and might have trouble with completing the game. • Half-way through you’re required to play as different characters. They share stats with the witcher; they cannot use his fighting skills, however. All of your previous strategies become useless, which results in an extremely frustrating experience. • Geralt moves like a puppet. His animations have no weight. • Potions have to be consumed ahead of time. Their duration is far too short. You have to wait until their effects expire until you’re able to choose other ones. • Traversal is constrained by invisible walls. • You can only roll, not dodge. • The music is too pompous and sounds generic. • No fast travel, which results in lots of backtracking. There’s no sprint. • The fistfighting mechanic has been reduced to a QTE sequence. • Boring arm-wrestling. • Horrible stealth. • Mutations are irreversible meaning it’s only worthwhile to do them at the end of the game, when more powerful mutagens become available. • Annoying death-screen. • Confusing map.
PROS: • The music is unique and atmospheric. It supplements actual narration excellently. • Believable and vivid portrayals of game characters by Polish voice actors. • The witcher’s fighting choreography. It makes for an amazing visual spectacle and sets him apart from other warriors. With new experience levels you can unlock new combos, which allows combat to evolve. • Intricate alchemy system. There are 5 substances required to prepare potions, oils and bombs. You are encouraged to experiment—it’s possible to discover new recipes on your own. Some ingredients have additional qualities; when combined, they offer extra benefits. • Well written plot with a surprising twist at the end. • Replayability. Depending on your choices, some of the game’s events unfold differently. • Incredible artwork displayed during flashbacks and loading screens. • Great intro and outro. • Varied bestiary. CONS: • While the dice poker minigame is cool, wining is a bit too much based on luck rather than skill. • Yrden and Axii signs take too long to cast and don’t offer much benefit. • Too many NPCs share the same character models. It breaks immersion. • Fast travel is available only for a small portion of the game. • No real challenge even on hard difficulty. • Repetitive locations, particularly interiors—the geometry might be slightly different but textures are exactly the same. You’ll spend at least a third of your time in the same places. • Annoying world traversal—Geralt cannot climb all obstacles. He has to walk around them to reach some spots (invisible walls). • Since defense is performed automatically, using dodges and rolls doesn’t make a lot of sense. • Loading happens too often when transitioning between locations. • Monster deterrents do more harm than good. • Too many fetch quests.
PROS: • Great graphics. • Detailed environments. • Emotional music. • The game tries to be immersive e.g., features a tangible, interactable map, minimalistic hud, etc. CONS: • Poor gameplay. Movement and shooting doesn’t feel right. • The game encourages you to play stealthily but it’s badly implemented. You can’t stick to walls, lean out of corners. Once any enemy learns of your location, the whole camp does. While there are some stealth indicators like a light on your watch and music cues, they don’t really work well and you’ll end up reloading the game way too many times. • All animations are preceded by a noticeable pause, as if the player character needs to think before performing a simple action, e.g. opening door. • Poor vehicle handling. • Long loading times. • Unskippable cutscenes. • Invisible walls. • QTEs instead of proper mechanics. • Annoying fake accents in the English dub. Why not do it like in the Chernobyl TV series where actors speak standard British English? • Too many “tell, don’t show” moments, rather than the other way round. • Silent protagonist (exluding DLCs), constraining narration and creating awkward moments where he is asked questions but doesn’t answer them. • The survivors leave the metro to look for a safe haven. It doesn’t take a lot to figure out that uncontaminated areas would be located far away from urban centers, in the countryside, where there are no strategic targets to attack. Yet, the characters put themselves in harms way, looking for clues where to go in dangerous places, rather than use their common sense. Also, train tracks are somehow still usable after 20 years without being maintained.
Pros: • Great voice acting. • If you like open-worlds this game features one the richest I’ve encountered. Lots of stuff to explore. • Top notch graphics. • The music is cool, even though it lacks variety in certain locations (particularly Velen, which has the worst, most annoying sound track except the swamp battle theme). Cons: • The plot may be hard to comprehend if you’re unfamiliar with the previous installments. • This game is not gameplay oriented but rather story driven. Combat (swordfighting) is hardly satisfying. It’s not as bad as in Skyrim but not as good as in Dark Souls. It could be easily repaired if the developers implemented two things: stamina-drain on dodging and attacking as well as improvement of the parry system. Right now, the standard tactic is to hit and dodge infinitely which is boring and unrewarding. Also it’s quite easy to parry human opponents but parrying monsters is nigh-impossible. The parry window should be extended for them. Either this or the system should be reworked to something which resembles Batman Arkham series combat. • I’m in two minds when it comes to animations. The ones used in cutscenes are pretty good, but the ones used in dialogues (which you see 90% of the time) are absolutely horrible. They’re sluggish and lifeless. The same, though to a lesser degree, concerns Geralt’s movement. His animations are unresponsive and too long. • There are lots of points of interest on the map. Usually they’re either bandit camps or guarded treasures. However, since combat isn’t the games forte, visiting them is a chore. Besides there is simply too many of them. Instead of adding such fillers the developers should have worked on new interesting quests or improving combat—which brings me to the point that the game is simply to big. There’s too much of everything. Witcher 2 made a much better job in this regard—being much more consise.
The GOG version was patched for compatibility with Windows 10. I managed to run it, yet the game lagged so hard it was unplayable. I had to use DXGL, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to play. As far as the game itself goes—unless you’re already familiar with the title you may have a hard time with it. The biggest problem I have are the combat mechanics (which lie at the core of the game). Once a specific period of time passes the AI begins to send troops to attack you. The enemy will attempt to storm your fortifications. This can be easily countered by building a lot of big towers close to each other, each fully manned by third level soldiers. There are several issues with this. First of all the enemy archers cannot shoot the archers on the towers. They just stand and get shot, since only swordsmen can storm the tower. Secondly, the AI doesn’t use siege engines which hardly makes sense and isn’t challenging. Attacking is even worse than defending. Once you capture an enemy tower (or recapture your own) the AI sends all of its troops after you, literally swarms your land with soldiers, which is ridiculous. You practically cannot command your army, only point them in desired direction. Once they see the enemies they become fixated on them, and cannot be called off. This most often results in the army being decimated since they don’t follow your orders. Among other things to mention is the fact that the game doesn’t tell about the possibility to speed up gameplay with numpad keys in the tutorial or anywhere else (only about the 1-minute time jump, which is useless anyway since it makes you vulnerable to enemy attack).
