The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Review

At The Game Awards 2015, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt won two awards, game of the year, and best role-playing game. The developer of The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red for also won the award for developer of the year.

The Witcher games are adaptations of The Witcher book series by Andrzej Sapkowski. Now, while this isn't the first time a game developer tried to make a game based on a book series, I think that CD Projekt Red’s adaptation of Geralt’s story is magnificently executed.

While being an extremely story driven game series, The Witcher 3 has delivered 40+ hours in game time for most players, and that only includes the main story line. The main story involves Geralt searching for his daughter Cirilla, but an organization of death and misfortune known as the “Wild Hunt” is after her. This is only a summary of the main story of course, but there is so much more to it that telling the story would drag on forever. The story is extremely interesting and what's great is that players that aren't familiar with the books or previous games can jump right into The Witcher 3 and still understand what's happening and be intrigued with how the story unfolds.

The game is aesthetically pleasing for a fantasy based setting. A lot of The Witcher 3’s praise comes from its impressive graphics. The Witcher 3 shows this right off the bat at Kaer Mohren. It’s really hard to get tired looking at the game when the visuals are so appealing, and with so many different regions to explore in the open world game, it becomes very evident how stunning the visuals are compared to most popular AAA games.

In the settings you can toggle on screen tutorials while you play. Inexperienced players are welcomed wholeheartedly. Because of this the game allows inexperienced players to enjoy the game while not taking the difficulty away from experienced players.

There are four difficulty settings to choose from and the difficulty can be raised or lowered at any time while playing the game. If the game ever gets too hard, you can lower the difficulty settings and if it gets too easy, than you can higher the difficulty settings. There are only two difference between difficulty settings worth noting. The first is that the first 2 allow you to meditate to regenerate to full health at any point in the game, but this mechanic is removed at the 2 higher difficulty levels. The second is that enemies deal more damage to Geralt and they have more health.

The game awards the player for playing patiently and just playing smartly overall. But players

can get punished if they don't prepare themselves properly. For example, in the quest where Geralt has to slay a werewolf, when you deplete 50% of his health bar, he begins to regenerate his health rapidly so it could be problematic if he heals faster than Geralt can damage him. Most players would struggle with this battle, but if the player creates cursed oil before hand and applies it to Geralt's silver sword, the fight becomes easier because the player planned ahead of time by crafting an oil that increases damage dealt against werewolves.

While there is a lot of good to say about The Witcher 3, nothing is perfect in this world. The first problem is fighting packs of monsters. It can be extremely frustrating to find an opening to attack when 3-5 enemies are attacking Geralt at once, and upon getting hit by one monster the player could find himself getting comboed by the rest of the creatures until Geralt dies.

This branches into my next problem of poorly placed checkpoints. Once dying the player can choose to load their most recent save, but if the player hasn't saved in a long time they are sent back at most 25 minutes from when they died. This could easily be fixed if the autosaves were spaced out properly, or saved before the player started a combat sequence.

That being said as playtime increases, these problems become less evident and provide a less frustrating experience for the players.

In my honest opinion, yes The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt deserved to win game of the year and the rest of the awards it did, because I believe its storytelling was done right, and the gameplay had little flaws.