I played a good chunk of this over the weekend and I think I’m close to being done. I have about 80 hours total. Most of it in Blood & Broken Bones difficulty, with a pop up to Death March about 15 hours ago.
I think The Witcher 3 may have some of the best quests of any game ever. The writing is fantastic. Even side quests, that in any other game would be given the laziest of scripts, often have shocking or touching bits that seamlessly blend in with the setting. They did some good work in getting the writing to feel real and make the consequences tough. There are characters and stories I will never forget in this game.
The few times the writing fell short, the naturalistic direction of the digital actors was strong enough to overcome any clunky dialogue. When Geralt is disappointed or saddened, his eyes say everything his monosyllabic grunts can’t. The conversations were staged so as to avoid the weird standing and gesticulating uncanny valley thing other games fall into.
Even the Easter Eggs, fan service, and goofy stuff read well.
All that said, I think I do have some criticisms. I haven’t seen this mentioned in a lot of reviews, but I feel the balance in this game is nuts.
I was constantly over or under-leveled for the main quest. In the former case, it didn’t matter except my RPG instinct was to be ticked off at getting little to no XP for advancing the main story. In the latter case, I had to delay the plot by finding other things to do until I could hit the sweet spot. Which was sort of the issue with bringing it to an open-world, I think. CDPR knows that most people aren’t going to tackle the main story in one uninterrupted string, so they tried to anticipate some side quest wandering, but they can’t really predict what players will do. Some might try to take on all the Witcher Contracts. Some might try to uncover all the map question marks.
The level of quests and mobs frequently seemed wrong as well. Sometimes I’d breeze through a quest a couple of levels above me, while getting my ass handed to me by a random mob a few levels under mine. The actual moment-to-moment combat was fine (more on that later) but the recommended level difficulty just didn’t tell the whole story. I think a monster/mob that requires the player to dynamically use their powers (abilities, signs, potions, bombs, combos) should be a higher level than a monster/mob with the same amount of hit points, but that calls for less ability management to defeat. Again, this seems to be an issue of the open-world setup. It’s harder for a dev to balance encounters when players may attempt them at different times with different abilities.
Speaking of the difficulty levels, I said the moment-to-moment combat is good. Rolling, parrying, throwing bombs, casting signs, etc, feels really crisp and looks cool. I feel like a badass monster hunter when I’m in the thick of it. On the other hand, potion abuse is way too easy. I like that CDPR changed potions from The Witcher 2 so that you can just use them in combat, but it’s just too easy to cheese. Three doses of that 100% heal potion means most fights are inevitably mine unless I get stunned and one-shotted by some epic beast. When it happens, I feel it was less about a lack of combat skill, and more because the monster sucker-punched me with some jank ability.
I appreciate that CDPR improved the loot from previous games, but it was another weird balance thing. Random armor and swords were almost always better than the Witcher Gear because I usually pieced it all together after the recommended level. Another casualty of the open-world design.
Gwent is a nice distraction, but I never felt it meshed well with the world in the game. It felt like a tacked-on minigame in another, lesser, open-world game. The hi-res art and quotes of in-game characters contributed to that. It was a little too meta for me to take seriously.
Overall though, I think The Witcher 3 is one of the best games I’ve ever played.
