The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

CD Projekt Red has done it again with another entry in the award winning rpg series based of the novels of Andrzej Sapkowski. The Witcher 3 is another open world rpg but don't let the recent flood of open world games influence what you think about the Witcher. The Witcher is brimming with content and full of quests and when I say quests I don't mean sidequests, every quest has its own story, characters and continuing story. The writing in the Witcher is bordering on genius and it shows when you start to care about characters that most games would make you hate for their blatant character flaws.

Starting with the Witcher's combat, it is what I like to call a "fair" combat system and having played on both regular and the superhard deathmarch difficulty the combat has to be described as "fair" as Geralt can take on almost anything one on one but struggles the more enemies are thrown at him. The combat focuses around swordplay combined with the different signs that are minor magic abilities that witchers can use. These signs are mostly used against monsters and groups of enemies that can overwhelm Geralt  can be augmented and upgraded by special gear and ability points found through leveling up and absorbing places of power. Unfortunately there is only one real change to each sign through leveling and some are obviously more useful than others. The most useful is undeniably the Quen sign as its upgrades allow you to regain health when hit which is incredibly useful on higher difficulties and borderline overpowered in the lower ones. The swordplay is a mix of short and long dodges and light and heavy attacks. Throughout my playthrough i decide to focus my upgrades on short attacks and short dodges which can be upgraded into invincibility frames.

The Witcher 3 is a very well polished game but like most massive open world games bugs often slip through the cracks. There is only one that has cause me to reset my game and that is falling in a pool of water with no escape that locks my ability to jump. there is another glitch getting an upgrade to special witcher gear where it is impossible to escape but through online help it was possible to fall out of the world forcing you to recover outside the dungeon. and these bugs were the only ones that forced me to reset my game. there is another fairly common error that results in Geralt preforming a swimming animation after he jumps off Roach while sprinting.

Finally moving into spoiler territory The Witcher 3 follows Geralt of Rivia as he attempts to track down his once lover Yennefer. After finding Yennefer Geralt discovers she is working with the Emperor of Nilfgard to track down his heir and Geralt's one time Ward Cirri. What follows is a hunt across warring countries and cities in turmoil. The story is fairly linear compared to other rpg's but its comforting playing as a defined and well rounded character rather than a blank slate miracle child that rpg's provide when you make your character. Playing as Geralt allows the story to draw out his character rather than inserting the player into some situation he has to fix.

In the end The Witcher 3 is an incredibly written and solid preforming rpg that really raised that bar in what an rpg can be and really broke the mold of what many other rpg's consider the standard of the industry.