The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Review (☂️ Conan 🌴)
Planned to just quickly hop in because of the new Witcher season on Netflix. Ended up starting a new save and falling back in love with this game’s world and characters. Even back in 2015, this game set the bar for AAA open-world games going forward, proving that you don’t need the enormous staff, budget and constraining input from a publisher that is to be expected of such ‘AAA’ releases (seriously who came up with this name? - Is it from US beef grading? Batteries? Idk). Technically, as CDPR is a publicly traded company without a conglomerate publisher, the Witcher 3 could be considered as just a large funded indie game, (yeah, what indie game doesn’t have a budget of 81 million these days?) but it is every bit the AAA experience without the baggage, and should be what every large-scale developer/publisher worth their salt should strive for.
The level of customisation to your weapons, armour and magic is immense. Side quests often feel like individual games in and of themselves in terms of brilliant characters and tantalising plots. Writers and animators are the real stars and do much of the heavy lifting to bring these storylines to life, with multiple dialogue options that have actual consequences through your actions; something that many similarly marketed games fail to deliver. Bethesda, take notes. This is how you make an open world RPG.
Unlike a certain Cyberpunk game (can't put my finger on it) you’ll struggle to find a machine that CAN’T run this game, with visuals that are some of the greatest you'll ever see from a smaller development team. I nabbed this for $8 on a steam sale one year which feels like I’m robbing the devs blind. You can get it for even cheaper on GOG! (but if you’re reading Steam reviews then you’ll probably just stick to Steam). More to the point, I can’t think of any fantasy action-RPG that has immersed and captivated me as much as the Witcher 3, and I haven't even finished it yet. If you’re still reading this and are one of the two people who haven't played this game, what are you doing with your life? Play it now!
★★★★★★★★★★