The Evil Within: Surprisingly Disappointing

The Evil Within (2014) is one of the most notable survival-horror games of the last decade for the simple fact that it was directed by Shinji Mikami, the man responsible for bringing us the original Resident Evil in 1996 and its beloved sequel Resident Evil 4 in 2005. With the man responsible for popularizing the concept of survival-horror games directing his first survival-horror game in almost a decade, there was a lot of hype surrounding The Evil Within, especially considering its strong similarities to Resident Evil 4. Promising a return to "pure survival-horror" that would become "the new face of horror," The Resident Evil Within certainly looked like the sequel Resident Evil 4 deserved, but ultimately never received.

The similarities are unmistakably present, from the slower-paced survival gameplay that has you exploring environments in search of hidden ammunition and healing supplies to the over-the-shoulder third-person combat system, but The Evil Within spices up that familiar formula by throwing in a stealth system, a more robust system for upgrading your weapons and abilities, and by generally emphasizing horror and tension more than action. It takes a little time for the game to get going and fully open itself up to you, but for a while during the early levels I was prepared to declare The Evil Within a worthy successor to Resident Evil 4 that was actually better in many ways. But as I got further into the game, my awe and optimism turned into detachment and frustration.

The story centers around Krimson City Police Detective Sebastian Castellanos, who's called to investigate a bunch of murders at the Beacon Mental Hospital, where he witnesses a man in a white hooded coat appearing in the blink of an eye and slaughtering policemen with a flick of his wrist. Sebastian gets ambushed and wakes up in a meat locker full of human corpses and has to escape from a hulking chainsaw-wielding maniac. Once free, he meets up with his partners, Joseph Oda and Juli Kidman, who all get in an ambulance with one of the hospital's doctors, Marcelo Jimenez, and his patient, Leslie Withers, as the ground collapses out from underneath them and the city starts crumbling apart. The ambulance goes over a cliff, and Sebastian wakes up separated from everyone else. The rest of the game has Sebastian trying to catch up to and find Leslie, who might be the key to stopping the man in the white hood, who seems to be behind everything.

That's the general premise that gets established during the first chapter, but unfortunately there's not a very compelling story to this game. The game doesn't do a good job of giving you concrete goals to work towards, or reasons why you should care about achieving those goals; throughout the whole game, the only driving force is "find Leslie," but it doesn't explain why that even matters, or what's at stake if you should fail, until near the very end of the game. Meanwhile, Ruvik -- the man in the white hood -- has these supernatural powers to warp you in and out all kinds of crazy nightmare scenarios, which happens basically every single chapter, so the whole game is a random, incoherent mishmash of different environments and situations with no sense of geography, flow, or pacing. As with Leslie, you don't learn how or why any of this is happening until near the end of the game, so I was often left wondering "why am I here, what's going on," and so on.

The first chapter is fairly exciting, but it feels more like a teaser trailer than the start of the actual game, like it was designed primarily to serve as a demo. I love how quickly the game gets into the horror schtick; within minutes of gaining control, you're running from a chainsaw-wielding maniac through comically absurd murder-machines and sliding down a chute into a giant pool of human blood. It's so excessively violent and over-the-top, and it's great. But after that fast start, the game slows way down and then takes forever to introduce its various gameplay mechanics, making you feel like you're in an extended tutorial. The whole first chapter has no health bars, no weapons, no inventory, no skill points, no crafting, no lamp, no nothing. It starts adding gameplay mechancis in during chapter two, one at a time, and it's not until chapter three, roughly two hours into the game, that it starts opening up and actually letting you do things for yourself.

One of the ways in which The Evil Within improves upon the Resident Evil 4 formula is by implementing a stealth system that gives you the choice of conserving ammo by sneaking past enemies or by going for close-range stealth kills. The stealth system is not all that sophisticated -- you simply hold a crouch button and stay out of enemies' line of sight -- but it gets the job done by allowing for creative alternatives to different situations while also adding to the tension. It's really satisfying early on, even if it does feel a little scripted -- it sometimes feels like there's one specific pattern of paths and timings that you have to deduce and follow if you want to stealth through certain levels undetected -- but it's nice having that strategic option available to you.

Stealth is important because it can help you conserve ammunition and avoid taking damage, which are both top priorities in an old-school-feeling survival-horror game like this, where there are sometimes more enemies than you have bullets, and you're only ever a few hits away from a game over screen. The Evil Within places a strong emphasis on the survival side of survival-horror, with a lot of the game's tension deriving from how difficult the game can actually be; it's not just about surviving an encounter or beating a level, it's about doing so as efficiently as you can, because if you make too many mistakes and have to waste too many resources you can leave yourself completely screwed for future encounters.

After years of being coddled by wannabe survival-horror games that basically amount to haunted house jump-scare simulators, I was kind of surprised by how brutally tough The Evil Within actually is, even on the default "normal" difficulty. I remember being super careful sneaking my way through the second chapter, flawlessly dispatching like 10 enemies with stealth kills, avoiding all the explosive trip wires and bear traps that littered the area -- it was a perfect runthrough of that level, but then I got careless at the very end and let two enemies ambush me. They kicked my ass and I nearly died in the span of 10 seconds after spending those 30+ minutes working through the level. I survived, but I had to use both of the healing items I'd found in the level, which set me back to square one and basically meant I had wasted all that effort collecting resources.

Exploration is heavily rewarded in this game, both in terms of ammo and healing items, but also with a substance known as "green gel," which you find in jars lying around hidden areas of the level, and sometimes also harvest from defeated enemies. Green gel is the game's upgrade currency that you spend in the hub area (where you get to save your progress manually) to upgrade Sebastian's skills, like increasing his stamina gauge, increasing how much ammo he can carry, increasing the amount of health that stimpacks heal for, and increasing the stats of Sebastian's various weaponry, among other things. Also scattered throughout levels are locker keys and map fragments, bonus collectibles that unlock greater rewards as you collect more of them. Each locker key will open a locker in the hub which grant you increasing amounts of randomized ammunition and green gel as you unlock more of them, and the map fragments, once all have been found, unlock two unique extra-powerful weapons for New Game Plus mode.

Getting through each of the game's 15 levels therefore involves a pretty satisfying degree of risk-versus-reward. This is a game with tough encounters around nearly every corner, all of which will demand more and more of your resources to survive, but the game gives you the option to avoid a lot of these encounters in favor of taking a safer route, which comes at the expense of missing those hidden collectibles, or missing out on a lot of green gel to make Sebastian stronger. This is a game that puts a shiny object in clear view, but with deadly traps and enemies in the way, and asks you "how badly do you want that item," and "is it worth trying to get to it?" As the type of gamer who likes to face these kinds of challenges and feels compelled to explore everywhere he can, I found it really satisfying how often I was rewarded with extra green gel, or a locker key, or a map fragment, for deciding to take a closer look at an obscure corner of a level.

In terms of horror, The Evil Within is a bit unsettling but never scary or terrifying. There's a ton of gratuitous violence and gore, as evidenced by all the gruesome cinematic death sequences Sebastian can suffer in the game (beware of spoilers in that video link), but that's not really scary. The enemies consist of all kinds of weird, grotesque monsters but most of them just look like generic blobs of flesh to me, not much different from other video game monsters I've encountered before. Sebastian experiences a bunch of weird hallucinations, but none of these affect the gameplay or your condition in any way, so they're mostly just weird visual things happening for inexplicable reasons. It's a tense game, but that's more because of the limited resources, tough difficulty, and heavy emphasis on survival. I love the dark, creepy atmospheres and the gratuitous gore, but I never came close to experiencing any moments of pure terror like I've experienced in other games. Then again, maybe I'm not the best judge of what's scary anymore since I've become so desensitized to it.

Combat is functional, although not as sharp or as satisfying as it is in Resident Evil 4, but that's largely by design, since Mikami wanted The Evil Within to be more of a survival-horror game than an action shooter. As such, Sebastian is not much of a fighter; he can only take 2-3 solid hits before dying, his melee punches are practically useless except in extreme desperation, he can only sprint for a few seconds before running out of breath, and his accuracy with firearms, while not abysmal, is still far from perfect. That would all be fine and good if this were indeed a "pure survival-horror" game like the Steam page claims it to be, but the reality is that The Evil Within is still very much an action game, albeit at a slower pace than Resident Evil 4, considering it seems to forget about stealth almost completely after the first couple of levels while forcing you to kill dozens of enemies at a time to advance in most levels. In essence, it feels like playing Resident Evil 4 but with a less competent protagonist in a somewhat janky, frustrating package.

Sebastian is kind of a burden to control; he moves slowly, he turns slowly, and he aims slowly. Again, that's fine in and of itself, but it gets annoying when enemies juke and dodge faster than you can aim your weapons, and when stuff gets in close and you have basically no way of dealing with anything because all of your weapons are impossible to aim at close range and your melee attacks hardly do anything. There's no quick-turn ability, so when you need to turn and run you're forced to slowly turn Sebastian around and pan the camera around even more slowly so that you can see where you're going, which is often impossible because of the extremely narrow vertical FOV that blocks so much of your view, often leading Sebastian's movement to get stuck on obstacles like fallen chairs that you can't even see.

Interacting with the environment, such as to pick up an item, burn a corpse, or press a button on a control panel, can be finicky too. You need to position Sebastian close enough to and facing the desired object, and then you also have to aim the camera at the object to target it, which can be almost impossible if there's another object closer to the camera because it gets fixated on that one thing in the foreground. Even just positioning Sebastian can be a chore sometimes, with his awkward turning radius and momentum causing you to bump into things in the environment or move out of a safe space into dangerous territory. I struggled just getting him to face a certain way while standing in the right position so I could aim the camera somewhere for a screenshot, and I even struggled to perform melee attacks in the correct direction because he'd insist on curb-stomping a dead corpse in the opposite direction I was facing, or else punch some other random direction I never intended.

It's not just the controls that prove irksome, either; little things with the gameplay pop up all the time that frequently made me feel like I was being unfairly punished because the game just wasn't polished enough. One time I instinctively pressed the action button thinking I could interact with what looked like a button, which then had Sebastian stand up and climb over something and get decapitated. At one point an ally gets kidnapped and is being dragged to a guillotine, and you have limited time to kill the baddies with the sniper rifle before he dies; I missed the first shot and ran out of time, which led to the game taking control away from me so I could watch a cutscene while the ally gets dragged the last 10 feet and dropped into the guillotine while the enemy reaches for the lever, and I'm sitting there literally yelling at the screen "Why can't I shoot them right now?!" Frequently I'd be trying to use a torch or a match on enemies, and then I'd get grabbed by some enemy mere frames before my animation would've finished, thereby canceling my entire attack and, in some cases, leading to my own instant death.

As it turns out, there are a ton of one-hit kills in The Evil Within. I'm fine with a game being challenging and not being afraid to let you die, but I feel like there's a little too much trial-and-error in this game, where you're basically forced to die in a split second for an ignorant mistake, just so you can learn the game's lessons and know what to expect up ahead when you reload the checkpoint. Sometimes, enemies that you've fought before randomly gain one-hit kill abilities, and there's no way of knowing until it gets you. There's one recurring gameplay sequence when Ruvik randomly spawns and stalks you through the levels, and if you let him catch up to you, you die instantly; one time I was running away from him and he teleported right on top of me, before I could even react -- I saw the game over screen fade in before I even got a chance to see him. Most bosses have at least one or two one-hit kills, and most levels have traps lying around that kill you in one hit. Sometimes it feels like the game just decides to screw you over for the sake of stroking its own ego, and there's not usually a lot you can do about it.

As the game goes on, these minor annoyances start to build up, and eventually it got to feel more frustrating than scary, or difficult, or fun. Around halfway through the game you get stuck with an incompetent ally for a few levels whom you can't order around, so you're stuck babysitting them while they insist on standing in a spot where arrows are constantly raining down, or falling off ledges. Towards the end of the game it starts introducing enemies with full suits of bullet-proof body armor and ballistic helmets, armed with assault rifles, and they're just the most tedious, obnoxious enemies to deal with if you don't have the right upgrades. Then the final chapter is a bunch of long, boring, empty hallways that lead to a series of boss chambers where you fight bosses you've already fought before, followed by a highly scripted final boss sequence where you don't get to use any of your weapons or abilities that you spent the entire game developing and earning with green gel.

So while I like the general premise and all the basic components of The Evil Within, I find its execution a little too rough around the edges. I really wanted to like this game, but as I got further and further into it, I just found myself annoyed and increasingly disinterested. In the grand scheme of things, I'd much rather play a survival-horror game like The Evil Within -- flawed but interesting, with actual survival tension -- over a haunted house jump-scare simulator like Outlast, which I think is part of the reason I felt disappointed with The Evil Within, because I had hoped it could be so much more, and it never quite delivered on all of its promises.

Dark Souls 3: Ashes of Ariandel - Review

Ashes of Ariandel is the first of two planned DLCs for Dark Souls III; it adds a new region to the game with a new boss, new enemies, new armor sets, new weapons and spells, and a PVP arena that can be accessed from the Firelink bonfire once you find and beat the second, hidden boss. For $15, it'll get you about four hours of content and at least one new toy for each type of build, which you can put to use in the arenas for 1vs1 duels (un-embered, no estus), free-for-all brawls (timed match with respawn, limited estus, player with most kills wins), or team-brawls (same as free-for-all, except 2vs2 or 3vs3). For the most part, it's all quality content with memorable encounters and fun new weapons, and the PVP arena will really help extend the game's life for those interested in PVP.

Despite its overall quality, Ashes of Ariandel wasn't that satisfying for me. Part of that has to do with its relatively short length; I was able to explore everywhere and do everything possible in a single afternoon, and the whole thing felt anticlimactic. In typical Souls fashion, the story is practically non-existent, with you entering the Painted World of Ariandel on an incredibly vague pretense, and then wandering around aimlessly until you trigger its ending, which leaves everything almost completely unresolved. In the end, this DLC felt more like it was a hidden, optional area that was cut from the base game instead of a proper DLC expansion. It's not a bad experience, mind you, but apart from the PVP arena I feel like I wouldn't have missed much if I'd just skipped it altogether.

The new area in Ashes of Ariandel is a snowy wasteland reminiscent of the Painted World of Ariamis from the first Dark Souls. It begins with an open snowfield that leads to a set of crumbling ruins, and then to a cathedral across a long rope bridge. From there you can descend a ways down the mountain to the rot-infested Corvian settlement, then cross a snowy mountain pass to reach the underside of the cathedral, which loops back up to the cathedral itself. That's about it; there are two other hidden paths to take, one that leads to an NPC invader and another that leads to an optional secondary boss, but both of these terminate in a dead end and don't really contribute anything to the main "story" of the DLC. If you ignore those two side-routes, you can run from the beginning of the DLC through every other area to the final boss, stopping only for one essential fight, in less than 10 minutes.

It'll take you much longer than that if you want to actually explore everywhere to get all the loot, fight all the enemies, and talk to all the NPCs, of course, but it's kind of disappointing to realize that the DLC is essentially just one short path to the boss chamber, and then it's over. The two side-paths are welcome additions, but they're deliberately hidden -- so well that I might not have even found them if not for floor messages left by other players. Even then, they're so short with so little of interest to do along the way (no fun twists in the level design, no unique encounters, extremely few enemies) that they're over almost as soon as you find them. The fact that one of the paths needlessly recycles the giant crabs from the base game, and that the only other boss battle in the DLC consists of a basic NPC enemy and another recycled enemy type (but much bigger), is almost inexcusable.

Except for those two lackluster side-routes and the general linearity towards the main boss chamber, the level design is actually pretty good. There may be only one real route through the DLC, but it's full of side areas and off-shoots to explore with a lot of hidden loot. The initial snowfield, for instance, is a pretty wide-open space with no clear sense of direction, which can make it a bit confusing trying to figure out where to go in addition to keeping track of where you've already been. The Corvian settlement features a lot of vertical levels that have you working from the gutters below the town up to ground level and then onto the roofs, unlocking a lot of shortcuts and one-way doors in the process. The mountain pass has a lot of winding paths with trees and cliff faces obscuring your line of sight, making it feel almost like a maze as you try to work your way to the top while exploring everywhere.

Some moments along the way stand out as fairly unique and memorable. Fighting the giant Viking-like Millwood knights while an archer shoots at you from atop the belltower with great arrows that cause the ground to erupt at the point of impact; the giant wolf that appears at the top of a steep path up the mountain, howling to summon more wolves before leaping down to cut off your path; the final boss and its surprise phases; the first Corvian knight slowly walking towards you as you enter the bowels of the Corvian settlement; walking around the settlement itself, with a bunch of mostly docile slug-like humanoids wailing and trudging around, showing just how badly the painted world is rotting and the effect it's taking on its inhabitants, leaving you to wonder what's really going on in this world.

None of this is really that special, however, and I ultimately found more enjoyment in the random, unscripted interactions with other players. I was invaded as soon as I entered the DLC, and got to experience the thrill of fighting off an invader who was trying to lure me into traps while I explored unfamiliar territory. The giant wolf encounter was kicking my ass, but I stumbled upon a purple summon sign and brought him in to help (hopefully). He did, and we went about our way in jolly co-op for a while, before being invaded by another Red. A Blue got summoned because of the invader, and promptly tried to kill my friendly Purple. After finally convincing him not to kill the Purple, we went on and eventually found (and killed) the Red. Then, while exploring the top of the bell tower, my friendly Purple betrayed me and tried to knock me off, but I'd equipped the Silvercat Ring beforehand, which saved me from the fall, and then I killed him as he jumped down to try to finish me off.

I went into Ashes of Ariandel on my level 120 character in New Game Plus Mode and found it decently challenging. The common wolf enemies move around a lot and are difficult to keep track of without being super annoying like all the other dog-type enemies in the series, and the giant wolf with its lunging and sweeping attacks that cover huge distances and kick up clouds of snow to obstruct your view gave me such a hard time that I panicked and summoned help. The Corvian knights have such quick attacks with unique movesets that they caught me completely off-guard and forced me to heal a few times just to get through a single encounter with a single one of them. Unfortunately, any real difficulty is offset by the typical overabundance of bonfires, with a whopping five of them on the way to the main boss. For being such a short DLC, I feel like they could've done with just two or three to make surviving to the next bonfire part of the challenge.

The final boss is pretty challenging, at least, ranking among the toughest of the entire series. I've found, however, that its difficulty can vary a lot depending on your build and weapon of choice. The final boss does a lot of fast, 360-degree, distance-closing, multi-hit combo attacks that I found nearly impossible to land hits against while using my trusty two-handed zweihander. The boss's attacks are so fast, and the zweihander's (and any ultra great weapon's, for that matter) so slow, that any time I'd try to attack I'd either get interrupted first, or the boss would dodge away before the attack went through, or I'd get punished hard with immediate counter-attacks and have no stamina to roll away because the zwei attacks cost so much stamina. I struggled hard trying to beat the boss using my beloved zwei, but found it almost laughably easy once I switched to a shield and estoc, because it was so much easier to land hits, interrupt the boss, and avoid taking damage.

This DLC thus reinforces a feeling I've had for a while now that From Soft just don't care about heavy weapons like ultra greatswords, great hammers, and great axes. As part of the DLC release, they applied a patch that supposedly adds improved functionality to poise, somehow making it so that, with higher poise values, your attacks with heavier weapons will be less likely to be interrupted, but only during certain frames of their attack animations (called "hyper armor"). A welcome addition that would seemingly make life a bit easier attacking with the big, slow weapons, but the reality is this system only benefits medium weapons like greatswords, maces, and axes, because they get enough poise and hyper-armor to trade hits with lighter weapons, while still being faster than heavier weapons and thus able to interrupt heavier weapons before their hyper-armor frames even activate.

This was readily apparent in the PVP arena, where I noticed an immediate uptick in the number of people using medium weapons, and where I felt constantly disadvantaged trying to get by with my trusty zweihander. My attacks were always so slow that people could easily dodge them or interrupt me, and while I could occasionally catch people by feinting an attack or delaying a followup attack, it only ever worked once because they didn't fall for those tricks a second time. It felt like, generally, I only won against people who got too greedy and made careless mistakes, or against clueless fools who thought they could trade hits with me; against anyone remotely skilled, I stood no chance. Being beaten by someone better than you is to be expected, but I fared much better, even against gold-ranked players, when I switched to katanas and straight swords, which tells me that the heavy weapons are simply out-classed by virtually every other weapon type. Or that I'm just terrible with them, which I find hard to believe considering I've been using them almost exclusively ever since Demon's Souls. 

The PVP arena is another welcome addition to the game, but it isn't quite where it should be in terms of quality or polish. It has several game modes including one-on-one duels, multi-player free-for-all, and team battles, but I find most of its modes a little unsatisfying. Free-for-all brawls are just a chaotic mess of people running around kill-stealing each other, because all that really matters is who lands the last hit, which I feel strips the mode of the depth and nuance the PVP system is renowned for. One-on-one "honor duels" would be nice, except everyone plays with 30% lower un-embered health values, which makes fights often feel a little too short with the victor usually being the first to land two or three combos, and the loser being the first to make a mistake. Two-player brawl is probably my favorite, since everyone gets to play with the extra 30% health and limited healing, with the winner being whomever gets the most kills over the course of five minutes. I like it because fights tend to last longer, and getting to respawn and face the opponent again gives you more of a chance to learn and adapt to what they're doing. 

So many things bother me about team arena. First and foremost is how difficult it is to tell who's on your team -- they could have easily made it "red vs blue" and given everyone the appearance of a red or blue phantom, or put a scoreboard on the HUD with players' names in it. But they didn't. Instead players drop into matches looking exactly like they do based on whatever covenant they're currently set to, and you have to find people and get close enough to them to see whose names are displayed in red, which signifies them as opponents. The only other way to tell who's on your team is by turning the camera away from everyone else so that your allies' health bars show up on the side of the screen, memorizing their names, then hunting people down and remembering what they look like. All of which is much more of a hassle than it should be, just to know who's on your team or not, and makes team arenas a little less enjoyable for me. 

I've also found that there's a tendency for team arenas to become easily stacked in one team's favor. When one team scores a kill, they get a free recharge on their normally one-use estus flask, which means the first team to get a kill not only gets more healing capability to stay in the fight longer, but also benefits from then out-numbering the other team, which can potentially persist for the rest of the fight. For the team that scores the first kill in a 2v2 match, if they both survive they can stick together and go after the other team as they respawn one at a time, because if the other team is dying at staggered intervals they'll be respawning at staggered intervals, often times at opposite ends of the overly large arena, meaning you can be forcibly separated from your teammate for the bulk of the match if you get caught in that loop. This is less of an issue in 3v3 matches, but it can still happen. Nearly every team match I've played ended up with one team steamrolling the other, because once you get knocked down it's really hard to get back up. 

The new DLC weapons have some of the coolest, most unique movesets of the entire game which makes them a lot of fun to use, but there are definite balancing issues that lead some of them to feel significantly stronger than other weapons. The carthus curved sword was already one of the most powerful, over-abused weapons in the base game, and the DLC adds the follower sabre, an identical weapon with an even better weapon art. The onyx blade is a greatsword that deals really high damage and has almost as much reach as an ultra greatsword. Valorheart is a sword and shield twin set that gives you straight sword-style movesets with a shield that automatically blocks hits during your own attack animations. These and other weapons from the DLC are so popular right now, whether that's because of how good they are or simply because they're new and fun, and it just gets tiring fighting against the same handful of weapons all the time. 

So, ultimately, I don't care much for Ashes of Ariandel. The PVE portion of it, with the new region and final boss is decent, but it has pacing issues that made me feel like I was just wandering around until it was over, and it's so short that I actually spent more time writing this review than playing it. The PVP arena is a great addition, but there are some quality of life issues they could (and hopefully will) improve. I'm also not fond of how the arena is locked behind a hidden, optional boss fight in the DLC, because only people who buy the DLC and find the boss will be able to participate in it, which I imagine must be a drastically smaller portion of the overall community. For $15 you're paying for a few hours of entertainment exploring the new area, a bunch of fancy new weapons, and the PVP arena. The arena makes getting into matches a lot quicker and easier and can significantly extend the life of the game for you if you're into PVP, but aside from that it doesn't really feel like you're getting a lot of stuff for your money. 

For a piece of DLC to be a quarter of the cost of the base game, you'd hope that it would give you a quarter of the content and entertainment value of the base game. Ashes of Ariandel doesn't come close to matching that ratio. For some, the new weapons, new challenging boss, and the PVP arena are enough to justify its cost, but unless you're a superfan who's completely enamored with the Dark Souls games and absolutely need more content to satisfy your hunger, you can probably just skip Ashes of Ariandel, at least for now.

The Witcher 3: Blood & Wine - Review

Blood & Wine is the second expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and the last bit of content that will ever be produced in The Witcher series. With no plans for any future games in the series, developer CD Projekt designed Blood & Wine to serve as a final farewell tour for Geralt, sending him on one last adventure in a new land before he puts up his swords and retires from his life as a monster-hunter-for-hire. For that reason alone, Blood & Wine is a special, magical experience that serves as a fine coda for one of the best open-world games -- and one of the best video games in general -- ever created, but there's a lot more to appreciate about Blood & Wine than its sentimental value.

Whereas Hearts of Stone felt like it was, essentially, just a new story set within the confines of TW3, Blood & Wine is a full-fledged expansion fully deserving of its $20 price tag. Blood & Wine offers upwards of 30 hours of extra content with an all-new main story in a brand new region, Toussaint, complete with dozens of new quests, tons of new weapons and armor, new enemies, a new system for improving Geralt's witcher abilities with skill points and mutagens, and a player home that you can upgrade to give you extra benefits as a base of operations. There's enough original content in Blood & Wine that it could have been sold as its own stand-alone game, and the majesty of its presentation is simply breath-taking.

Unfortunately, nothing in Blood & Wine is much of a game-changer, with the exception of the new mutations and possibly the player home -- otherwise, it's all basically just more of the same from a game that was already a little too long and bloated to begin with, and at least in my opinion, nothing in Blood & Wine really outshines anything that's been done previously in either the base game or Hearts of Stone. That's not much of a criticism, mind you; CD Projekt set the bar so high with its previous efforts that coming up a little short still puts Blood & Wine well beyond other game experiences from other developers. But if you're someone like me who's feeling a little burned out from playing the same game for so long, then Blood & Wine will only give you so much of a spark before it settles back into routine.

The first thing most people will probably fall in love with is Toussaint itself, with its bright, colorful fairy-tale vistas offering a stark contrast to the often-times decrepit, dark-fantasy atmosphere of the base game. There's no denying its beauty, and I particularly enjoy how its rolling hills and mountains let you see major landmarks all across the terrain. There's something immensely satisfying about being able to see something cool seemingly miles in the distance, and then being able to work your way towards it and see it up close, which was mostly missing from the base game because everything was so flat, with trees usually blocking your line of sight. Exploration, in that sense, is pretty engaging because the world feels much more condensed, with a lot more visibly intriguing things beckoning you towards them.

Pacing becomes an issue with a map this size, however, as Toussaint inherits some of the same problems I criticized in the base game. It can get a little tedious trying to do a quest that sends you way off into uncharted territory when four other quests and points of interest pop up along the way that pull you away from what you were originally doing. It's also pretty annoying when you're exploring just for the fun of it and find some place cool and interesting, only to discover that you can't actually do anything there because it's part of a quest you don't have. That sort of thing is fine every now and then, but it feels like a lot of stuff in Blood & Wine is locked behind quest progression, with locked doors mysteriously opening and unusable items suddenly becoming usable only when a quest calls for it.

A lot of quests, meanwhile, are fairly boring and straightforward. There are over 60 side-quests in Blood & Wine, and over half of them are single-step "go here, kill this, report back" quests. A bunch are about killing monsters to clear cellars and vineyards for vintners, with three of the major ones giving you five objectives, each, that involve going to five different locations to kill things. Another five quests are about helping stone-workers build a giant statue of Lebioda, which you do by going to five places and killing things; another quest involves helping 15 knight errants by going to 15 different places and killing things. Fifteen quests are treasure hunts which basically amount to "go here, loot this chest." A few other quests are so short that they're completed mere seconds after you pick them up.

Nearly every one of these trivial quests has some kind of story behind it, but almost all of them happen through diaries and letters that you find lying around at the scene, which I find kind of lazy and uninteresting. For starters, I find it hard to believe that every single person in this world keeps a diary on them at all times, and that everyone keeps it up to date until the moment before they die. An occasional diary entry here and there is fine, but it often feels excessive in Blood & Wine; it gets a little tiring only ever reading about all these interesting events, and not actually getting to see or experience them, especially when you realize they typically have zero effect on the gameplay. After a while of finding random notes on random corpses in random places, I stopped caring and stopped reading them.

Not all the quests are boring monster-slaying, mind you. One quest involves a young maiden who was cursed by Gaunter O'Dimm decades ago, having been turned into a hideous wight with insatiable hunger; you're given the option to lift the curse, which you do by sitting down to eat with the wight, and you have to make some choices which lead to either success or failure. Another quest sends you into a literal fairy-tale world where you get to play a role in various fairy-tales and see the twisted outcomes of some fairy-tales whose characters have gotten sick of being a part of them. Other quests are equally interesting with original premises, but besides their originality they're mostly on par with other quests in the base game, and none of them come close to matching the main story of Hearts of Stone.

I realized after writing the above paragraph that both of my examples of good, memorable quests were from the main questline, and that there really weren't many good, memorable side-quests. There's one quest to reopen an old bank account which turns out to be a wild goose chase hunting down the right paperwork, and closely mirrors the frustration of dealing with bureaucracies in real life; another quest to retrieve a set of magical stamina-boosting testicles that were stolen from a stone sculpture; a quest to test your alignment with the five chivalric virtues, which is determined by what choices you make in the other side-quests; and a couple more quests about lifting curses from young maidens, one of whom was turned into a tree and another of whom has been slowly turning into a bird. These are the only ones I distinctly remember; everything else was, apparently, forgettable.

The main story of Blood & Wine, meanwhile, never really interested me, apart from a few individual moments within it. You're brought to Toussaint by the request of its duchess to kill a mysterious beast believed to be responsible for several grisly deaths. You quickly learn that the beast is really a higher vampire acting under the influence of another party, and then you spend the next large chunk of the main quest trying to figure out who's really behind the attacks. Once you figure that out, the final third of the story involves finding that person and putting a stop to the murders, with a branching path at the very end about how to accomplish that. It's longer than the main story of Hearts of Stone, but I never felt as closely connected to any of its major characters, certain parts of it felt almost like busy-work filler-content, and the plot ultimately boils down to a petty squabble between two people, which isn't that exciting and felt kind of underwhelming as it progressed.

There are several new ways to improve your character, with enough content to increase your level from the mid-30s to over level 50. The main feature is the new mutation system that gives you extra abilities to spend your extra skill points on. These mutations are pretty powerful and enable cool effects, like making Aard freeze enemies and, possibly, shatter them at the same time, in addition to unlocking extra slots to fill with basic abilities from the original skill trees. Unfortunately, I ended up not gaining much from the mutation system because of the steep costs to move up the mutation skill trees, with them initially costing two skill points and then increasing to three, five, and seven skill points, each, and requiring you to connect multiple paths to reach stronger mutations. You can only have one mutation active at a time, and so I spent almost the entirety of Blood & Wine with one simple tier-two mutation while I fruitlessly saved up skill points to invest in a tier-four mutation that I never reached before finishing the expansion.

The other major addition in Blood & Wine is a private estate given to you near the beginning, which you can spend money to renovate and thereby unlock extra bonuses. You can outfit it with a laboratory that grants you extra potions and bombs, a garden that will continually produce herbs, a stable to increase Roach's stamina, a better bed to increase your vitality, a library for your books that also grants extra experience from combat, grindstones and armor tables on site to improve your weapons and armor, as well as armor and weapon stands for displaying fancy gear you've acquired, and spaces to hang paintings. It also has a storage chest. Most of the stat boosts trigger as resting bonuses when you sleep in your bed and last for 60-120 minutes of real time. It was pretty fun to see the estate evolve as you put money into it, and the practical benefits were certainly worth it, but I do wish there was more to do with it; it caught me by surprise how quickly I was able to max it out, which left me with an empty feeling of "that's it?" despite the great benefits.

Still, it serves a point as the backdrop for Geralt's retirement, a place for him to settle down with whomever you romanced in the base game. And that's ultimately the point of Blood & Wine; to bring about a satisfying conclusion to Geralt's adventures over the last three games. In that sense, Blood & Wine is a triumphant success with a lot of feel-good moments and a picturesque ending. For that reason alone, Blood & Wine is absolutely worth playing, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. The base game already felt too big and bloated, and this expansion follows that design philosophy of churning out more quantity (which was already abundantly present in the base game) instead of focusing more on quality like Hearts of Stone did. Nothing in Blood & Wine is actually bad, except maybe the simple, repetitive side-quests, but very little of it's actually better than what we've already seen and done in Wild Hunt or Hearts of Stone. A few good moments and mechanics shine through, but otherwise, the majority of this expansion is somewhat "meh" to me.

That apathetic feeling towards Blood & Wine may simply be the result of me feeling the fatigue of playing one game for five months straight. When you spend 200 hours playing the same game, it all starts to feel kind of samey. This expansion brought about a cool "wow factor" for the first several hours as I simply took in the beautiful sights of Toussaint and once again got hooked searching for better equipment and planning how to invest skill points in a new skill tree, and upgrading the new player home. Once I got past all of the shiny new sparkle, however, it started to feel like the same old Witcher 3 again. So I guess if you played through all of Wild Hunt and Hearts of Stone and are still craving more content, or if you had to take time off from your playthrough to wait for the new expansions to release, then you'll probably enjoy Blood & Wine more than I did. But if playing The Witcher 3 has started to feel tiring to you, then Blood & Wine isn't going to fix that. It's still worth playing just to see how the series ends, but don't go in expecting a game-changing experience. 

The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone - Review

Hearts of Stone -- the first DLC pack for The Witcher 3 -- adds about 15-20 hours of new content to the game, extending the northeastern region of the map, near Oxenfurt, with new points of interest, side-quests, and treasure hunts, in addition to other expansion essentials like all-new enemies, new equipment sets, a new system for crafting and buying unique runes and glyphs, and a main storyline that goes toe-to-toe with and even exceeds the best quests in the base game. Hearts of Stone is, at its heart, a fairly typical DLC expansion that simply takes the familiar formula of the base game and adds more content to it, but it improves upon the experience by directly addressing some of the core issues of the base game, such as combat, economy, and pacing. The mechanical improvements are reason enough to give Hearts of Stone a solid recommendation, but the main quest-line and all of its great characters, stories, and gameplay sequences push it well above the base game and make it one of the best $10 DLC packs I've ever played.

In my review of the base game, I criticized the combat system for feeling shallow and boring because it mostly amounted to repetitive, simplistic button-mashing from beginning to end, against enemies that behaved more or less alike. Hearts of Stone fixes that issue by introducing several new types of enemies with unique AI and attack patterns, all of which require different tactics to take down as well as more attention to things like positioning and timing. Wild boars run circles around you and try to trample you from odd angles, and their lunging double-attacks are designed to catch you in the middle of a dodge if you don't time it right, or don't dodge in the right direction, while their "drive-by" tactics leave you very small windows of time in which to attack them. Arachnomorphs use group tactics, scattering in all directions to avoid AOE attacks and to keep you surrounded, only rushing in to attack when they trap you in their webs or when you engage one of them. Ofieri warriors block, dodge, and counter attacks better than any human enemies from the base game, meaning you can't just spam attacks on them -- you have to bait them into attacking and find an opening in their attack patterns.

Boss battles have been similarly overhauled so that each one is more challenging and requires its own special strategy, while also incorporating the environment into their fights for added uniqueness. The first boss can rain cluster bombs on you that leave lingering toxic clouds on the ground, poisoning you if you move through them, and his really fast beam-style ranged attack will force you to keep moving and dodging through the poison clouds. If you get in close, he'll do a variety of close-ranged attacks, one of which is an AOE ground pound. Most of his attacks also cause stagger and knock-down. Another boss uses a melee weapon with a lot of unblockable melee attacks and ranged AOE magic attacks, and heals himself 10% of his health bar every time he hits you. At certain points he spawns a bunch of mostly harmless enemies so that he can quickly heal back up to full health by killing them, unless you can kill them first. This fight can be literally impossible if you're not smart and careful. In each case, the fight is about positioning yourself to avoid attacks, navigating the battlefield, and figuring out when to attack and when not to attack, and they feel way more satisfying than anything in the base game.

Quests also tend to involve a little bit more player input than what was present in the base game. At one point you pick up a missing person quest and use your witcher senses to follow the trail to a pair of suspects. They act a little suspicious, but you find no incriminating evidence; normally at that point a quest entry would pop up telling you to keep searching the area, but Hearts of Stone doesn't do that. It expects you to figure out for yourself that their story doesn't quite add up and keep snooping around, else you return to the quest-giver and "complete" the quest without ever finding the missing person. In another quest you have to recreate images by placing the correct missing pieces in the correct locations; you have to look at the scene and use your own judgment to fill in the blanks of what should be where. Although it's technically possible to just use process elimination and try every option until you get the right one, it's satisfying to use your own brain and come up with the correct solution on the first try. Later on you have to solve a riddle by exploring a small map; there are no quest markers or witcher sense trail telling you exactly where to go, and it's entirely possible to fail and have to start over.

Another thing I criticized about the base game is that, after a while, you simply ran out of things to spend money on, thereby making money (often treated as a reward) effectively worthless. Hearts of Stone fixes that by giving you an outlet to spend your thousands of coins, in the form of the Ofieri Runewright. By donating 5,000 coins to the Runewright, he can create special runes and glyphs not found in the base game, like weapon runes that extend the range of whirl and rend, or make killing blows regenerate stamina, or armor glyphs that deflect arrows, or cast a free quen sign at the start of every combat. You unlock better runes and glyphs by donating another 10k, and later 15k, for a total of 30k. While it's nice to finally have this avenue to spend your hard-earned dosh, the costs and benefits don't necessarily feel worth it, considering that each of these special runes and glyphs takes up all three slots on your equipment. Is it worth, for instance, giving up +15% damage to be able to spend three adrenaline to regenerate vitality and stamina, or giving up +30% igni intensity to make it cast in 360-degrees and not cause burning?

These upgrades tend to feel less like actual upgrades, and more like gimmicky side-grades. Only a few of them could actually be considered "better" than the standard runes and glyphs, but it is nice that you can now obtain regular armor glyphs that do stuff other than increase your sign intensity, since my combat/alchemy build gained little benefit from the base game glyphs, since I used signs so little. There are some new weapons and armor sets to be found, as well, but these too are something of a mixed bag, usually providing some balanced benefit and trade-off which may or not be of any use to you depending on your build. The New Moon armor might be tempting for a pure melee fighter, and the Ornate Robes might be good for an igni-spammer, but I ultimately preferred the more balanced stats of my mastercrafted Wolven set. You get enough experience from the extra quests to level-up beyond the restrictions of the base game, but since you don't gain extra skill slots along the way, it doesn't do you much good. It's kind of disappointing, therefore, that you can play the entire 20-hour expansion and experience no progression whatsoever.

The other major issue I had with the base game, which the expansion addresses, is that the pacing of both the main story and various side-quests suffered by virtue of the world being so big, with so much to do, that you often got pulled away from what you were doing to go focus on something else. Hearts of Stone takes place on a much smaller scale, dealing with only a handful of characters in a few locations in and around Oxenfurt. There's enough new terrain with new things to explore and side-quests to complete to give you that basic satisfaction of playing an open-world game, with the freedom to go where you want and do what you want, but Hearts of Stone is much more tightly-focused around its main quest-line so that the side content complements it, rather than distracts from it. And the main story, meanwhile, doesn't bog itself down by making you trek to every corner of the world and fulfill a thousand favors for a thousand different people before finally getting over the first hurdle; it cuts right to the chase and builds steadily over its 10 hour play time towards a satisfying conclusion with an interesting hook, strong character development, and an intriguing mystery.

Hearts of Stone begins by picking up a witcher contract from a notice board to kill a monster that's been lurking in the Oxenfurt sewers, which it turns out is actually a bit of red herring (a supremely interesting one, with an amusing twist) for the main story. The actual story centers around a man named Olgierd von Everec, leader of a group of bandit mercenaries all descended from Redanian nobility, who made a deal with the devil to reclaim his family's fortune, win back the love of his life, and live like there's no tomorrow. Per the deal, the devil would only get Olgierd's soul after three more of Olgierd's wishes are fulfilled by a third-party, and when they both stand willingly on the moon. The devil interprets "live like there's no tomorrow" to mean immortality and gives Olgierd a heart of stone, which makes him immortal and, as a side-effect, slowly saps him of his passion and emotion. After the devil intervenes to save your life, following the conclusion of the monster contract in the sewer, he sends you to repay your debt by fulfilling Olgierd's remaining three wishes, which is how you spend the bulk of your time in the main story.

The somewhat generic but spoiler-free review of the main story is that Hearts of Stone has good tension, an effective villain, interesting characters, engaging pacing, and quests that are tonally distinct from what's on offer in the base game. I'll get into the specific details below, so for those of you who want to avoid spoilers, here's my conclusion: Hearts of Stone doesn't really feel like an expansion, but more like a continuation of the base game; it's basically more of the same, but with better quality, and an interesting new story arc set within the confines of the original game. There's nothing all that grand, epic, or exciting about it -- no new continents to explore, no new skill slots or upgrades for high-level characters, no fancy player house -- but it's just such a solid, well-rounded experience that I feel is among the best that The Witcher 3 has to offer. As a $10 DLC pack with 15-20 hours of content and its own self-contained story-arc, Hearts of Stone is a better game experience and a better overall value than a lot of $60 AAA games, so much so that it's almost worth it to spend $50 on the Game of the Year edition of The Witcher 3 for the sole purpose of playing Hearts of Stone, which I should mention can be played as part of the main game or as a separate adventure accessed from the main menu.

From here on out, I'll be getting into heavy spoiler territory in regards to some of the characters, the main story, and the main quests, so you should only continue reading beyond this point if you've already played Hearts of Stone, or if you just don't care about spoilers. You've been warned.

Let's start with Gaunter O'Dimm. He serves as kind of a villain for the DLC, the central agent who drives the conflict and narrative forward, but he doesn't function like a typical video game villain or antagonist. The central plot doesn't revolve around stopping him, and although you can choose to "fight" him at the end, doing so is completely optional. He's more of a third-party, and you're simply wrapped up in his mysterious, possibly nefarious machinations. And yet he works so much better as a villain than the Wild Hunt ever did in the base game because he has a much more meaningful and intimidating presence. Whereas the Wild Hunt was this theoretical threat that you almost never got to see or interact with, Gaunter O'Dimm shows up frequently throughout the main story and teases you with hints of how powerful he really is and how dangerous it would be to cross him. The game doesn't explicitly tell you who he is or that you should be afraid of him, however -- it implies everything through subtle hints that internalize the threat in your mind, slowly building him up over the course of the game and leaving him an intriguing mystery as you try to figure out just who he is and what his motives are.

It begins with staging and camera angles; most of the time, shots are framed so that he's above you with the camera looking up at him, which ominously implies dominance and power. His powers appear in limited fashion to begin with, simply appearing and disappearing at will and summoning a great storm to wreck the ship on which you're being held prisoner (and thus saving you from execution), but subtle lines of dialogue made by other characters after he exits a scene cue you into his identity ("they heave like devils," "what the devil?"). While wandering about, you sometimes encounter groups of children happily singing a nursery rhyme whose lyrics seem to mirror that of O'Dimm offering deals and granting people their wishes, with the final stanza sinisterly suggesting, after he's come to collect his dues, that "he'll snare you in bonds, eyes glowin' a'fire, to gore and torment you till the stars expire." After saving your life, he arranges for you to meet him at a crossroads at midnight, where you enter into agreement to repay your debt.

Gaunter O'Dimm is essentially this world's version of the devil, and the central plot is about dealing with the devil and being careful what you wish for. It's a completely familiar tale, but its execution in Hearts of Stone is fresh and interesting, largely because of the acting and portrayal of O'Dimm and Olgierd, but also because the three main quests offer unique experiences tonally distinct from the likes of what you encounter in the base game, or other games in general, in some cases. In your efforts to fulfill Olgierd's three wishes, you end up going on a heist mission to rob a locked and booby-trapped vault of its contents, attending a wedding reception while possessed by the ghost of a debaucherous hooligan, and reliving the memories of a deceased woman by entering a world held within her paintings. Besides that, you also get to do battle with a giant fairy-tale toad prince, romance Shani (who's back from The Witcher 1), and go to hell to wage wits with the devil himself.

I particularly enjoyed getting to see Shani again, considering my fondness and appreciation for The Witcher 1, and she played a pretty big role in that game, both as a romance option and in the main story with Alvin. I don't think they handled her very well in Hearts of Stone, however. For anyone who's not played the first game or read the books, I can see her romance feeling incredibly rushed and/or a little awkward, because so much of it is based on a past relationship you may have never actually seen or been a part of. If you don't already feel that connection with her when you first meet her in the DLC, then she's a stranger you're basically forced to romance, because all the dialogue options imply feelings Geralt has (or had) for her, even if you try to say otherwise, with no clear or direct way to say that you're just not interested, or that you're already committed to someone else if you romanced Yen or Triss and want to stay faithful to them. Meanwhile, if you're a big fan of Shani and were looking forward to romancing her (again), then you may find yourself disappointed that the game treats her romance as nothing more than a one-night fling, no matter what.

The wedding reception, where you spend the bulk of your time with Shani, is great because we get to see Geralt break out from his usual stoicism to enjoy life as a party animal, albeit as the physical embodiment of a ghost possessing him. Vlodimir, the ghost, is a delight to control; his revelry and whimsical attitude serve as an amusing foil for Geralt, particularly whenever he steps out of Geralt's body to engage in one-on-one conversation. Much like attending the masquerade ball with Triss, the wedding gives you a chance to do something other than be a rough n' tough witcher killing monsters and solving other people's problems, except this time, it gives you things to do besides just walking around listening to people. You can drink with assorted people, play gwent, wrangle pigs, (attempt to) seduce wedding guests, get in a drunken brawl, dance to live music, find the missing fire-breather and lost dog, and go diving for Shani's boot. None of the actual gameplay involved in any of this is all that sophisticated, but it's just such a pleasant change of pace, and it's the most fun I've ever had being at a wedding in a video game.

The heist, unfortunately, isn't as much fun. It plays out like a typical heist movie: assembling a crew, making a plan, setting up the preparations, and improvising when things go wrong. But much like the battle of Kaer Morhen in the base game, once you actually get into it, the whole thing is so heavily scripted with cutscenes and isolated scenarios centered around highly specific objectives, that I didn't feel like I was actually taking part in the heist; I was merely along for the ride, there to pick dialogue options and fight a handful of guards. You'd think, for instance, that there would be tense and exciting gameplay in planning a route through the city to dodge guard patrols and finding a way to break into the manor, using your witcher senses to detect guards and traps, but this entire infiltration process happens entirely in a cutscene. The hostage negotiation scene is fairly tense, I guess, with you having to pick the right dialogue options under a time limit to keep the guards at bay, and there's a pretty big decision at the end about whether to turn against your employer, but I didn't really want to be there in the first place so the major decisions at the end felt mostly inconsequential to me.

Another bit of criticism I can lay against Hearts of Stone is that it deliberately makes both you and Geralt reluctant participants in the story. O'Dimm's a mysterious, all-powerful dude with some kind of hidden agenda whom I just didn't trust, and yet I had no choice but to agree to his terms; Geralt even says as much. Olgierd's another sketchy dude with a troubled history (and the blessing of immortality to boot) with whom I just didn't want to get involved, especially when one of his first quests involves major criminal activity. As a result, it took me a little while to become interested in the story, to reach that point when I wanted to push forward in the main quest-line to see what would happen next. Even before getting to the stuff with O'Dimm and Olgierd, the DLC begins like any typical monster contract, with no apparent reason to care about the quest-giver, Olgierd, and the prospect of exploring yet another video game sewer didn't really excite me. It wasn't until I was over halfway through the main quest-line, doing Olgierd's third and final quest, that I really started to care about what was going on.

Make no mistake, though -- that's not to say the first half of the DLC is bad or uninteresting. The quests themselves are engaging (except for the heist which I just generally don't care much for) and the characters are particularly riveting, but the early goings merely set down the edges of a puzzle that you're slowly building over the course of the main story -- you get hints of what's going on here and there, but you don't have enough pieces of the puzzle until the second half, and so the picture doesn't really start to reveal itself until you get into Olgierd's third and final quest.

Whereas Olgierd's first two quests have the distinct tones of romantic-comedy and crime-thriller, his third quest is that of surreal-horror as you investigate a haunted mansion. Your goal, there, is to retrieve a memento he left his wife when they separated years ago. You patrol the grounds encountering ghosts and battling demonic beings that Olgierd created to maintain the mansion, and eventually discover that his wife, Iris, died of heartbreak a long time ago. Through some strange magic, you end up going into her paintings where her soul has basically been trapped, recreating scenes from her memories and battling ghostly monsters that continue to haunt her after death. You learn about her history with Olgierd, how his deal with O'Dimm (unbeknownst to her) steadily changed him and ruined their lives as his passion slowly left him. It's a touching, tragic sequence filled with utterly unique visuals and some of the best boss fights from the entire game, and had me completely engrossed from beginning to end.

Having fulfilled all of Olgierd's wishes -- three things meant to be impossible, so that he'd never have to complete his contract with O'Dimm -- the final step is to get the two to meet on the moon, which you accomplish by meeting at a temple with the crescent moon carved into its floor. O'Dimm comes to collect Olgierd's soul, who realizes he's been tricked and out-witted by the devil; at that point, you have the option to intervene and try to save Olgierd by besting O'Dimm in a game of riddles, or stay out of it and consider your debt to O'Dimm repaid. And let me tell you, that was probably the toughest timed decision I had to make in 154 hours of playing TW3. On the one hand, I'd grown to sympathize with Olgierd, who'd been manipulated by the devil and tricked into something he didn't want, and what I'd learned about O'Dimm (basically, that he's pure evil) made me feel like I should stop this evil from happening. On the other hand, perhaps Olgierd got what he deserved, and should've known what to expect when dealing with the devil, and perhaps I shouldn't risk my soul trying to save someone I just met from eternal damnation. In the end, I resigned myself to do nothing, reasoning to myself that it was best not to make an enemy of possibly the most powerful being in existence, and turned down all offers of reward, wanting to ensure I had no more possible ties to O'Dimm.

He thanked me and walked off-screen, whistling and playfully tossing Olgierd's skull in the air as the screen cut to black to roll the credits.

It was anticlimactic to be sure, but poignant nonetheless. And strangely satisfying. It felt right to me, appropriate. That ending resonated for me like few other games ever have. After decades of playing video games of this sort that come down to defeating a Final Boss, it was so refreshing to be able to say "you know what, I'm not gonna fight this guy" and have an ending that still makes sense and feels complete, with the story properly concluded. But after a little while, curiosity got the better of me and I started to wonder what would have happened if I'd intervened.

If you confront O'Dimm, you're treated to a rather unique "boss fight" in which you're whisked away to a hellish landscape and challenged to solve a riddle. CD Projekt could have gone the old-fashioned route and have the riddle play out entirely through dialogue, with you picking answers from a list of options, but they did something original by making you solve it through actual gameplay. The scenario gives you a limited amount of time to find the solution in the environment, which involves running around examining things, fighting off demonic apparitions, and trying not to get tricked by distractions (like a vision of Shani dangling off the edge of a cliff yelling for help). Eventually you discover a mirror at the end of a long hallway, and O'Dimm collapses the floor underneath you, leading you down a false trail trying to chase down mirrors before he shatters them. In the end, you have to realize it's not the mirror itself, but the reflection, and so you have to find a way to create a reflection in the environment that O'Dimm can't destroy, which is cleverly foreshadowed by two demons in the painted world who tell you to "seek salvation in glass that can't be broken." There's no dumb waypoint marker or witcher sense trail telling you where to go or what to do; you have to figure things out for yourself.

This ending felt just as satisfying as the other one; the "boss battle" was fun and exciting, and I loved that it served as a final boss that didn't involve me defeating the devil by hitting him enough times with my sword.

As I wrote in my earlier spoiler-free conclusion, it's all this novelty in the story, the presentation of the characters, the unique quest mechanics, and the imaginative scenarios you find yourself in that made Hearts of Stone feel so special to me. The fact that it's also better mechanically, addressing and fixing several key issues I had with the base game, is just the icing on the cake. If you already own The Witcher 3, then Hearts of Stone is a must-buy; if you don't already own TW3, then it's almost worth it to buy a copy just to play Hearts of Stone as its own stand-alone game, with the added value of a 100+ hour base game thrown in for good measure.

The Witcher 3: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I've had nothing but tremendous respect for Polish developer CD Projekt RED ever since I played their 2007 debut, The Witcher. That game quickly vaulted its way into my short list of all-time favorite RPGs. Their 2011 followup, The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings, was really solid as well, and I especially admired how the middle portion of the game branched in completely separate directions depending on your choices. What they and their parent company have been doing with GOG.com, meanwhile -- picking up licenses for older games, updating them to work on modern platforms, and selling them completely DRM-free at reasonable prices -- combined with their continued support for TW1 and TW2 -- putting a ton of effort into the Enhanced Edition of both games and releasing the updates completely free -- has made them a shining example of a game company doing good within the industry and treating their customers right.

The 2013 and 2014 E3 previews for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt generated a ton of hype, leading some publications to declare it their most anticipated game of 2015. Understandably so -- how could you not be excited over the prospect of CD Projekt's masterful storytelling and quest design applied to a vast open world? I was skeptical when it was first announced that the game would be open-world, but I held out hope that CD Projekt could pull it off, given their track record of success and how much they seem to understand game design. The Witcher 3 was subsequently released in May of 2015 to universal acclaim, and shattered records for the most "Game of the Year" awards ever bestowed upon one game. I figured, at that point, that CD Projekt had defied my expectations and managed to craft a huge open-world RPG that captured all the best elements of open-world games while still retaining the unique soul and elements that made The Witcher series so great in the previous two installments. And then I actually played it.

It turns out that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is not the perfect masterpiece everyone claims it to be. It's really, really good, mind you, and I'd say it's easily one of the best open-world RPGs ever created. But that praise and distinction doesn't shield it from criticism, and the fact remains that there are a lot of critical areas in which TW3 comes up short, outright disappoints, or else simply isn't as good as it could've been. There's a lot of stuff to talk about with a game this size, so I won't even try to craft this review into a paragraph-by-paragraph flowing essay; instead, I'll break it down into specific topics and categorize them based on three of Clint Eastwood's timeless criteria: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

DISCLAIMER

Before jumping into the full review text I want to point out that you may discover a few contradictions; I might say one thing and then later state the opposite, because some issues are a double-edged sword, with two sides to every coin, both positive and negative, and other similar idiomatic expressions, and I wanted to make sure I was covering every valid angle when I could or found it appropriate to do so. I also make a lot of generalizations because this is a long game and I can't always remember every little detail about it, even though I take a lot of notes on specific things that I notice as I'm playing. These statements are not absolutes; they're generalizations because they tend to apply a significant amount of the time, and there are exceptions to every claim. If you haven't already played the game, let it be known now that this article contains some minor spoilers, but I tried not to spoil any of the major moments. Either way, you should probably not click on any hyperlinks unless you've already played the game or don't care about potential spoilers.

THE GOOD: The audiovisual aesthetics are outstanding

The Witcher 3 has some of the best graphics I've ever seen in a video game. Mind you, I don't have a blistering rig that can run everything at UltraMaxx4KHD™, and I don't play a lot of modern, cutting-edge games. I'm also not someone who cares much about graphics; I rarely write about graphics in my reviews because I'm ultimately much more interested in how a game feels to play than how it is to look at, but in the interest of giving credit where credit is due, I must stress how good TW3 really is in this department. It looks friggin' amazing.

Draw distances can be an issue in open-world games, with things in the horizon rendered at such low detail that they look like blurry smudges, and things fading in and out of existence as you move towards or away from them. When a game is rendering a ton of things over a long distance, it has to cut corners somewhere for the sake of performance; TW3 implements these typical performance-saving measures, but it's in such a subtly smooth and effective way that I rarely ever noticed it. If I stopped for a moment and really focused on a building in the distance, I could guess that it wasn't being rendered in full detail, but everything looks so good, even in low detail, that I never gave it any notice. Shadows and vegetation extend far enough that I almost never saw the cut-off point, where the game stops rendering them, unless I was at a really high altitude looking down on everything. Even then, the transition between "grass" and "no grass" was smooth enough that it never stood out to me, and never pulled me out of the experience.

The amount of stuff that's crammed into every frame, everywhere you look, is simply astounding. Never before have I seen so much vegetation and underbrush in a video game; it's so thick in some areas you can't even see the ground beneath it. When you walk into Novigrad, the big city in the North, you find so many NPCs bustling around market squares, shipping docks, and other major hubs of activity that you can't even walk down the street without bumping into someone. I was blown away when I zoomed in on Geralt's shoulder and could vividly see every individual link in his chainmail armor. Nvidia's HairWorks adds tens of thousands of tessellated strands to characters' hair, allowing each strand to react to movement independently of one another, but even with it turned off (HairWorks is a big resource hog), hair still looks really good thanks to the multiple layered meshes that still flow and react to movement.

Dialogue scenes are really engaging in TW3 because they have such a strong cinematic style to them, not just in terms of camera angles and the like, but also in terms of "acting" and directing -- in other words, all the deliberate decisions someone had to make in terms of how a character should be acting during a scene, and crafting their animations to capture that feeling and framing the camera in an interesting way that also highlights different elements of a scene. I usually hate it when games strive to be like movies, because it tends to ruin the gameplay when an invisible game director yanks the camera and controls away from you to show you something exactly as he envisioned it, instead of letting you just be in the game and experience things for yourself. But it really works in TW3 because it's such a heavily story-driven game, and it helps to make the characters and the story itself more interesting. And ultimately, the dialogue and cutscenes make up only a small percentage of how you spend your time in the game, so they feel more like pleasant additions to the game, instead of an obnoxious detraction.

The dialogue sequences also showcase all of the great facial expressions and animations. When you think about it, the difference between emotions and how they appear on one's face can be incredibly subtle, and I'd imagine it's one of the most difficult things to do when it comes to graphic design in video games. And CD Projekt pulls it off really well, conveying several dynamic emotional ranges for a single character within just one scene. Just take a look at this conversation between Geralt and Yennefer; in just a few seconds she goes from exasperation to concern, which then becomes almost pleading optimism. She then becomes pointed when discussing what must be done, and when she mentions there being one more thing, she gives a look of annoyance before addressing it. Finally, there's that look in her eyes right at the two-minute mark, when she realizes that Geralt interpreted her instructions for how to use the detector with sexual innuendo.

The music is top of the line as well. The soundtrack uses a lot of traditional folk instruments to capture the sort of folklore-fantasy atmosphere in which The Witcher is set, and in fact, a lot of the music was actually composed and performed by a real Polish folk band that took its name (Percival) and inspiration from The Witcher novels by Andrzej Sapkowski. They actually performed an entire concert of mostly music from TW3. This song of theirs, Silver for Monsters, is used as combat music, and it has this really awesome, raw tone that just gets me so pumped, with that primal scream and the vocal chanting over top of the droning tones, pounding drums, and accented string rhythms. Other songs, like The Fields of Ard Skellig by CD Projekt's own composer, Marcin Przybyłowicz, are just so beautiful and tranquil that, when I washed up on the shores of Skellige, I stopped everything and just slowly trotted around on horseback in awe of the sights and sounds.

THE GOOD: All characters have personality and motivation

Every, single, character in TW3 is fully voiced. That itself is not unusual in this day and age (it's practically expected from any major studio), but the scale to which it applies in TW3 is almost beyond comprehension. According to information gathered by IGN, the script for TW3 had over 450,000 words of dialogue (supposedly four novels' worth of text), with 950 speaking roles. It took 2.5 years just to record all the dialogue. Even that, though, really isn't all that impressive; it just took a lot of time and resources. What's impressive is that every single character, from Geralt's most important and closest companions down to the most insignificant of random people asking for help by the side of the road, has some kind of personality and motivation that shows based on how they talk, and how they behave in dialogue.

When you have a world made up of thousands of people, with 950 people you can actually talk to, it's really easy for the writing to devolve into terse exchanges that simply check the boxes of what needs to be accomplished in the conversation, and it can start to feel bland and repetitive after a while. But the writing and voice acting in TW3 brings every character to life in such a believable and engaging way; even if a character is someone you'll only ever talk to once, for just a few minutes, they feel genuine because someone (the writer, the director, the actor) made a conscious decision about why a character is saying the things he or she is saying, and why a character is the way that he or she is. Not every character is totally unique or memorable, but every character fits in where they belong in the grand scheme of things, and none of them stand out in a negative way.

The main characters, in particular, are fleshed out extremely well, showing all different sides of their personalities and often struggling with internal conflicts over what they want and how they should act. Yennefer, for instance, is rather brusque and pragmatic -- she's short and to-the-point with people, not caring how her words or tone might affect someone's feelings, and resorts to dark sorceries, breaking the law, and sabotaging ancient mystical relics without a second thought when it serves her interests in a more efficient manner than another alternative -- but most of her actions in the game are guided by a deep love and concern for Ciri and Geralt. While others typically only see her as a cold, manipulative witch who's always scheming behind people's backs, usually for her own self-gain, we see her getting into whimsical pun battles with Geralt, crying out when Ciri is in danger, and yearning to put the sorceress politics aside and settle down with Geralt and grow old together.

THE GOOD: Recurring characters keep the story connected

Most of your usual friends from the previous games like Vesemir, Lambert, Eskel, Dandelion, Zoltan, and Triss make appearances in TW3 and help you out on your main quest of finding Ciri, and most of the main characters stay with you over the course of the entire game, coming and going as quests and meet-ups call for their presence. A lot of side characters end up involved in multiple quests that take place in different acts of the game, which helps to build a rapport with them so that you care when they're involved in later events, because it's something happening to someone you know and care about. Similarly, a lot of characters you meet and help out over the first half of the game come back to help you later when you have to cash in a favor for a favor, which lets you see how people's situations have changed since you last saw them 50 or 100 hours ago.

THE GOOD: Three different endings

Multiple endings is kind of a standard thing in RPGs because it's one of the prime ways developers can show different outcomes for your actions, to show that your decisions had a significant impact on the game. This happens all the time with individual quests, but a lot of games still tend to force a single outcome on its main story. The Witcher 3 allows you to experience one of three different endings, which is nice in and of itself, but what's really impressive about the three endings is that their seeds are sown throughout the entire game, with each ending being the culmination of several small, seemingly insignificant moments. This isn't a matter of simply playing the game and then picking one of three branching paths near the very end; you're stuck with your outcome based on decisions you made previously, and you never could have known, at the time, that the decisions you were making were actually going to influence the ending, which I feel makes the endings much more natural and organic, because the ending is based on how you role-played Geralt over the entire story, not just at the very end or at obvious critical branches.  

THE GOOD: The world feels real

With a lot of these big open-world games, there's a common tendency for the worlds themselves to feel phony and artificial because the designers just churn out landscapes and paste a bunch of content all over the map with little concern for how anything relates to anything else, why things are the way they are, or how the world exists and operates independent of the player character. The world in TW3 has a very precise, hand-crafted feel to it -- there's something interesting to see everywhere you look, nothing feels like it's been copy-pasted, and everything exists for some kind of purpose. What's really interesting, though, is how much backstory and atmosphere you pick up just from all the subtle, ambient details.

Following the events of TW2, the kingdoms are now waging war against each other, with the Nilfgaardian empire trying to push its control further south. The game doesn't beat you over the head about being a war game, however -- you simply see the effects of the war, never actually taking part in it, as if you were any common citizen. You see scorched battlefields where the dead are left to rot in their suits of armor. You see villages that were once raided by invading armies, still struggling to recover. You encounter wounded soldiers from either side seeking refuge in an abandoned shed, or about to be lynched by villagers. You see squabbles and brawls in bars over which kingdom's insignia should be on display. You find a ton of currency from the previous regime, which is completely worthless until you take it to a bank to exchange for real money. It's a cohesive theme that permeates almost everything in the game, and it gives you a strong feeling that, even though you're not actually seeing the battles being fought, this war is serious and is taking its toll.

A lot of times video game worlds feel like playgrounds or theater stages built solely to accommodate the main player-character. This is still true of TW3, as it is, ultimately, with basically every game ever created, but the amount of stuff that happens around you in TW3, sometimes beyond your control or whether you're there or not, really helps to make the world feel more real, natural, and immersive.

THE GOOD: The world shows signs of dynamic elements

With worlds this big, they tend to remain pretty static throughout the game, rarely reacting to your presence in any kind of significant way. This, I imagine, is because the sandbox nature of these games typically requires that the designers allow for any possibility at any time -- if you change the world-state too much, or too drastically, then it could start to conflict with other quests. The Witcher 3, being itself one of these vast open-world games, can only change the world so much and still allow you to access all of its content, but it still manages to change its facade over the course of the game, sprinkling in enough changes to make the world seem like it's reacting to your presence and even affecting quests in a few ways.

The biggest examples center around the city of Novigrad. With King Radovid turning the city upside down in search of witches to burn at the stake, he eventually puts the city under lockdown while you're away so that, when you come back, the guards deny your access unless you can produce a gate pass. Later, if you complete a side-quest to help the mages sneak out of town, the witch hunt sets its sights on non-humans, and you're greeted with elves and dwarves being executed outside the main gate as you return to town. If you've completed that side-quest before getting to a certain point in the main quest, then it affects your options since your dwarven friend Zoltan is no longer able to roam around the city, because he's afraid of being lynched by the city guard.

Similarly, your actions in one area can affect your interactions somewhere else nearby. When you arrive in Velen, the point in the game when they take the training wheels off and let you loose in the giant open world, your first objective takes you to a local tavern to gather information. Once there, you're confronted by some of the Bloody Baron's henchmen, the self-proclaimed ruler of Velen whom you have to go through to progress the main quest. How you deal with his henchmen affects your relationship and interactions with the Baron before you've even met him, and can make the initial goings tougher or easier when you finally make contact with him.

THE GOOD: Fast-travel and horseback from the beginning

The size of the world map in TW3 is supposedly bigger than Grand Theft Auto V and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim combined. I'm not sure I believe those numbers, but I do know that TW3 is pretty damn big. With a world that big, there need to be measures in place to help you get across it quickly and conveniently, because it's not very fun to have to spend 10 minutes at a time holding down the "forward" key to get anywhere. On the other hand, you don't want to make alternative means of travel too quick or convenient, because you want players to feel rooted in the game world and not continually skip by it. The Witcher 3 perfectly balances these two issues with its inclusion of fast-travel and horseback, both of which are available to you from the very beginning of the game.

Fast-travel is restricted to the use of signposts, which are present outside of cities and villages, and also found at major roadside intersections. If you want to warp somewhere instantly, you have to make your way to a signpost first, and you can only warp to other signposts you've already discovered. You therefore have to explore the entire world on-foot -- even if you warp somewhere, the signposts aren't at every single location on the map, so you still need to get to your final destination the old-fashioned way -- which helps you to become more familiar with the world and feel more physically attached to it. And yet, getting around without the benefit of fast-travel is never a tedious, time-wasting endeavor because you always have access to your trusty horse companion, Roach. Just whistle and she'll run in from somewhere off-screen, ready to help speed you along to your next destination.

THE GOOD: Interesting quests with engaging storylines

Most of the quests, whether they're part of the main story or trivially inconsequential side-quests, have something interesting going on, with some reason for you to care about seeing them through to their conclusions. In one quest, you accompany Triss to an elegant, high-class masquerade ball. You're there to help an alchemist get out of town before the witch hunters come for him, but all you really do is walk around talking to people, not even making a lot of important decisions. It's a pretty simple quest in terms of gameplay, but it's fun just to be there witnessing the events, listening to conversations, and simply appreciating the unique atmosphere.

One of my favorite quests, "A Towerful of Mice," has you working with the sorceress Keira Metz, who wants your help lifting a plague-like curse that's afflicted Fyke Island, where the former lord of Velen and his daughter died. The island itself has this really ominous, spooky vibe about it, with you using a magic lamp to hunt for ghosts and piece together the island's history. Eventually, you meet the ghost of Annabelle, the lord's daughter, who asks you to take her bones to her beloved, whom you discover lives in a nearby fishing village. With her bones buried by her lover, the curse, she says, will be lifted. At that point you have a couple different options about how to proceed, both of which result in a somewhat tragic success.

I remember one quest in which a village asked me to help defend one of their people from bandits, and I rolled my eyes at such a cliche premise, but went along with it. The bandits showed up and their leader tried to explain her side of things, but I wasn't going to be persuaded that easily and fought them off. It turned out she was a werewolf, and upon looting her corpse I discovered a letter from her parents that gave her an entire backstory. She was born of a human and werewolf, and lost both of her parents to a show-trial execution because one of the villagers snitched on them. Her parents wrote to her before their deaths telling her that they loved her, that they believed lycanthropy was not a thing of evil, and implored her to lead a good life. She was just out to avenge her parents' deaths, and I felt kind of bad about killing her. What I thought was going to be a simple one-and-done, forgettable quest ended up having a surprising amount of narrative purpose to it.

THE GOOD: Tough moral dilemmas

There was a time when games had a bad habit of portraying moral and ethical issues in pure black or white -- you're either Adolf Hitler or Mother Theresa, with no room for anything in-between. When The Witcher came along in 2007, it made a deliberate effort to blur those lines into more realistic shades of gray with no clear right or wrong -- just two choices, and two different outcomes. The Witcher 3 continues to carry that torch by frequently placing you in situations when you have to make a tough choice, which adds a lot of extra weight to the gameplay and forces you to think long and deep about what you're doing.

At one point you come across a Nilfgaardian soldier about to by lynched by three locals; if you choose to stay out of it and let him be killed, you can check his corpse and find a letter on him that reveals him to be an honest, well-intentioned family man who was deserting the army to go back to his wife and child. If you decide to stand up for him, before learning any of this, then you have to kill the three villagers in self-defense, and Geralt makes a comment to the soldier, when he expresses his gratitude, that if he hadn't have gotten involved only one person would've died instead of three. In this situation, knowing the two outcomes, would you choose the option that results in the loss of less life, or the one that saves one life you know to be good at the expense of three others that you don't really know?

In another quest, you come across another witcher from the school of the cat, who slaughtered an entire village after being cheated out of payment for a contract and getting stabbed in the side with a pitchfork. The guy was clearly way out of line and did not warrant killing all those innocents, but when faced with a decision, I couldn't bring myself to kill him because I didn't feel like it was my place to judge him. Later on, you meet up with some old friends who're conspiring to assassinate King Radovid because his madness is leading to a lot of civil unrest and war-torn bloodshed, and you have the option to go along with their plan or back out, and I struggled big time trying to figure out if regicide was really the right choice or not.

THE GOOD: There is a ton of content

The Witcher 3 is a long game, with a lot of stuff to do in it. It's so long that it took me 134 hours over the course of three-and-a-half months to "finish" the base game. I know for a fact that I haven't done 100% of everything there is to do in the base game, and I haven't even started the two DLC expansions (which now come bundled in the $50 "Game of the Year Edition") that supposedly add another 20-30 hours of content, each. That's an insane amount of value for your dollar. And it's not just the amount of content that creates that value -- it's the fact that it's all quality content, with everything feeling hand-crafted and serving a specific purpose.

THE GOOD: A buttery-smooth, well-polished experience

I started playing TW3 over a year after its initial release, so it had received extensive patching long before I even started playing, and even received a few major updates while I was playing, one of which was a major overhaul of the user interface. I can't vouch for how the game felt at launch, but in its current state, TW3 ran buttery smooth for me and felt totally polished and 99% bug-free.

In similar games of this size, it would not be unusual to find a bunch of small graphical imperfections like floating objects, missing textures, misaligned seams, and so on, but I never noticed anything of this sort, with just three or four exceptions. Likewise, it would not be unusual to encounter weird glitches like animations spazzing out, or characters getting stuck running in place, or enemies clipping through walls. Again, I never encountered anything like this, with just a handful of small exceptions. These are the kinds of utterly tiny, insignificant imperfections that would usually slip through a less-diligent or less-resourceful team's quality assurance process, and there's barely anything of this sort in TW3.

In 134 hours, the worst things I ever experienced were: (1) a completed quest that never moved itself from the "active" to "completed" tab in my quest log, (2) a quest-giver from a completed quest got stuck with the yellow exclamation-point next to his name and on the mini-map, (3) a treasure chest underwater that I couldn't reach because an invisible wall prevented me from diving any lower, (4) one occasion when I couldn't climb onto my boat because I kept dropping back into the water when the climb animation finished, and (5) a stretch of time when Roach's tail disappeared from the game, before returning in a patch. That's not to say there weren't other issues, but anything else was so insignificant that it never bothered me and never took away from that smooth, polished feeling of the game.

THE GOOD: I really like the Skellige isles

The bulk of the game takes place in Velen and Novigrad, which consist of one giant map with zero loading zones. Both of these areas have good atmospheres and theming (Velen's murky swamps and dreary half-dead forests really bring out its reputation as "No Man's Land"), but I found myself especially enamored with the Skellige isles out west, which evoke a strong Nordic vibe with their snowy mountains and honor-bound clans of warrior-societies. As I mentioned in the audiovisual aesthetics section above, the landscapes are a thing of beauty simply to gaze upon, especially in conjunction with that wistful music.

Skellige also sets itself apart from the other regions of the game in terms of its gameplay mechanics. The mountainous terrain gives each island a lot of vertical space to explore. Each island is itself a relatively small, confined space -- this helps to guide exploration so you don't feel like you're wandering aimlessly along a vast landscape -- but they're ultimately more satisfying to explore because they cram more complexity into the folds of a smaller space. The vertical levels hide a bunch of content out of sight, on the other side of a mountain face, or underground, or in the folds of a ravine. Everywhere else in the game is mostly a matter of seeing something on the horizon and just making a beeline for it, but Skellige really stimulates your curiosity because you never know what you're going to find until you find it, which had me constantly in this wondrous "what's out there" kind of mood.

THE GOOD: Lots of tie-ins and references to TW1

One of my biggest issues with TW2 is that it didn't really feel like a Witcher game to me because of how much it strayed from the themes and gameplay mechanics that were established in the first game. The Witcher 3 feels pretty similar to TW2, in terms of gameplay and presentation, but I really appreciate how much effort CD Projekt went through to tie TW3 in with TW1. It was really nostalgic to go back to Kaer Morhen and spend time catching up with your fellow witchers Vesemir, Eskel, and Lambert, and it was cool how that whole section of the game dealt so heavily with what life is like as a witcher, and how it shed new light on things like the trials of becoming a witcher. The central plot of TW3, meanwhile, is actually laid out by a specific line of dialogue said by the King of the Wild Hunt to Geralt in TW1. There's also a really neat easter egg in the bookshop of Novigrad in which you receive a letter from one of the main characters of TW1.

THE GOOD: Humor and easter eggs

You wouldn't expect, in a world as serious as the entire Witcher saga, to find as much humor and fun off-the-wall moments as there are in TW3. Geralt himself can be a wise-ass at times, dropping witty one-liners, insults, and dry puns at the drop of a hat. You're in for some smiles any time you interact with a troll, and basically any quest with Dandelion is sure to end up with some kind of theatrical absurdity. Other scenes go in hilariously unexpected directions depending on what you do, like if you try to romance both Yennefer and Triss, or if you decide to get drunk with Lambert and Eskel. All-the-while you run into a ton of easter eggs and pop-culture references, probably my favorite of which involves a quest to shut down the Defensive Regulatory Magicon (DRM) of a mage's tower by using Gottfried's Omni-opening Grimoire (GOG).

THE GOOD: Elaborate journal, beastiary, and quest entries

There's a ton of information to process in TW3, and thankfully the user interface is a Godsend for helping you keep track of everything. From the menu, you can access detailed character biographies (helpful in case you forget who certain characters are, or if you've never played the previous games and therefore never met them, and want to learn more about them), beastiary entries that let you read up on the lore of all of the Witcher universe's unique monsters, and quest entries that narrate each step of the quest in the form of a story. None of this is absolutely essential for the game, and it all has zero effect on the actual gameplay, but it's a really nice touch just to have this information available if you desire to enlighten yourself more.

THE GOOD: A more useful inventory screen

The Witcher 1 had a pretty solid grid-based inventory system that let you see everything at a glance, just by looking at the icons for every item, with bigger items taking up more spaces in the grid. Then, for some reason, TW2 turned the inventory into a text-based list with abstract item weights attached to everything. It was a pain and a bother to use. Thankfully, CD Projekt have gone with a more TW1-style inventory this time around, giving us grids with graphic icons for items, and even allowing us to sort items by tabs like in TW2. It's a small thing to be sure, but since you spend so much time dealing with your inventory in this game, it's a nice quality of life feature that the inventory screen be sleek and easy to use.


THE GOOD: Custom map markers

This is something I've been asking games to do for a long time, and very few actually do this; The Witcher 3 lets you put custom markers on the map to keep track of things you've found but need to remember to come back to later, as well as waypoints to help set your own personal destination on your mini-map navigation. The markers can be yellow exclamation points if you think it's something quest-related, blue inverted triangles if you simply want to mark a spot, or red skulls if there's a strong enemy in the area. With a world this big, it's a tremendous blessing to be able to place your own reminders, because without them, it would be near impossible to remember where everything is that you want to come back to.

THE GOOD: Alchemy is much more accessible

A lot of people complained about the alchemy systems in the first two games, saying they were too convoluted, too inaccessible, and just generally not very appealing gameplay options. CD Projekt took those criticisms into consideration with TW3 and revamped the system to make potions and blade oils a viable option for all playstyles. Potions, blade oils, bombs, and decoctions are a lot easier to brew, and maintaining your supply is almost effortless, automatically refilling everything as long as you have alcohol in your inventory when you meditate, meaning you can focus your efforts on just playing the game (and using your alchemical creations) instead of spending a bunch of time hunting down resources and staring at a menu screen to brew everything all the time. You don't have to invest a bunch of points in alchemy to make good use of potions, and you can brew them anywhere and use them at any time.

THE BAD: Alchemy is oversimplified

By streamlining alchemy to make it a more appealing gameplay option, they removed almost all of its depth and complexity. Potions now have zero negative side-effects, so there's absolutely no reason not to use them, and you no longer have to stop fighting to uncork a potion and actually drink it, meaning you don't have to worry about positioning yourself and finding the right moment when you can afford to drink a potion -- you just press the hotkey and the effect triggers instantly. There's no more variety in brewing a potion by mixing your own ingredients with dominant substances to create special versions with bonus secondary effects, and you only really have to brew a potion once, because from then on everything will automatically replenish every time you rest, as long as you have a single bottle of alcohol in your inventory, which you find everywhere in your travels -- in other words, there's virtually no cost for brewing and replenishing your supplies. Similarly, there's no consequence for applying oil to your blades, so you may as well run around with a constant damage boost and swap the oils out every time you start a fight against a new enemy type. 

THE BAD: Horrible first impressions

I was really put-off by TW3 at first; everything felt like a horrendous mess. Movement controls felt stiff, clunky, and unresponsive, causing me to constantly bump into things and struggle simply walking through a doorway. The intro features a ton of heavy-handed tutorials that pause the game in the middle of the action to bombard you with walls of text explaining how things work. The HUD looked so cluttered and busy that I didn't really understand what was going on with all of it. And the combat was so rough trying to get a feel for everything that I spent 15 minutes dying and loading my save, just trying to survive the first fight that happens literally seconds after you finish the tutorial and are finally let loose in the world.

Were I not a seasoned gamer with the patience to endure rough starts and put in the time getting used to things, I might not have made it past the opening 30 minutes. Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I didn't feel comfortable with the game until I was an hour or two into it, and didn't really start enjoying myself until about two or three hours into it. In the grand scheme of a 134 hour playthrough, those first couple of hours are pretty insignificant, but it's never a good thing to start off a new experience on bad footing, because some people might not have the patience to stick around until it supposedly "gets better."

THE BAD: Game balance is non-existent

Typical game balance involves easing the player into the game by making things slower and simpler at the start, giving you time to figure out how the game works as you start getting your feet wet, and then slowly increasing the difficulty towards the game's ending so that, as you become more experienced and develop greater mastery of the game, it gets harder to match your increasing skill level, thereby pushing you to get better over the course of the game.

The Witcher 3 is almost the exact opposite of this; it starts the difficulty out at its absolute hardest, right from the start, and maintains a decent amount of challenge only for about 10-20 hours. Around that 10-20 hour mark you start crafting your first set of witcher's gear and unlocking enough skill slots to finally get some decent bonuses, thereby resulting in a steep drop-off in difficulty as the game instantly gets easier, and continues to get progressively easier over the entire rest of the game.

While it's true that there's some satisfaction in getting stronger and eventually breezing your way past all the obstacles that were giving you so much difficulty in the beginning, that point happens so ridiculously early in TW3 that it's more pitiful than satisfying. It's like playing a game of basketball where you're up by 60 points at halftime, and don't even need to play the second half. I started out on the hardest difficulty, "Death March," and had to take it down a notch almost immediately because the game was kicking my ass so badly while I was still struggling to get a feel for the combat. But then, about 30-40 hours in, the supposed hard difficulty ("Blood and Broken Bones") started to feel more like easy mode. I considered bumping the difficulty back up to Death March, but felt like that would just prolong every fight by simply inflating enemy health values.

THE BAD: Combat is shallow and boring

Combat has never been all that sophisticated in this series, but it's mindlessly simple in TW3. Melee combat, at its core, consists of five main actions: fast attack, strong attack, parry, dodge, and roll. That's not a bad foundation to work with, but sadly it all boils down to button-mashing; every fight against almost every enemy basically amounts to spamming fast attacks and hitting the dodge button when an enemy is about to attack you, then going right back to spamming fast attacks. There are exceptions, of course, such as if an enemy has a shield, or if it's a weird monster with a unique special ability, but you spend the vast majority of the game fighting the same basic enemies over and over again, all of which fall victim to this simplistic, repetitive pattern of attack attack dodge, attack attack dodge.

Enemy AI is just so simple that you almost never have to deviate from that successful pattern, because most enemies behave exactly the same. It doesn't really matter whether you're fighting a wolf, a bear, a drowner, a nekker, a ghoul, or even a werewolf because they all just come straight at you and do some generic close-range one-or-two-hit attack. Against most enemies, you don't have to worry about what type of attack they're doing, or where they're aiming it -- you just dodge or parry when you see them telegraph an attack. Meanwhile, you don't have a lot of different attack options at your disposal; with only two types of sword attacks, the system is even further limited by the fact that there's hardly any reason to use strong attacks because they're so much slower and are therefore easier for enemies to interrupt, while fast attacks do roughly the same damage-per-second and are harder to interrupt because they keep enemies stun-locked longer.

The inclusion of potions, bombs, blade oils, magic signs, and a crossbow are supposed to add extra depth and variety to the system, but these aren't particularly exciting options, either. The crossbow is insanely under-powered and only ever worth using to knock airborne foes out of the air, or to one-shot underwater foes. Blade oils and potions are all passive stat-boosters that don't change the gameplay all that significantly, with the exception of the Blizzard potion that slows time around you, while you move at normal speed, for a time after each kill. Bombs can be thrown like a grenade to cause damage or special effects to an area, like freezing enemies in place, or preventing the use of magic, which can certainly be helpful against large groups of enemies or against tougher boss-like enemies, but I rarely felt the need to use them, even in hard mode.

Magic signs would seem like they're more fun, since there are five of them and each one gets an alternate casting mode (for essentially 10 different signs), but they, too, become shallow and repetitive after just a little while. As a pure mage, I discovered that signs made combat even simpler and more boring, because I spent basically the whole game using Aard to knock enemies down and kill them with a one-hit finisher, or spamming Igni as often as possible and dodging until my stamina regenerated enough to cast it again. Against some of the stronger enemies in the game, it was faster and more effective just to cast Quen and reflect their damage back at them instead of actually fighting -- I just stood there and let them kill themselves. As with the melee combat, every single fight was just a matter of repeating the same basic strategy, rinsing and repeating until everything was dead.

THE BAD: Gameplay doesn't evolve as you level-up

A cardinal sin for an RPG, it doesn't feel like your character evolves as you get stronger. You can invest in 80 different skills, most of which have 2-5 tiers of investment that unlock extra effects as you put more points into that individual skill, thereby allowing you a ton of freedom to customize Geralt into your own unique build. The vast majority of these skills, however, are passive modifiers that don't actually change your gameplay; deal 5% more damage when using fast attack, blade oils now have a 3% chance to poison enemies, extend the duration of Yrden sign traps by five seconds, etc. Sure, they all make you better and stronger at the game, and these skills have a tremendous cumulative effect as you rack up more and more of them, but few of them add new abilities to the game. For the most part, the skills simply make you more effective at what you're already capable of doing.

Once you gain access to the crossbow a few hours into the starting area, you'll have seen and experienced 90% of what the combat system has to offer. From that point on, the only variety comes from different bombs, potions, and blade oils you unlock, but again, with the exception of a few bombs and potions, these are mostly just passive stat boosters. Of the 80 skills, only 9-10 of them introduce new abilities; five of these are the alternate sign-casting modes, which can be unlocked relatively early, while the two new melee attacks, whirl and rend, are buried deep in the skill tree. The only skill that does anything new outside of combat, meanwhile, is the Axii skill "delusion," which lets you jedi mind trick people in dialogue, and can also be obtained pretty early in the game. As a pure mage, I unlocked all of the game-changing skills in that tree about a quarter of the way through the game and just passively watched my stats go up for the remaining 90 hours.

THE BAD: Progression is slow and unrewarding

The rate at which you play the game, exploring the world, completing quests, and so on, doesn't match the rate at which you level-up and gain skills. The Witcher 3 is an incredibly long game with a massive world to explore and a ton of content to complete -- people spend an average of 100 hours playing this game, but the leveling system feels like something from a 50-hour game that's been stretched to fit a 100-hour game. The game's scale is so big that progress feels incredibly slow; I sometimes played for 6-8 hours at a time before achieving a new level.

But just leveling up doesn't make a huge amount of difference in the game. For starters, each individual skill point, which you gain every time you level up or discover a Place of Power, is relatively insignificant, typically only providing a 3-5% boost in something. Secondly, those skill points are worthless unless you've unlocked enough skill slots to "equip" your desired skills. You typically unlock a new skill slot every two levels, but that rate slows down as you level up; from level 18 onward (roughly halfway towards end-game level), it takes four levels to unlock a new skill slot, meaning you go anywhere from 16 to 24 hours at a time accumulating skill points that you can't actually use, and thus not actually progressing.

Even then, once you've finally ground-out four levels to unlock a new skill slot, you may find yourself in a position where new upgrades don't even benefit you that much. After 80 hours, having still not been to Skellige or even completed chapter one, I found that I just had no reason to upgrade anymore. My sign intensity was already so off the charts that upgrading my signs any further would just give me diminished returns, and branching out into one of the other two skill trees (physical combat or alchemy) would result in less benefit from my mutagen slots (slots tethered to skill slots, which further enhance your stats if you equip skills from one tree in sets of three with a matching mutagen) until I could make another 10-14 levels to unlock more mutagen slots.

Finally, it's kind of disappointing that, of the 80 skills you can choose from, you can only ever equip 12 of them, meaning you hit a soft level cap at level 30 and can no longer equip any additional skills. You can still learn other skills, but you're always limited to only having 12 at a time active. Normally I like that kind of thing in games, because being limited to a smaller portion of what's available forces you to really think about what you're doing, weighing the pros and cons of different abilities and forming your own more-specialized build, but it feels almost criminal to spend so much time in this game building towards such few abilities. It makes me especially concerned going into the two DLC expansions, because that's potentially another 30-50 hours of slowly leveling up and not getting to feel any reward from any of it.

THE BAD: The world is too big, with too much content

I know I praised the game earlier for having so much quality content and for being such a good value for your money, but there are two sides to this coin, and in the case of TW3, having such a big world and having so much content in it can also be a bad thing. When you create a world this big, there's necessarily going to be dead space because you can't fill every single square foot with interesting content; the world is as big as it is to create a more realistic sense of scale and geography, but that comes with the consequence of spreading everything out and forcing players to spend more time traveling across it, and to spend more time than really should be necessary searching for the good and worthwhile content.

For every hour I spent doing a fun quest, or tracking a unique monster to its lair and having an epic showdown with it, or discovering some cool area off the beaten path with a hidden treasure chest, I spent half an hour wandering around the wilderness picking flowers and generally finding nothing of interest. A lot of times I'd discover a cool-looking place that simply had nothing going on in it. I'd sail to a uniquely-shaped island to find nothing at all. I'd find an unmarked village and there'd be nothing there. Even major landmarks on the map, like the Wolven Glade or the Devil's Pit, for instance, had all these interesting structures that looked like they should've been part of some quest, but ended up serving no purpose whatsoever.

On the flipside, I frequently ran into situations when I was being overwhelmed with quests and things of interest popping up from everywhere, all the time. In trying to get to a quest marker across unexplored terrain, I stumbled into a bandit camp and had to defend myself, and ended up picking up a quest to find a family sword. So I figure "I'll do this quest since I'm here," bring up the journal, and discover it's pointing me far away in the opposite direction. So I head that way and stumble into another quest because a cyclops ambushes me on the side of the road. So I investigate the area and find a note which sends me off in yet another direction to complete the quest, at which point I give up and ignore both of quests I just picked up, opting to go back to what I was doing originally. I ended up accidentally completing one of these quests some time later after I'd long forgotten about it, having stumbled into the area and talked to an NPC without having the quest active in my journal to know that he was part of a quest I already had.

The effect of having so much content in one game is that it dilutes the overall experience. With a game this size, some of the content is just going to be better than all the rest, and a lot of other stuff is going to end up being completely forgettable. Even though nearly every quest has some kind of decent setup and characterization relative to other games of this scale, a lot of these less-significant side-quests pale in comparison to what else is in the same game, or compared to smaller, more tightly-focused games. And yet, you never know what quests or points of interest are going to be outstanding or mundane until you complete them, so you basically have to do everything you come across if you want to experience all of the best that the game has to offer, which means wading through a lot of relatively boring content to get to the good stuff.

THE BAD: Exploration is unrewarding

As a result of the world just being too big for its own good, exploration doesn't feel all that rewarding. The thing that makes exploration satisfying in games is that feeling of discovery you get when you find something off the beaten path that others might possibly miss, thus making your experience potentially different from someone else playing the same game. These discoveries can be cool quests, special loot, or just fun easter eggs, but a lot of stuff that you find in TW3 ends up being either completely worthless or completely pointless.

All of the best gear in the game, for instance, is witcher gear that you craft yourself, and then upgrade over the rest of the game. I made my first set of witcher gear at level 11 and eventually realized that nothing I was ever going to find in my adventures would ever be better than what I already had, which somewhat hurt my motivation to go out exploring. Most of what you find, loot-wise, is just worthless junk that only exists to clog up your inventory as vendor trash, or blueprints for gear you won't be able to use for another 20-40 hours because the level requirements to use them, once crafted, are so much higher than when you find them.

Meanwhile, you get so little experience for killing monsters and discovering locations that you can spend several hours exploring and make virtually no progress towards leveling up. And with the map as big as it is, you spend a lot of time running all over it just looking for content, sometimes in vain. I'd often spend 5-10 minutes at a time running around an interesting-looking area finding nothing but useless plants and maybe a few random crates full of junk, or some random low-level enemies. So, you either put up with spending all this time aimlessly wandering around, or you cut to the chase and just follow the marked points of interest on your map that tell you where basically everything worth finding is before you've even been there -- useful for cutting down all the wasted time, but they make exploration feel like accounting, like you're just going around checking boxes off a list.

THE BAD: The world doesn't feel alive

Earlier I praised the game world for feeling real and showing signs of dynamic elements, but that doesn't mean it always feels alive. There are thousands of NPCs in this game, but 95% of them can't be interacted with in any kind of way whatsoever. I'd sometimes run across entire towns populated with dozens of people, not a single soul of whom could I talk to, at which point I sat around wondering "What is the point of this town being here?" There's a ton of content in this game that only exists to serve one, singular purpose, and is otherwise completely useless unless you pick up the one quest that will trigger it, including things like named characters you inexplicably can't talk to, or locked doors that you can't open, or in such cases as Fornhala and Kaer Muire, entire towns and cities without a single person to talk to or thing to do in them.

In keeping with the open-world nature of the game design, the world has to remain in a type of status quo at all times so that all content can be accessed at any time, which means, for the most part, the world sits around idly waiting for you to show up before anything happens. Everything just sits around in its prescribed state waiting for you to come along and put things in motion; the normal state of the world is almost completely disregarded when you start a quest, as it spawns and de-spawns everything as necessary. I can't criticize that point too much because it's almost unavoidable in this type of game, but I think the world would've benefited from some more random events to keep you on your toes and to introduce elements that require a timely response if you want to see how they play out.

THE BAD: Simple, repetitive quest mechanics

The quests in TW3 may have a lot of engaging storylines or characters in them, but the actual mechanics for solving quests tend to be pretty shallow and repetitive. A strong majority of quests follow a simple formula of "talk to the quest-giver, go to the location, investigate using your witcher senses, fight something, and return to the quest-giver." Other quests consist of a lot of straightforward dialogue where you just walk to the objective, watch long cutscenes, cycle through all dialogue options, watch more cutscenes, walk to the next location, and repeat. Occasionally, they'll throw some kind of utterly trivial, pointless, unrelated fight at you just to give you something to do between walking to your next objective.

Witcher senses, in particular, feel like a lot of missed potential. On the one hand, it's cool that you can press a button to hone in on things a witcher's heightened senses would pick up on, that we as mere ordinary humans would never notice, like animal tracks on the ground or scent trails, but this takes a lot of self-satisfaction out of the quests because you're not actually solving the quest yourself -- you're just pressing a button to highlight the solution and following a dotted-line to its conclusion. And unfortunately, witcher senses are a mandatory part of the game, they're not just there as a crutch for casual gamers who don't want to put in the work figuring things out for themselves; you have to use witcher senses to solve these things because there's literally no other information to go off of. Without them, you'd just be bumbling around aimlessly, hoping to stumble into solutions randomly.

There's a major quest in Novigrad, for instance, in which a main character is nearly murdered by a serial killer, and you're sent into detective mode to find out who's behind the killings. This is a quest ripe for Sherlock Holmes-esque deductive reasoning, in which the player has to assemble the evidence in his own mind and come to his own conclusions about how it all might relate to different suspects who each have their own alibis and possible motives, like you do in TW1 when you're trying to figure out who's working with Salamandra. Instead, you simply use your witcher senses, follow the trails, exhaust all the dialogue options, and let yourself be dragged by the nose to the obvious culprit. How straightforward and mundane.

THE BAD: Decisions often feel trivial and unimportant

While it's true that you can make a lot of important decisions that can affect the outcomes of major characters and even lead you to one of three different endings, most of the decisions you make in TW3 have little effect on anything, either because the outcomes are utterly inconsequential and only exist for role-playing purposes (which is totally fine, I suppose -- it's better than having no choice at all) or because you actually, in fact, have no choice at all and are forced to do exactly what the game intended all along, regardless of the fact that you were given an apparent "choice."

At one point in the main story, I thought I had a chance to effect a major branch in the main quest line, to pursue a hint of Ciri's whereabouts by pursuing either Dandelion or Triss and Yennefer. I decided to go with Triss and Yennefer, because that seemed like the more logical guess -- nowhere had I heard, previously, that Dandelion even knew Ciri, and I knew that Triss was in the city and that Yennefer had a history with Ciri -- only for the game to say "That was the wrong answer, you're gonna go after Dandelion for help."

Meanwhile, a lot of your dialogue options are considered plain-out wrong, according to the script. In one major conversation after finding Ciri, I said I didn't want to get the Lodge of Sorceresses involved because I didn't trust them and was told "Too bad, we're doing it." Ciri then protested, saying that she should have some say in things and that she can take care of herself, so I said "You're right," and was promptly told "No, she needs to be kept completely out of danger." She got angry and ran off, so I said "I'll go after her," and was then told "No, she needs to work this out on her own." This was three things, all in a row, where the game slapped my wrist and said "no you're wrong, this is how this cutscene is going to play out," and I was left to wonder why I was even given a choice if nothing I said was actually going to matter.

THE BAD: A lot of restrictive gameplay

Like with the dialogue options, there are a ton of instances in the ordinary gameplay when the game forces you to play a certain way, either by arbitrarily restricting your actions or by preventing you from doing anything else. Every now and then you run into situations where the game just doesn't let you run, and you have to walk to your next destination, or you end up in places where you can't jump, draw your weapon, or cast signs. Particularly infuriating is how combat is a completely different gameplay mode from non-combat; while in combat you can't jump or interact with anything, which often led to me getting stuck in places because I couldn't jump or climb a ladder to get to the enemy so I could kill it and get out of combat mode.

I remember one time when I walked into an NPC's house and found it being ransacked by bandits who then attacked me, and the game forced me into a fist-fighting mini-game. When I tried to draw my swords, or cast signs on them, that familiar message popped on screen reading "You can't do that here." And I thought, "Why not? They're bandits, I don't want to give them a fair fight or take it easy on them." It's annoying when any game does this, but I think it's even worse in an open-world RPG, the whole point of which is having the freedom to play the game how you want, which is not always the case in TW3.

THE BAD: The main story bogs down like crazy

The game begins with a pretty clear and concise objective: find Ciri. Finding her is not that simple, however, as you have to go to every single region of the Continent and speak to a variety of people in each location, usually doing some obligatory sub-quest for each and every person you find just so they'll point you in the next direction. This premise is fine for a little while, especially while you're dealing with the Bloody Baron's questlines, which prove to be some of the best in the entire game, but it really bogs down when you get to the big city in Novigrad.

So you're supposed to be looking for Ciri -- someone in Velen tells you she went to Novigrad, so you go to Novigrad and turn the city upside down looking for her. Someone tells you that Dandelion might know where she is, so you look for Dandelion and find out he's gone missing. That initiates a sub-quest to find Dandelion, which takes you to a guy who might know where Dandelion is, which initiates a sub-quest to help him to find someone else before he'll tell you where Dandelion is. Once you find out where Dandelion is, you need someone else to help you get there, which involves another sub-quest to find that person.

In 100 hours of searching for Ciri, I'd searched for Yennefer, searched for Keira Metz, searched for the Baron's wife, searched for the Baron's daughter, searched for Dandelion, searched for Whoreson Jr, searched for Triss, searched for Dudu, searched for Hjalmar, and searched for Cerys, and still hadn't found Ciri. Throughout all of that, it gets really hard to remember that everything you're doing is so that you can, eventually, find Ciri, because all of those arbitrary sub-quests put you so far off-track from your original goal that you almost forget about her.

THE UGLY: Meandering pace

The whole point of finding Ciri is that the world is at risk of an apocalyptic event should the Wild Hunt ever catch up with her, and she's also Geralt's adopted daughter whom he cares deeply about and doesn't want to come to any harm. Seems like a big deal, and yet the game (and the rest of the world and all of its inhabitants) don't really care if you find her or not. Geralt, meanwhile, is content to lie around brothels and pursue a life becoming world champion of a collectible card game instead of looking for his daughter. The main story is at odds with the core gameplay design, with the meandering pace of the open-world design taking a lot of narrative thrust out of the main story and basically every other quest. It's good that one have the freedom to choose where to go and what to do, but I feel like it detracts from the overall experience when there's always something new popping up to interrupt your progress and distract you from what you were doing, because you can't give the proper amount of focus and attention to everything all the time.

THE UGLY: Movement controls feel weird

One of the hardest things to get used to, besides the general rhythm and technique of combat, is simply moving Geralt around. Geralt has a significant weight to his movements, with momentum affecting how he starts moving, comes to a stop, and even changes direction. This has the benefit of making you feel more realistically rooted to the game world, but it also makes simple tasks like walking through doors or turning around more of a nuisance than they should be, since it takes so much effort to get Geralt moving to make minor corrections to your positioning, and Geralt's momentum will frequently make him stop short of what you expected, or push him further than you intended to -- which, on numerous occasions, led to me falling off a ledge and dying on impact. You can turn this movement scheme off and enable an alternative system, but then Geralt stops feeling like a real person and just floats around like a video game character. In the end, I just got used to the default movement scheme, but it still caused me some hassle every now and then.

THE UGLY: Clunky combat controls

Input-queuing is a system that lets you press a button in the middle of an action and have that second action play out immediately after the first action has finished, used in a lot of fighting games to help process a lot of fast inputs fluidly. The Witcher 3 doesn't seem to do this at all, meaning if you want to cast a sign or swing your sword after coming out of a dodge, you have to wait for the animation to finish before pressing the button, else the input won't register and you'll find yourself standing there awkwardly for a moment before realizing Geralt's not actually doing what you told him to do. This matter is made many times worse by the inconsistent combat animations; in an effort to make everything flashy-looking, Geralt will randomly launch into different kinds of attack animations of slightly different lengths, thereby making it much harder to anticipate your next button press because you never know what Geralt's going to do. The inconsistent targeting system doesn't help, either, with Geralt randomly targeting and attacking enemies you never intended, likely moving you out of position and exposing yourself to enemy attacks.

THE UGLY: Witchers aint got time for these trivial tasks

Witchers are not altruistic paladins crusading for the good of all humanity, protecting the down-trodden and the oppressed while fighting for social justice. They're monster-hunters for hire. They stay out of politics, mind their own business, and don't intervene unless there's significant pay involved. And yet, you basically have to be an altruistic paladin if you want to experience as much game content as possible, or else you'll end up just skipping a lot of quests and events altogether, missing their stories, experience points, and rewards. Geralt shouldn't have the time (or the interest) to do menial chores for people, and yet the bulk of quests in the game consist of doing simple favors for random people that any non-witcher could be doing. Why, for instance, is Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf, the Butcher of Blaviken, stopping by the side of the road to help someone fix shrines, or looking for someone's stolen horse? If you were to play as a true witcher and only do the monster-hunting contracts, main story, and favors for personal friends, you'd probably end up skipping over half of what the game has to offer.

THE UGLY: No penalty for stealing from people's homes

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, also known as The Witcher 3: Petty Theft Simulator, is a game in which you can steal everything that isn't nailed down, from every peasant and noble citizen's home, right in front of their eyes, with no repercussions whatsoever. This is part of the reason the world doesn't always feel alive, because no one makes any reaction to you barging into their homes and taking everything off their shelves. The only time it matters is if you steal within sight of the city guard, but that situation almost never comes into play because the city guard isn't stationed inside people's homes, and a lot of containers that are within sight of guards aren't marked as personal property, so the game doesn't consider it stealing when you loot their contents. It's not a game-breaking issue, but it does break my suspension of disbelief that no one cares about their personal property.

THE UGLY: Too much useless junk cluttering inventory

You loot a ton of stuff in this game, most of which is completely pointless junk like forks, plates, broken rakes, or melted candles, to name just a few, or components like plants, leather, minerals, and monster parts used in alchemy and crafting. Everything in the game technically has a use; junk can be sold to shopkeepers to increase your income, or can be dismantled to form crafting components, which are themselves used to create new gear and other, more advanced crafting components. The problem, here, is that you're simply bombarded with an excessive, overwhelming amount of stuff, most of which you'll never actually use, and then it just sits around cluttering your inventory. I actually reached a point in the game when I had so many crafting and alchemy items that the game would lag out for a few seconds every time I opened that tab of my inventory screen.

THE UGLY: Nothing to spend money on

Since you either find or craft all of the good stuff you'd ever use in the game, money has essentially no value and no purpose. The only things worth spending money on are recipes for potions, bombs, and blade oils (but these become fewer and fewer as you play the game), rare herbs that you can't find in the wild or that simply don't exist elsewhere, strong alcohol for creating more advanced alchemical substances and potions, and repairs for your weapons and armor (which becomes less of a necessity as you accumulate more and more repair kits). These purchases make up only a tiny fraction of your total income. You end up with tens of thousands of coins and nothing to spend them on, which contributes to the overall feeling of not progressing and not getting stronger that permeates the entire game, because gold is treated like a reward for quests and exploration but in reality it does you no good.

THE UGLY: Quest rewards scale down as you level up

Point of fact: you are going to become over-leveled in this game, even more so if you're a diligent explorer and completionist who does everything he can before moving on to another area. When this inevitably happens, quests that are deemed too low-level for you start giving less experience and less reward to a point when they eventually stop giving you rewards altogether. The intent, I suppose, is to slow your leveling so you don't out-level everything in sight, but that still happens at an alarmingly fast rate, even with this down-scaling, which yet again contributes to the overall feeling of slow progression. After a while of clearing these greyed-out, low-level quests from my journal, it started to feel like a chore -- a waste of time.

THE UGLY: Limited overlap between quests

The bulk of quests in TW3 are completely stand-alone and have no relation to any other quest, character, or location, and in a lot of cases where quests might appear to overlap, they're really just running in parallel with one another -- usually nothing that happens within a quest will affect anything outside of their own specific quest-line. In that regard, it doesn't really matter how you choose to solve quests because the impact will almost never carry over to anything else, except that in future plays you'd be able to choose something different and maybe see something new. This is another side-effect of an open-world game striving to be completely open and accessible, so that any bit of content can be completed at any time in the game, regardless of what else you've already done, or in other cases, not done.

THE UGLY: Long, frequent cutscenes hold players hostage

I encountered a lot of instances when the game forced me to keep playing much longer than I intended because cutscenes, dialogue, and story sequences would seize all control from me and force me to sit through everything before putting me back in control so I could save and exit the game. On one occasion, I wanted to just turn in a quest and go to sleep, but upon doing so I ended up having to sit through 20 minutes of cutscenes, and then got dropped into a five-minute gameplay segment which didn't feel right to interrupt by saving and quitting because it would've ruined the narrative pacing to delay the story's continuation by 20 hours, and then had to watch another 5-10 minutes of cutscenes before it was all finally over. On a night when I had to be up early the next morning, the game unexpectedly forced me to stay up an extra 30 minutes later than I wanted.

THE UGLY: The Battle of Kaer Morhen is a little disappointing

The Battle of Kaer Morhen is the main climax that the game spends up to 100 hours building towards, the grand culmination of your quest to find Ciri and fight off the Wild Hunt. You go back to everyone you've met over the course of the game cashing in favors so that they'll come help you, assembling a Super Team of badass allies. When you're ready to start preparing for the fight, you meet everyone one-by-one as you work your way from the entrance of Kaer Morhen up to the inner keep, and get to see what everyone's planning and how each individual will offer unique assistance. You then get to make a few decisions about what to do (brew some potions or lay traps around the castle's exterior, reinforce the walls or clear the way to the armory). But then you don't actually get to do any of the prep work yourself, a lot of stuff seems to have little to no effect on the actual battle, and the entire fight is broken into a bunch of tiny, self-contained sections separated by loading screens, cutscenes, and really specific objectives that force you to focus on one little thing at a time, one after another.

As with the dialogue and storyboarding of the main quest-line, it felt to me like the Battle of Kaer Morhen was designed to play out a very specific way, with only a couple variables changing the outcome (or the path to the outcome) in any significant way. It was supposed to be this grand, epic castle siege as you try to fight off hordes and waves of Wild Hunt soldiers, but the scale felt tiny and claustrophobic to me because you're always in these tiny, instanced scenarios: "Go here and kill that, go there and close that portal, go there and flip the lever," and so on, with no concern whatsoever for any greater, over-arching goal, because the instanced scenarios made it clear nothing was ever going to happen off-screen, and you never had to worry about possibly failing. I would've much rather preferred if the Battle of Kaer Morhen had been just one, big fight with you having to defend multiple angles of entry, perhaps with status meters indicating when a side was getting overrun, or when a wall was about to collapse, thus forcing you to react to these different situations and making your own choices, instead of simply following a linear series of events that are totally scripted beyond your control.

THE UGLY: Playing as Ciri

Occasionally throughout the main story you get to play flashbacks as Ciri, to see from her perspective what she went through at each step of her journey, while Geralt is always two or three steps behind her. Some people might like getting to play as Ciri, but I always found it jarring; you spend 100+ hours as Geralt building an association with that character and tailoring his skills and equipment to your own desires, and then suddenly the game says "Ok, now you're a completely different person, and none of the stuff you've been doing to improve your character applies here." It's kind of cool that you get to feel how Ciri gets stronger over the course of the game through actual hands-on experience, but I still found it annoying every time I switched to her, and it was kind of boring playing as her in the second half of the story when she's one-shotting everything with lightning-quick ninja moves that take no effort on your part to pull off.

THE UGLY: Gwent is pay-to-win

Gwent is a card game that CD Projekt designed and put into TW3 to replace the dice poker mini-game. It now exists as its own stand-alone game, and you could even, for a time, buy physical decks to play in real life. It's a fun little game that reminds me a lot of Blue Moon Legends, an actual card game by Reiner Knizia that I own and rather enjoy, which made me really intrigued once I realized that the card game in TW3 is actually a good, interesting game system, and not just some gimicky mini-game. That said, as it exists in TW3, Gwent is pay-to-win, which I find absolutely abhorrent.

In a nutshell, Gwent works by playing cards from your hand, which you draw from your pre-built deck, with the ultimate goal of having a higher total value of cards in play than your opponent at the end of a round. The game lasts up to three rounds, with the winner being whomever wins two of the three rounds. So, the crux of the gameplay is baiting your opponent to play cards a certain way so that you can, essentially, spring a trap on him, while also making sure that you're pacing yourself for all three rounds, possibly forfeiting a battle so that you can win the war.

The problem I have with Gwent, as it's implemented in the game, is that there are relatively few restrictions on how you can build your deck, and with different cards simply being more powerful than others, a deck that's loaded with higher-value cards will basically always win against a weaker deck. They start you out with a crappy beginner deck, and if you want to make your deck stronger you have to spend in-game currency buying better cards, or else win better cards by beating other players, which is kind of a catch-22 because you often need better cards in your deck to beat certain players in order to win better cards. I had fun playing a few matches early on, but once I realized that individual decks can be so highly imbalanced and that you have to spend a lot of money buying better cards, I swore it off and never touched it again.

IN CONCLUSION

That was a lot of criticism, both in "the bad" and "the ugly" sections, and perhaps "the good" section didn't do the game enough justice, so let me be clear at the top of my conclusion by saying that I liked The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It has a lot of good things going for it, and it's easily one of the best open-world RPGs ever made, but that almost says more about the state of open-world games than it does about the game itself. Open-world games tend to have a lot of inherent problems, usually to do with pacing, balance, and depth of mechanics, and TW3 suffers from nearly all of them, albeit not as badly as some other games. The sheer size and length of the game, meanwhile, make all of its weaker elements stand out even more as the game drags on and begins to outstay its welcome.

I firmly believe that TW3 could've been a leaner, tighter, and more satisfying game if CD Projekt had trimmed some more of the fat and given us a somewhat smaller but more tightly-focused game. The Witcher 3 didn't need to be as big as it is, and I feel like it suffers for it. Ultimately, I like some other open-world games better, such as Gothic, Fallout, STALKER, and Dragon's Dogma to name a few, but none of those games come close to matching the epic scale or production value of TW3. It's kind of a shame that most of the praise I can give for TW3 comes with a qualifier ("it's exceptionally good for an open-world RPG of this size," or "it's better than that other major open-world game from 2011") because its characters, stories, and world are so entertaining and engaging. Sadly, its gameplay doesn't always live up to rest of its high aspirations, and it leaves me feeling a little empty when I think about how much better it could have been.


DLC REVIEWS

If you're interested in my thoughts on the two DLC expansions for The Witcher 3, check out my separate articles on each one:

The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone - Review
The Witcher 3: Blood & Wine - Review