Followed by popular The Witcher 2 success, the Polish video game studio CD Projekt Red released the final installment of its RPG action series, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The gameplay is full of open-world quests, and the storyline involving hunting monsters and a massive map to explore.
To protect the child of destiny and collecting bounties, Geralt of Rivia slays beasts for the last time in its expedition. Action controls are more improved and allow more alchemy into the game to make it more accessible. The game is full of tragedy, humor, horror, and a story that keeps you bound to the events.
Witcher 3: Wild Hund has reached the like of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and has grown into something magnificent. A new benchmark was raised for the genre and this game mesh together with the story, music, art, action, and graphics in a perfect way. The story matures with the quests, and Geralt of Rivia, a lover character in early editions, is now a real sword master slaying the beasts in the way. The game has upscaled and displayed the eye for every minute detail in an organized manner.
Blood and war accompanied by the physical glamor are rich in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt storyline. Geralt of Rivia spent almost a large chunk of its time on the back of the horse. Resemblances with The Red Dead Redemption are uncanny and might seem strange to some of the players.
The game focus on exploring the wilderness, completing the missions, and discovering the characters. The Red Redemption and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt both share a dash of hope, with sardonic humor and a dark tone in the story. Well, we can see killer characters in both of the games with the mission to accomplish.
Excellence is the critical element of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and thematic turbulence’s overall success and a casting factor. An immersive open-world game with excellent creature design, flawless role play, excellent exploration map, improved combat mechanisms, and progressive changes take it to the top charts in the genre.
Variety of missions we see in the whole progression where you have to unite a corpulent spouse abuser with two different souls. Each of which tests the affection of the character and its limits. In one quest, a reunion of the two lovers is required where she is a rotting hog with its tongue rolling out of the mouth. While on in the city of Novigrad and isles of Skellige, there is a sacrifice need for every triumph, and there is no joy without a parallel sorrow.
Geralt of Rivia is the lead character of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and is born in literature. First appeared as a fantasy character in the Polish novels written by Andrzej Sapkowski, but now it’s the video games that make the character alive and popular. As a Witcher, he perfected many skills and carried many talents, and was a perfect pliable protagonist.
Geralt is an abled swordsman and handles a hulking beast and a crowd of bandits smoothly moving across the countryside for rich bounties. Most of the time, we see the main character riding the horse, adding an accomplished driver title for The Witcher. From the Velen fields’ froth-lapped rocks of Skellige and driving through forest and river, the main character focuses on the storyline and depth of the story.
A Giant in its genre
In 2015 there was no such game as epic as The Witcher 3 with such a storyline in the genre. Due to its vast world to explore, it’s still a sensation even after five years of its release. The combination of magic and combat in an open world with characters and quests makes it an everlasting experience. The Witcher sound is just like Batman’s voice with the husky pitch and adds charm to the overall gameplay. The sound of the character does not feel any bad and adds to the character’s strong personality.
The main cutscenes in the game are just mesmerizing, and after their end, a hand-drawn graphic novel style theme continues with the narrating. Each quest and progression have such cutscenes, but their pitch and narrating vary with the story. The main story involves the rescue of the adopting daughter of Geralt, which was absent for a while, involving dreadful battles with beasts and bandits.
The games’ progress is eventual and starts from the basics of combat and flashbacks from Ciri’s childhood. It takes time and several quests to effectively apply the combat skills in the game. Unlike most open-world games, you cannot just press a key repeatedly to kill an enemy. Instead, it would help if you had patience, skill, parry, dodge, and better utilization of sword attacks. Regular sword bandits are usually no problem for Geralt, but for ghouls and wraiths groups, it needs solid defense, dodge, and counterattacks to kill them and progress further.
Magical spells and pots are common in this open-world game and need brutal attacks and solid defense. Strong spells are required when ensconced by the enemies in large numbers. Other tools also help alongside these magical spells, including crossbows and bombs. With each completed quest, you get the rewards to level up, trade, and experience points. The points are indeed in-game money to level the characters’ skills and enhance the powerups.
Related: Mortal Kombat 11 Review
The storyline of Witcher 3
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt focuses on human conflicts and politics involving love and hate between characters than an actual fantasy storyline. Magical elements and European folklore acts as a framework for war-racked and dramatical stories. Despite having magical ethnicity and the elf and troll universe in The Witcher, races serve as greedy, compassionate, and loving creatures. The Witcher series theme is basic throughout all the series and has similar events of bigoted stories.
Geralt is the main character that is searching for his adopted daughter Ciri throughout the game. Once found, he protects his daughter from being the subject of the prophecy. The actual drama begins with the involvement of Emperor of Nilfgaard, who is the birth father of Ciri. He is the emperor of an aggressive and colonial empire. Dandelion, the bard, narrates the game’s portion, which is the good friend of Geralt and is seen in-game more often helping him.
CD Projekt Red lead the stories in the final chapter of The Witcher series, which were previously roaming around in previous chapters. Geralt’s need to find his daughter Ciri before the enemies and protect her is the main plot in this chapter. Ciri is the main character and brings life in Witcher novels, and her presence in The Witcher 3 pulls the game towards the conflicts. For Wild hunt and conquering the Nilfgaard, Ciri’s unique bloodline acts is the primary target.
Multiple quests are cohesive and bleed into each other between different types of quests. There is a thoroughly blurred line between treasure hunts, monster contracts, mains quests, and secondary quests. They all transform into multiple quests running side by side and keeping the storyline smoothly. The game is lenient, awarding the time for a quest, so there is usually no hurry to complete a quest on an urgent basis. The story-related quests keep flowing smoothly by leading into one quest to another and one plot to the next. No playable characters in the story have specific missions they want you to complete and beyond their role.
Right from the beginning of the game, there is an introduction to Gwent, which is a mini-game based on card battle. Players spend an absurd amount of time getting required cards for the deck by challenging the shopkeeper to Gwent. Hundreds of fun and strategy-filled quests are there in The Witcher 3, which gives vast content to chew through. Every story quest challenges your decision-making and gets you to the new landscape and events. The story itself is a triumph and asks you to absorb it and make your way through by accepting the consequences in the way.
Level-up in The Witcher 3
The range of the game’s storyline is very vast, and you will encounter multiple events where you spend countless hours doing explorations and new quests. Gwent’s card battle game, already mentioned, is time-consuming but cannot be ignored. To craft armor, you may ask to cut down some heads and bodies of ghouls and drowners. Or you may ask to explore the waterside and collect the herb for the special potions. Every mission is a new door towards several more tasks and takes a massive chunk of your time.
The Witcher 3 RPG system is somewhat enhanced and better than we have seen in The Witcher 2. The character enhancement and equipment choices impact the gameplay in the long run. But with every move towards the progression, the result is a better experience. The potions and oil are more practical to use and restock with a straightforward strategy. These significantly boost the combat power, agility, and health recoveries of the character when used in the right situations—at the same time, casting powerful spells to impact the outcome of the quests and brawls.
Gameplay settings allow the players never to set their limits. You have four different combat modes where you can select the difficulty from beginner level to hard level. This feature lets you test your limits and helps to improve the moves and strategy on challenging levels. For getting better at the game on difficult levels, you have to master parry, dodge, and agility during the fights. These essential skills are required, especially for fighting harder-level enemies.
Always keep leveling up your character and abilities to keep pace with the upcoming quests and events. In case you are a level 10, and your enemy is at the same level, then fight can be easy but having a significant difference in the power levels make it difficult for you to defeat the enemy. Explore the quests to get the experience points and then use those points to leveling up your abilities. Getting in good shape before the fight against formidable enemies is a prerequisite for success in the quests.
Never limit yourself in the fights and do not get cornered from, especially against the group of enemies. In that case, you will observe yourself in deplorable conditions getting pounced by the enemies in the corner. Use Bloodborne Strategy to tackle such situations and separate the large group of enemies into smaller groups or individuals to fight against them effectively. Drowners have a distinctive approach in the fight, and they attack in a group of four or more at once on the other had human hold their ground and let you come at them.
Sometimes brawling against a leveled enemy can cause you to lose the fight. To prevent such matches, always look for the enemy levels before the onset of the fights. If they have a red skull symbol, they are beyond your level, and your abilities might not work effectively against them. Saving your progress before such matches is usually a significant relief. As some matches do not have a leave option, and you have to fight the opponent even mightier than you. Saved progress makes you survive in the game and get away from a total shutdown.
Like any other RPG game, loot has a significant impact on the game’s overall progression. Highly customized weapons and improved armor protect you in tough fights. A different armor set unlocks the progress making Geralt look tougher and give visual improvements. Customizations to the Geralt personality are easy by doing a shave, getting a haircut of your choice, and beyond that, there is no character enhancement. However, the new set of armor’s physical looks greatly influence and leveling them up for a more evolved look.
Fighting Against Bosses in The Witcher 3
Fighting a stacked boss is different from the usual battle with growlers and humans in the game. Bosses are fully stacked with the upgraded stats and can take a couple of rounds to defeat them. There is a complete glossary of weaknesses and strong aspects of the boss that can beat them. But practice and patience are the primary key and require a little skill to overpower the bosses in this venture.
Bosses in the Witcher 3 are no less than horror characters of the movies. They are giants and have horrible faces that can make your children cry. As already mentioned in the game rating, it is not a game to play for the little ones, which might have no issue for a large audience. Stop your cry and work on defeating them as their ferocious beaks, bulging eyes, and horrific body characters have powers that are prone to defeat with strategy.
Potions and alchemy are the way to fight in the big rounds and do not forget to prepare them ahead of main fights. Potions mixing and making new bombs and oils are very easy in any location. Even roads allow alchemy to work and make your fight interesting with the spells. For better armor, you need a skilled blacksmith to craft your desired armor or weapon to fight against the boss. The different weapon has different agility and damage type when it comes to their effectiveness. For example, sword damage quickly and is good against both humans and monsters. Dismantling extra weapons for forging new weapons is easy and can include axes and maces.
Visuals and Details
CD Projekt Red has done an incredible job developing The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt, especially in the graphics department. The first one in The Witcher series made its way to consoles like Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. There is a whole lot of improvement in the graphics and detailing of the gameplay.
Trailers and cutscenes caused a lot of gossip. According to Veryaligaming, when the game was released, it fulfilled the audience’s expectations. Everything from the moving of the character’s hairs, sunlight breaking through the forest from narrow spaces, trees catching the winds and their movements, and even the character’s skin after the bath stands out.
Graphics overall have better details and are astonishing. The use of fog, grasses moving with the breeze, changing weather, sky color, and many more things are perfect. There are immersive details in the game and a desire to wander in the game just for fun. The facial animations and textures of the surfaces all over the game have a fantastic finish.
The soundtrack’s music beats are great to listen to, and the cast did a cracking job creating those masterpieces. Overall, strong voicework together with great music and fantastic tone in the background. Soundtracks are in the right place even during the fights, and a realistic approach towards the music and graphics makes the gaming experience more fascinating.
Related: PUBG Review
Areas of Improvements
The Witcher 3 has a rich storyline, beautiful graphics, mesmerizing backgrounds, and a great soundtrack, making it one of the best releases of its time. The overall game is stable and has many points to praise, but developers need to address some improvement areas. Technical issues are part of game development, and resolving them saves players headaches and time.
One of the most significant technical issues related to the gameplay is Geralt’s slow response to the movement keys. Whenever the character needs to move, it takes a delay in the actual movement. There is a brief gap of half to one second between Geralt’s movement and pressing the movement button. We have checked this latency issue for the keyboard and controllers and found it to be a real issue on both of the devices. It is not a game-breaking issue, and games work fine even with this latency issue, but it still slows the outdoor combat movement.
Detailing in the characters’ faces seems repetitive in all of the NPC (Non-Playable Characters). For many NPC characters creating a face is a very tiresome process and requires massive work to skip that hard work. But it seems odd that the same feeling comes with different names and guiding the players in the story mode. Repetition of characters is not a big problem but still disturbing for a story-based game.
There are few occasions of they complain about the glitches in the game. Occasionally, you can see a horse flying in the air, and dismounting during this bug will lead to immediate death. One complaint about the game is its slow switching between quests and maps. The frame rates drop sometimes, and there may be texture pop in the pursuit. Overall, the gameplay is marvelous with quests and inventory management.
Loving, Cruel, and Wonderous
CD Projekt Red has paid an impeccable amount of time and attention to the details while creating this product. It’s a product of love and dedication. From inventory management to character development, immense hard work towards the better good of this game. The storyline is lovely, and the dialogues alone give a glimpse of creativity.
The Witcher 3 is all-around a well-balanced and great game. Geralt is a powerful character, and with progress, it goes more powerful. It references the novel and a story that tells the struggle between a daughter and a father. Secrets, side quests, extra missions, and upgrading the character gives more content to enjoy. It is still one of the best open-world RPGs at the time of review until the date and hands down a unique art piece.
Related: Fortnite review
Final Verdict
While covering the review for The Witcher 3, we have tested the gameplay and checked its comparison to the other games in the genre, and still, we love every minute of its experience. There are areas of improvement in glitches like a dodgy horse, occasionally dropping framerate and bumpy texture.
If you have still not played The Witcher 3 and planning to start a new expedition towards open-world gaming, then make yourself ready to sacrifice your everyday life. The gameplay is full of beautiful lands, balanced gaming mechanics, and have a compelling story. You will immerse yourself inside hours of role-play gaming and open-world quests.
