By Hadyn Green
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a good game wrapped inside of terrible one. This is a tale of two games: The Witcher and what I call the Glitcher.
The Witcher is a complex, woven story of Geralt of Rivia, the titular Witcher – hunter of monsters – searching for the girl he considers his adopted daughter, Ciri, as she is chased by the Wild Hunt – a gang of magical warriors – for reasons unknown.
The Glitcher is a poorly made RPG, full of sexist clichés, inexact fighting mechanics, occasional bugs, and infuriating design that often have you groaning or rolling your eyes.
Sadly. the two are inseparable.
I must note, the bulk of this review was played on a pre-release build of the game marked by many more serious bugs, like disappearing people and severe cropping and collision detection issues. I also tested a retail version of the game, which had a day-one patch applied, and it appears that these issues have been more-or-less resolved.
The bugs I experienced included Geralt's horse Roach getting trapped behind trees, fences, buildings, or villagers; Geralt himself suffering from small impediments in his way and trees he just can’t get past and Geralt tumbling from cliffs after what seemed like small jumps.
The fighting is pretty hack-and-slash, which is fine, but you may end up finding yourself vulnerable if you just mash away. Geralt's sword animations look cool and move you across the battle in a whirl of blades, but often also mean that you find your opponents are now behind the camera and stabbing you in the back.
Playing this on a big TV also showed some of the limitations of the console's graphical power. Occasionally NPCS or even dead bodies (there are a lot of people hanging from trees in this game) would appear in the middle distance as "scarecrows", legs akimbo with their arms straight out at their sides.
They would revert to being more realistic bodies when you get closer. It's the type of thing that once you notice it, you can't unsee it.
But the Glitcher isn't just about the bugs. It's also about simple bad game tropes.
The missions are often designed so that you have to travel back-and-forth between places. Go here, investigate something. Go back and report. Head back to the first place and fight monsters. Go back and report. Repeat until done.
These are not quite fetch quests, but pretty damn close. But the world is really, seriously huge, so when the quest tells you to travel back-and-forth it gets really dull really quickly.
The other thing that gets old quick is the depiction of women. All of the female characters have the same body type and none of them seem to know how to operate a shirt because every single one of them wears it open to the navel.
Perhaps the only reason the women aren't constantly falling out of their tops is because the breast physics are worse than they were in Ryse: Son of Rome.
Don't worry though. If you want to see awful, solid, unmoving breasts you're in luck, because the female characters whip their clothes off with regularity. Nearly all of them have one reason or other to sleep with Geralt, so you get to sit through some pretty terrible sex scenes.
Sex in games is OK by me (if I have to pick one, I prefer sex over violence). But it just seems stupid if the male character is running around in armour while the women are wearing light shirts that are unbuttoned to the waist. It's not even pretending to be armour!
Moreover, this game contains a lot of sexual violence. Rape is mentioned a lot by supporting characters and more than once Geralt saves women from being raped by soldiers. Somewhat disturbingly, there is at least one scene where Geralt can walk away and leave a woman to be raped and another where he can leave a woman to be tortured.
One quest, integral to the main storyline, involves tracking down a gang leader who enjoys raping, torturing and killing sex workers. When you finally confront him, it's in a room filled with dead women killed in various horrible ways and all naked. It can be incredibly jarring.
As you walk around villagers, guards and other non-characters will just randomly say things (it's something I've never understood in games). Most of the time it's the repeated garbage over-and-over, or vaguely related to whatever quest you're on, but one point in the game I suddenly noticed that the random lines were getting incredibly sexist, and homophobic.
In part, this is because the game had entered a darker phase, but at the same time it just felt wrong and put in for shock value; the usual poor writing trope of "Oh these guys are bad so they'll say something awful about women/gay people".
There is a scene with a character who cross-dresses and that is handled fairly well. It's not perfect, but it was a good attempt and for once, the cross-dressing was not a punchline.
If this game was just the Glitcher, it'd be struggling to get a two star review from me. But it's not, there is a Witcher in this as well. And frankly I want to play The Witcher 3 despite the Glitcher.
The story so deep that you can actually sit and read through hundreds of years of history and character storylines.
It is also why the game can take anywhere from 20 to 2000 hours depending on how many side-quests you want to take on. Even the main quests have dozens of little side quests attached to them.
You can choose to follow or ignore as many or as few as you want. Of course it's easier if you do at least a few of them because you'll need to level up. Helpfully, if there's no way you can beat an enemy, they will have a big red skull over them, and quests have a "suggested level".
Quests include main storylines, monsters hunts, treasure hunts and miscellaneous. Apart from the previously mentioned back-and-forth nature of most quests, the actual discovery, searching and RPG parts of quests were quite fun.
I often get grumpy that there aren't all of the options that I want in dialogues but The Witcher 3 might be one of the few games where there was always something that I wanted to say, or that I felt was more realistic to the character.
Interestingly, Geralt can be quite evil; killing people, walking away from situations where he can help the weak. But unlike a lot of games there was no overt change in gameplay.
He didn't look more evil or good and there weren't changes in the dialogue options. It actually felt quite refreshing.
I feel that sometimes games push you down one path or the other but by not having an attached mechanic, you can feel free to make Geralt as good or evil as the situation dictates.
I really quite liked Geralt too. Normally I'm quite down on RPGs where I can't create my own character, but I understand that this is a franchise and Geralt is actually quite likable.
My favourite quests were the monster hunts. After getting clues and hunting down the beast, you use your bestiary knowledge to take it down.
To do this you use a combination of alchemy (potions, oils and bombs), signs (aka spells), and sword play. You'll quickly need to learn how to dodge and parry, the latter being better for humanoids, the former better for monsters.
After you kill a monster on your contract list you get a trophy that hangs from Roach's saddle. For the bigger monsters, like griffins, it's an impressive if somewhat gross, addition. But carrying these trophies also gives you bonuses, which is why you can only carry one at a time.
The upgrade system is quite fun too. Rather than a straight tree, you are given certain skills that you can upgrade. You are only allowed a certain number of active skills depending on your level.
These skills are broken into categories: fighting, signs and alchemy. Killing monsters sometimes gives you "mutagens" which increase attributes and can be boosted by activating associated skills.
The main story has a Game of Thrones feel about it. There is clearly a history between characters and everyone is looking to stab everyone else in the back and it's never clear exactly who you should be trusting. Though it's often clear exactly who you shouldn't trust.
If the backstory is huge, the maps are made to match. I thought the first map was big, but that was basically the tutorial level, the next land was gigantic - and then I realised there was another one!
The people and the landscape change depending on where you are too. In the north, the houses are painted and there are more guards; to the south the houses are more rundown and there are more bandits and swamps; and in the city it's completely different again, with slums and sewers and squares with minstrels playing.
Even though I have had this game for a while, I haven't come close to visiting every corner of the map.
When you enter a new town there is a notice board. These boards contain outright contracts ("there's a monster please come and kill it") and more vague entries ("my child went missing last week, has anybody seen him?"). As you read these entries the map gets filled with question marks for you to go and investigate.
Will it be bandits, a monster nest, or something else entirely? The only way to find out is to go there (and hope it's not anything that will kill you).
Where does this leave us? With a great RPG, but one that's held back somewhat by some tedious quest design and an overreliance on sexist clichés.
Four stars.
NZGamer.com
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
:: Publisher: Bandai Namco
:: Developer: CD Projekt Red
:: Format: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC
:: Rating: R16
source: newshub archive
