When I first read details about monsters in TW3, it was in the context of a game preview (probably in the german gamestar). It was about the unique monsters and how every one of them needed to be tracked down and had certain strengths and weaknesses. Also, I got the impression that a certain amount of those monsters were one-of-a-kind, like the kayran was in TW2, and were somehow connected to main/side-quests. The monster featured in that preview was the leshen, described as a spirit of the woods haunting a village somewhere in the game world. I really liked that concept because it seemed more dynamic than in TW2 and also gave the monsters specific backstories and personalities, if you will. It is also so much more mystical, you know, there is a difference between hunting for some sea monster you can find in every lake around the corner or hunting for the monster of Loch Ness.
Now we have seen the leshen in at least two different locations (woods in one of the very first trailers and second location in the latest steel and rage trailer), we saw several wyverns and giants (or trolls?) closely together in the gameplay trailer and the monsters trailer featured a red fiend. So I assume none of these monsters is really “unique” and you can just happen to run into one of them if you’re lucky. While it makes the world more believable if many different creatures freely roam the world within their natural environments, it also kills the mystery those special monsters were supposed to arise. I mean, if you’ve slain like ten leshen every here and there before you do the leshen-specific side quest, you won’t be that surprised or interested in it anymore because it’s just another stupid leshen. Same goes for the devil in the well. If I wouldn’t know otherwise, I’d expect the devil to be a really unique monster (I like the design, by the way). I’d be a little disappointed though when I travel the open world and discover those noonwraiths are pretty much everywhere and always look the same. I think it would be awesome if at least 10-20 of the 80 monsters were really unique and tied to side quests and stories and you could only find them if you gather information and actively track them down (which shouldn’t be as easy as in the devil in the well contract, which was in prologue-area). If not, I hope the quest-related monsters are special to some extent, like bigger or more powerful than their basic counterparts. Again, from the first announcement of TW3’s monster mechanic I was looking forward to that aspect of tracking and hunting rare mystical creatures and I just hope this is implemented the way I imagined.
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