May contain SPOILERS (Okay it contains spoilers)
So, the Witcher 3 : Wild Hunt ...
I am a fan of the two previous games and of the books. So I had high expectations for this game and was counting the days until the release. This may have also lead to my final verdict. I hoped for a worthy continuation of Witcher 2 and an epic final of Geralts saga with a closure to the plots from the books. Maybe the best game of all time. But what I got was "just" a good game.
CDPR did a lot of things right. I had many hours of fun. But at the end I felt disappointment about the way several things were handled.
At first the positive things:
- The graphics are beautiful. My computer may be a bit too old to get the maximum but I was still impressed. It may not be my GOTY, but it is at least the best looking game of the Year. And all the details. Superd handled
- Music: Brilliant
- The high amount of Side-Quest all with a little story attached. Nothing like give me 10 drowner tongues (not that this was bad in Witcher 1, but if every monster hunt in this game would have been like that, I would have probably skipped them after some time)
- Ciri, Yennefer, Dijkstra, Keira, Emhyr, Roach,... So many characters from the books for the first time in the games
- Living villages and cities. Okay, we had that before, but not at such a large scale
- Fighting system was improved in my opinion, compared to Witcher 2. And the throwing daggers were luckily replaced by the crossbow (even if it is overpowered under water)
- Gwint: Best Minigame ever
- The bloody Baron and his quest. Aside from the main story of HoS the best quest in the game
- Keiras Quest/A towerful of mice
- Skellige Helping Hjalmar and Cerys
- Battle of Kaer Morhen (Although your friends don't really make a difference)
- Hearts of Stone !!!
Middlings:
- I missed the alchemy from the previous games a bit. It was great to upgrade the potions and oils, but still I think that potions are restocked after meditations and that you can drink them and eat the whole time during fights, without a eating or drinking animation like in Witcher 1, makes things too easy. And in Witcher 2 you had the feeling that you are preparing yourself for a fight or a hunt.
- Latest after surpassing level 15 the fighting was way to easy. Through the handling of alchemy and food it was possible to beat enemies 10 level higher than yourself. If you got hit just eat something, retreat a bit, and than attack again. In the late game it was not even necessary to use alchemy at all. Quen was enough. Maybe quen is also a bit overpowered. Luckily they increased the difficulty in HoS.
- The skill tree had also advantages and disadvantages. It was a nice idea to limit the number of perks you can use at the same time. But I had the feeling that several perks were of very limited use. I am thinking that the skill tree in Witcher 2 was still better
Things I was disappointed about:
- The save game import from Witcher 2 was pointless aside from Letho. Witcher 1 is completely ignored, Adda and Yaevinn are completely forgotten, Kalkstein is killed offscreen, Sigfried got only mentioned in HoS and the Order of the Flamming Rose has only a short cameo in a sidequest. And Thaler is always alive (Not that I would have killed him). But also Witcher 2 is nearly completely ignored. The differences through our decisions in Witcher 2 are probably one hour of content. Half of it Letho. Henselt is always dead, Stennis never mentioned, Sakia and Iorveth do not appear, Natalis is always missing, Radovid is always a crazy Witchhunter,... . You cannot even ask the people you meet: "Hey Zoltan, what happend to Vergen", "Lady LaValette, what happend to Anais and Arjan, both are not in the game".
I know that it is impossible to make a completly different game depending on you choices, but at least some small quests for important characters, some extra dialogues about others and Iorveth and Saskia should be in the game.
- The politics: At the beginning I thought just Redania against Nilfgaard? Okay, that is not much but hopefully good written and maybe there is a third party (hoped for Lodge or Scoia'tael/Saskia). I had no problem with making Nilfgaard more human, but turning Redania in a bunch of rassistic, pyromanic witchhunters and jerks? There should also be some counterparts, some nice people but no. Radovid is no longer the stern but the mad. And we are not even given a real reason why he changed from a rassistic and power hungry but also cunning and diplomatic king into the guy who wants to burn all mages and talks nonsense. It could have been easy to give his character more depth, but it looks like CDPR wanted him that way. He is supported by Caleb Menge, a guy you always want to kill, and Whoreson Junior who is a serial killer. Really? Just give them a marker with EVIL on it to make it more obvious. The only whitchhunter who is not deeply dislikeable is the guy from the baron quest line. But I think he just had not enough screen time.
Also to decide the outcome of the war through one Quest...
I was disappointed by this design as it no longer shows us two evils, but a big EVIL and not so bad guys. Probably all in preperation for the Empress Ending
- Reason of State: The whole Third Northern-Nilfgaardian War is decided through one Quest. If you break Dijkstras leg (something you cannot expact from the textoption shown) you loose that option and Radovid wins automatically. I think that was the only prerequirement. Aside from the fact that the war is decided by just one quest it is poorly written. The option help to kill Radovid or not is, aside from Roleplaying aspects, as Witcher normally try to avoid politics, not a real choice. Radovid is portrayed as such a bad person, that you don't have any second thoughts about killing him. Afterwards you have to decide between let Dijkstra kill your friends or you killing Dijkstra. Roche and Dijkstra are here out of character. Roche trusting Emhyrs proposal is very strange, even if Roche is desperate. Emhyr broke the agreement with Letho and the truce with Foltest during the 2. War. And there is nothing to stop him from taking controll over Temeria again after he conquered the rest of the north. And Dijkstra cannot wait for five minutes to attack Roche after Geralt is gone.
Also the choice between Dijkstra and Roche is very one sided. Roche lied to you, but he saved your live just a few minutes before and he helped you in Kaer Morhen. And that is only in this game. So Dijkstra is threatening Broche, Ves and Thaler and wants to build a Northern Empire with himself in control. It looks like he is just hungry for power. So, again no difficult decision. It could have been lesser evil choice, but it was badly presented and the ending screens show, Nilfgaard wins = everyone is happy, no bad consequences mentioned.
-In this game we need to rescue or help nearly every Lodge member remaining. Saving Phillipa, Margarita and Fringilla from capture, saving Keira from her own stupidity (but this story line was very good) and helping ex-members Yen and Triss. I hoped for a bigger role.
- The Wild Hunt was poorly written. Nearly no screen time, a lot of missing explanations (why are they no longer spectres, where is the time and space travelling ship coming from,...) and Eredin and his generals have only one liners as dialogues. I know that they are kidnapping children, are elven racists, want to kill every human, feel superior to every one, need Ciri/her child to invade other worlds. So yes, they are evil. But you can have evil characters or stereotypes. And the wild hunt was definitly a sterotype. They are not interesting. There is no reason to fear them. And in the previous Witcher games we had antagonists like Jacques de Aldersberg and Letho. I don't think that need to say more...
- The White frost was unneccessary and completely against the lore. An Ice Age that threatens the world in 2000 years or so is turned in something that freezes the whole multiverse, a magical being that can only be stopped by one - Ciri. I am definitly no fan of ignoring the books. In the previous games it were thinks like changing triss haircolour, making radovid some years older (he is three years younger than Ciri) and Adda a bit younger and other minor things. But ignoring the whole story about Ciris child and turning Ciri and the White Frost into something both are not for a badly explained shocker at the ending??? In my opinion this was not a good choice.
- No optional bossfight against Avallach. In the other games was always an optional bossfight.
How did he betray Geralt and Eredin? Nobody knows. I always thought that he must have a plan for his personal gain, but no, it is just the White Frost and he is a nice guy who wants to help Ciri. By the way, would Emhyr not also have used Ciri to defeat the White Frost? Why are they against each other?
- Most of the things above make me sad, but I really hate how CDPR dealt the relationship between Emhyr and Ciri. Emhyr killed her mother and is reponsible for the death of her grandmother and the whole population of Cintra City. I think some of them were also important to her. He wanted to impregnate her (okay, he got soft at the end, but that doesn't change what he did and planned. It just shows that he has still a tiny bit humanity inside). This is completely ignored. For an unknown reason nearly everybody knows now that Ciri is his daughter. Also everybody forgot about FakeCiri, so nobody askes: "Your wife is called Cirilla of Cintra, and you have also a daughter of the same name???"
Instead of using this history to make him a character who is trying to redeem for what he has done to Ciri as a reason to search for and help her, the history is ignored and he wants to make her empress.
Charles Dance wasted for not even ten minutes of dialoge.
Sure the history of the characters is difficult and in this case disturbing. But ignoring one of the two biggest WTF OH MY GOD moments in the books for an ending which feels completely out of character for Ciri is questionable in my opinion.
- Choices and Consequences: A lot of choices in this game, but most of the consequences are the same. The main story is also always nearly the same. Okay, Witcher 2 was superb in this, and in Witcher 1 you got at least help from different people in the epilogue, but here. The Baron is either dead or gone, in both cases he vanishes from the game. Menge always dies, Rittersporn is always freed the same way. In Skellige you can at least decide who will become king, but this does also not lead to much differences in the game. It is unimportant who comes to Kaer Morhen for help, aside from Keira, Vesimir always dies and aside from Lambert no one is in danger. The five choices for Ciri could have been described better and are sometimes confusing. But this is another debatte, I think I have already written way too much.
As mentioned above Witcher 3 is a good game, but it has also a lot of flaws. I would still give it 7,5/10 for all work and time CDPR invested in this game. And for Hearts of Stones. It would be unfair to say that it is a bad game because disliked the last part, which was rushed probably due to lack of time. I had a lot of fun with it and it entertained me for a long time. But in the end I felt disappointed. Maybe some of the things I mentioned above could be changed with an Enhanced Edition. CDPR may have said that an EE is currently not planned, but until they say "no, there will be never an EE, we want to do Cyberpunk now, only Cyberpunk and nothing else" I have still hope =)