John White
The Witcher III: Wild Hunt
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a story-driven, next-generation open world role-playing game set in a visually stunning fantasy universe full of meaningful choices and impactful consequences. In The Witcher, you play as a professional monster hunter, Geralt of Rivia, tasked with finding a child of prophecy in a vast open world rich with merchant cities, pirate islands, dangerous mountain passes, and forgotten caverns to explore. Features: Play as a Highly Trained Monster Slayer for Hire Trained from early childhood and mutated to gain superhuman skills, strength and reflexes, witchers are a distrusted counterbalance to the monster-infested world in which they live.
Explore a Morally Indifferent Fantasy Open World Built for endless adventure, the massive open world of The Witcher sets new standards in terms of size, depth and complexity. Chase Down the Child of Prophecy Take on the most important contract to track down the child of prophecy, a key to save or destroy this world.
Following the hype around this I was really excited as I love RPG games, from Star Wars KOTOR to the Elder Scrolls series, but after putting hours into the game it left a very sour taste in my mouth. Straight from the off I found the camera that follows you to be so tedious, it jolts from the slightest touch so full control is a task itself.
The menus text is so small even on the bigger tv’s it’s an eye squinting task to read, saying that when you have a tutorial pop up on the screen I found myself looking at the screen like a cat following a red dot across the floor, one pop up to the left, one to right, one here, one there, just a constant annoyance if you ask me.
The map is huge and it is lovely, 25gb download really justifies this game with the vast environment and all the foliage brings it to life but when on horseback this seems different. On horseback you can travel the map with ease, not the whole thing but a light portion, for a really hyped game the intro missions and story is really lackluster for RPG fans, it has the setting similar to the elder scrolls games but without the 1st person view, the horseback travelling took me back to Rockstars wild western outing in Red Dead Redemption, just the whole physics of the horse and how it moved are dead similar.
When controlling Geralt his movement takes some getting used to, turning whilst running looks and feels too clunky and the jumping is far too arcady for my liking, walking feels like a method you can’t do unless you’re inside a building, the fact that Geralt is constantly running really makes it aware that you can easily miss things. One really good feature is when in combat you can lock onto your enemy and movement responds really well.
Combat feels very easy when locked onto your opponent, Geralt uses two swords which can be upgraded or enchanted, don’t get me wrong it is a hack and slash, with the added alchemy moves these are used with the left bumper as you select your magic time slows down as you choose the power you want to wield once you have made your selection use the the right trigger to release whatever spell you’re planning to cast, as always the more you progress the more powerful they become and the more range they can affect.
Witcher mode is Geralt’s bread and butter when on a quest, he uses it to identify clues which are part of the quest you’re completing, on top of that he can also flag up any lootable chests and bookshelf to name a few. This task can be done with the left trigger, one job that comes to mind was to kill a ghost that’s haunting a well in an abandoned village in result it was contaminating the water and making people sick, so my job was to explore the village for clues to see what sort of ghost it was, this task took me back to the days of watching CSI but it was less interesting if thats possible? after every clue Geralt would say some tedious quote regarding the clue and then stroll on, this is a thing that will repeat throughout the game as you take on the world, another good feature is the game recommends a certain level or experience to take on quests, like they do in World of Warcraft if you’re not strong enough you shouldn’t do it as you will get annihilated, they also recommend you you to stock up on certain potions and spells if you’re coming up against a certain mythical beast.
“Play as a Highly Trained Monster Slayer for Hire Trained from early childhood and mutated to gain superhuman skills.”
The time scale is the same as The Elder Scrolls where certain creatures will appear at night and vise versa in the daytime you also have the ability to meditate to make the day go by again like Elder Scrolls sleeping tool, also included is the fast travel ability, once you have travelled to an area and interacted with others you will be able to fast travel there in future.
Its no secret that Geralt is a monster hunter and in The Witcher 3 he will complete tasks where he has to kill an array of monsters to earn coin and also prove that he isn’t a monster to be feared,I had to kill a Griffin and of course you need to prove it, so he cuts the head off. But that’s not all he will have that head as a trophy on the side of his steed as he trots around on horseback. A gentle reminder not to mess with him.
The games interaction menu for me is just like bioware’s Mass Effect with the dialogue options and the odd methods to manipulate the other person (almost like a jedi mind trick) to listen to you, every time to successfully do this you receive points to rank up, the ranking system allows players to upgrade abilities across general cardio upgrades, weapon skills and alchemy skills. Along with the dialogue you have really good voice acting and in cutscenes thankfully there doesn’t seem to be any lag with the characters mouths like other games that currently populate the vast library of Xbox One.
The sound to me is done really well, with the wind crashing against the trees in the forests to the rain drops splashing in the puddles on the ground and as I briefly touched on above the voice overs for the characters are done really well Doug Cockle still the voice of Geralt, he has been the voice actor since the first game so was really good that they kept him on.
Villages have notice boards that show undiscovered areas of interest for quest dwellers, as well as tasks villagers need help with, which is where I found the task as mentioned above regarding the Ghost and the well. Scattered around the world of The Witcher 3 is a friendly card game called ‘Gwent’. Now i don’t have a clue how to play it but will describe to the best of my knowledge, I played it once and found it utterly confusing, i reminded me of Yu-Gi-Oh (a japanese card cartoon like pokemon) basically you have cards that are ranked and amount to an overall score and the person with all their cards on the field and the most points wins. The strategy is the start slow then gradually introduce any high ranked cards in the middle to boost your score. one of the really interesting additions is there are rare cards scattered over the world that you can collect and include to your deck. This brings back the old collector in me to find that damn shiny charizard in pokemon.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings