The Witcher 3

I’ve been playing the Witcher 3 on the Nintendo Switch for almost a year now. There is a lot of content, but I am at the final battle. At times some of the quest types get a bit repetitive, I think they erred on the side that you can’t have too much content, but it really is a beautiful game that for the most part was fun throughout. 

I did restart the game a short while in. I played a little while, figured out what I was doing wrong and started over on the easiest difficulty setting. There was a time in my life where I wouldn’t have dropped the difficulty, but now and in this game, I didn’t need random fights with non boss level monsters to be challenges, I wanted Geralt of Rivia to dismember them and stack their limbs in neat little piles. It’s remarkably cathartic. 

The big battle at the end of Act II is one of the finest bits of computer game story and execution that I’ve seen. The quests to open Act III are just as powerful. 

The world is remarkably well fleshed out. This game predates the TV show but of course it had almost all of the books to draw from. But when you go to a region it feels a lot like I imagined it when reading the books or TV show. The one difference, the city of Novigrad is so large and immersive it excedes what I think will be done by the TV show barring a massive outlay of resources. 

I had a few complaints about the art. The game is gorgeous. There are times where I would stop playing to admire how the sunset looks. But there are a few points on quests where it seems like the environment artists sacrificed the ability to see where I was going in order to keep the game pretty. Granted the artists likely didn’t realize people would be playing it on a Switch, but games industry artists have a bad tendency to assume everyone has the awesome monitor they work on. 

The weirdness of the Computer RPG City Guards: Of course the City Guards need to be tougher than the player, or at least en masse be tougher than the player, otherwise the player will run amok. I myself want to go back to Novigrad and put a majority of that city to the sword. But it’s a strange thing when you’re level 30, and tasked with defeating the end boss, but the guardsmen are all level 40. Why can’t one of them save the world? They’re wasted guarding the streets of this city with abilities like those.

I’m glad the game gives an epilogue where you get a chance to settle a few scores. I’m still going to have to replay the game to make sure I take out the ruler of Redania and as many of his witch hunters as possible, but the game at least sated my desire to put every last one of them to the sword well enough that I can take a break and play something else, probably spend the next year playing Zelda. 

Still, the fact that I’m thinking about starting over in a game I’ve finished after a year really shows how good this game is.