I finished Witcher 3 while Binging on the the Netflix Series
At the end of 2018, one game made most everyone’s hit list. The Witcher 3. By the time I had gotten around to it in early 2020, the world had moved on and a whole new list of must plays have capped off the year.
Taking advantage of an Xbox Game Pass, I downloaded The Witcher 3 and prepared myself for an epic RPG. And it was epic. Gloriously long like an old fashion dungeon crawl should be. I must impress upon you dear reader, it was a loooooooooooong game. Almost too long. Probably too long for a casual gamer, unless they want to spend the greater part of a year trying to get through this monster.
I had played The Witcher, and beat The Witcher 2. Both games are highly worthy of your time.
But man, they really went all out with The Witcher 3. This is a long game to beat. I mean, really long. I’d estimate a gamer who can put 6-10 hours per week into this would take at least 3 months to beat. Not that it’s particularly hard. In fact, the games difficulty and leveling system were amazingly balanced all throughout The Witcher 3. Some deep RPG’s (Skyrim I’m looking at you), give the player a wide range of optional side-quests. These allow the character to level up to be tough enough to take on the final boss missions. But if not balanced with the rest of the game, you wind up with a character that is almost god-like in power, so you breeze through what should be the toughest part of the game. What is truly the hardest part of any RPG, is in the beginning when your character is the weakest and all the cool armor and weapons have yet to be found. That’s when you end up getting dusted by an angry chicken or something.
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The Witcher 3 has a clever experience point system that allows you to level with side-quests, but it limits the XP gained once you are too high of a level. This may sound complicated, but any long time fan of the RPG scene knows what I’m talking about.
As for the story, it was intricately woven with a range of humorous, scary, and action packed sequences that kept the game fresh until the end. Yeah, there was the obligatory mechanic of ‘find all these locations’ for a bit of treasure. What open world game nowadays doesn’t have this obvious ploy at extending the hours of play? But the voice acting, even on side-quests, was top notch. I’d say the best I’ve ever heard in a video game.
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The Witcher 3 is rightfully the best of the series. But be prepared for an extensively long campaign that will prove challenging to the veteran RPG players and practically impossible to the casual gamers.
As for The Witcher on Netflix… it’s cool. You should watch it. It has monsters and stuff.
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