cheapLEY:
I'm excited some of you picked this up--it's my favorite game of probably the last five years, and my favorite RPG since Morrowind. You all post up some thoughts after you play some more!

Ok.

I once tried to play The Witcher 2 and... well... this happened:

Totally hated it from almost the first moment. The tutorial was total crap. It constantly paused the game to throw huge walls of text at you. It kept resetting you into different parts of the training. Like it'd let you swing your sword once then reset you, throw another wall of text at you, then let you do a combat roll or something... then reset... I think I somehow survived the tutorial and played one small part of one mission involving running up a castle tower and killing someone who the game barely told me about. Then I deleted it forever completely unimpressed.

The Witcher 3 has been just slightly different. :)

From the very beginning it did a much much better job of setting the scene and stage. The initial cutscene you get when you start the game gave me a good amount of insight as to what was going on. And the initial tutorial actually had me do things within the game world instead of chopping things up and smothering me under dialog box after dialog box. (That second part does come a little later though...)

The Witcher 3's tutorial did a good job of introducing the basics of combat but more importantly, it did a good job of introducing me and catching me up on the world and the characters. Yennefer, Vesemir, and of course Ciri were all interesting from the beginning. Something The Witcher 2 completely failed at. I don't believe there was a single named character until after the tutorial of doom. :(

From the tutorial on I've been falling in love with The Witcher 3. Here's a few things I've liked and disliked about it:

- World: The world of The Witcher is kinda like if you started with Skyrim then turned off the (pretend) parental controls. A lot of games don't deserve their M ratings. I think back to Halo 1 which was almost intentionally squeaky clean but somehow earned an M because "it has guns" or something. The Witcher is different. Very different. It earns it M rating. In every way possible. Which I find very refreshing. Not that I'm a huge fan of everything it offers (I've never liked bad language for instance) but for the time and setting, all of it is appropriate for the state the people of The Witcher 3's world find themselves in.

What's that world like? Well, there's just been a major war that has stalemated along a north / south line about halfway up the continent. One kingdom was toppled by invaders from the south, while a pair of northern kingdoms merged... hostile takeover like... in response. One of the best things about the world of The Witcher, unlike say Skyrim, is how much it sells this reality.

First off, unlike Skyrim, The Witcher 3 really makes you believe that there are enough peoples, towns, and settlements for there to actually have been armies. In Skyrim, Whiterun had like twelve houses aside from the Dragonreach mansion and maybe twenty people walking around and then a couple of farms outside the walls... and that was about it... for the entire Whiterun Hold! As neat as each Skyrim city was, they never felt beefy enough to support the ongoing war that was supposedly ongoing. In The Witcher 3, even just in the starting / tutorial area, there's multiple villages and settlements each with their own farm lands and with what feels like a better ratio of people to houses. It feels like maybe just maybe this is a real world instead of a small number of "for show only" cities.

Secondly, there are the battlefields. There were supposedly wars and battle fronts in Skyrim... except you never saw anything of the sort. In The Witcher 3... yeah... that stuff is very much there. There are entire areas that are nothing but burned forests that have been destroyed and turned into battle lands complete with the dead from both sides of the battles scattered about. Beyond that, the various armies all have several forts and roadside camps staffed with soldiers. All together, combined with the numerous towns and villages, the world feels real.

Then, there's what the people of these villages and camps do. They do a lot! Many of the people seem to have jobs. There' the obvious occasional blacksmith or herbalist, but so many people will go tend to their farms or wash clothes or shop with the local merchant. There's so many cool conversations and situation to be seen and heard. Individuals and groups can sometimes talk to each other. Sometimes they talk about things going on in the world, or going on in their village, or the monster(s) currently plagueing them. Earlier today I even saw a grandfather telling ghost stories around a campfire to one or more grandchildren.

Oh... and all that's just the south. In the North, there are a pair of larger cities one of which is very impressive. Like "Assassin's Creed level complexity" impressive. I've gone from having a wonderful time wandering the south among small towns and villages, helping people perform rituals and hunt down local terrors, to engaging in all sorts of big time city politics and doing all sorts of interesting civilized things ranging from spying to participating in artisan plays.

Story & Characters: Boy is there a ton of it! Right from the beginning there are great conversations and cutscenes and characters. And it just keeps grown and growing from there. This game has everything from big sweaping plots, to major and important stories about individual families and peoples, to numerous little stories centered around monsters and terrors plagueing individuals and individual villages. And all of these stories and fully voiced and fully animated. More than that, the stories, even the small little stories like the individual Witcher Contracts (where villages pay you to kill monsters bothering them) usually have multiple parts and require investigation and some cleverness and are fairly well written. I won't say there are absolutely no fetch quests, but every little mission has voice acting, usually has custom animation, and has a point.

And for characters, there are just so many good characters. Hard to talk about what makes them good without spoiling anything, but yeah... I've enjoyed several of the good guys and bad guys. Plus there's been funny moments and sad moments and vastly, gut wrenchingly awfully tragic moments. There's lots of subtle humor but man, once again, I gotta say that this game earns it M rating. For situations and for the actions that some people take and the terrible, emotional things that happen to them. And I love that. I love happy times and moments of triumph but I also love when things go wrong and when things go dark. And this game can be quite dark. It is, perhaps, at moments, one of the darkest games I've ever played. That's pretty cool to me. Also, that's not to scare people off. There's a lot of fun situations too. The winding, twisting silliness with your bard friend is a highlight of the game as much as some of the tragic situations are.

My only complaint is that, the farther I get into the game, the more people from past games it seems like I encounter. Not a huge complaint, mind you since choosing not to play the previous games is kinda my fault. Plus, there fun, detailed, constantly updating glossary pages on almost literally every single vaguely main character and every monster you get a contract to kill. Which is neat because the vast majority of the monsters have their own little stories.

Graphics & Sound: Excellent.

Everything is detailed and there are so many great custom animations for the peasants and city people that I can't help be impressed. Of particalur note is that this game has the best forests and wind and storms blowing through trees I've ever seen. The only thing that comes even close are the forests and “spooky fog” of Alan Wake. Basically, everything is to the point that I’m happy with it. From the sky to the weather to the people to the faces to the cities to the forest to the magic to the everything. It all works and it all looks good.

On the sound front, things are equally awesome. One point of note is the creaks and groans of the tress on windy or stormy days. The Witcher 3 really sells the concept of being in a forest with sound in a way that I don’t think I’ve heard any other game do. Not the Tomb Raider series, and not even Alan Wake which I will again hold up for having generally fantastic forest settings.

If I absolutely had to find a flaw it would be in the storms. They are very neat. Good wind. Good effects. The way they blow all the trees and bushes is very very impressive. But the lightning… it should be impressive since it can strike down or stay up in the clouds… except I don’t think the bolts are animated. Real lightning moves across the sky. It strikes visibly downward sometimes quickly and sometimes holding a strike that burns and pulses in the air. In game though, it feels like the lightning is nothing more than inanimate do images overlaid into the sky. There’s no strikes or movement. Its just there then its not. Really, this is the minorest point, but it took me a while to figure out why I didn’t think it was perfect so now I’m sharing what I kinda figured out for myself…

Gameplay: Pretty darn good.

http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/Ragashingo/video/23866284

This is not a simple game. There are many systems from combat to crafting to leveling up skills. It doesn’t do everything exactly like you’d first expect but it feels like its one of those games that does things the right way at every turn even if it causes a bit of confusion at first.

The combat is good and fairly crisp. I relate it most closely to Assassin’s Creed where you can hold block to deflect most attacks from people using small weapons. Also how often your attacks can be deflected by a prepared enemy. Except, its better than Assassin’s Creed. For one, its not stuck in that silly system where only one enemy will really attack you at a time. In The Witcher, a pack of wolves, or monsters, or bandits will attack you all at once from multiple angles and ranges if they are able. That’s cool. Combat isn’t hard, exactly, at least not on the default level I’m playing on, but you do have to fight well and stay on your toe as you can really only take a few hits before you’re dead. I think the combat is easy enough if you want it to be but can be turned up to be a real challenge that has you using every advantage you can get.

There are multiple ways to build your character and since you have to equip various powers into a limited number of slots you do need to sorta choose a direction. The level cap is high enough, I think, that you can probably make a very good hybrid character that does melee and magic, for instance, but you’ll really limit your depth into the various skill trees for quite a while until you finally get there. Really, the game wants you to pick a direction and go with it even though it does very little to force you.

The crafting system works pretty well. It can be a little complicated at times, but as long as you do your crafting while at a well stocked vendor you’ll rarely have trouble. I really like the Alchemy system. Instead of blindly mixing things together and hoping to form something useful, you instead know or find recipes for all sorts of useful potions and you’re always finding new recipes. Even better, instead of having to collect ingredients for each dose of a potion you make a potion once and then you’re smart enough to make it again automatically, without having to refind more ingredients, when you rest as long as you have some easily obtainable types of alcohol. This lets you focus on hunting down new recipes and new ingredients for new things instead of constantly having to harvest every single plant you come across just to have enough to make the same old things.

The only real complaint I guess I have is about the constant nagging of the tutorial system. Over time the game will walk you through every singles screen with step by step instructions. This is good at first as it help you do things right as you need to do them. Eventually though, you kinda learn how the game and various screens work… and then you get hit with another series of dialog boxes trying to help you make a potion… or whatever… when you’ve already figured it out on your own a long time ago. Fortunately, you can turn off the mini tutorials in the Display settings once you’re ready to fly solo.

To sum up: I really like this game. It does a fantastic job of selling its world in a way that very few games ever have. It has great stories and great characters and its very rare that you are asked to do something or go somewhere in a “great… another fetch quest…” type manner. It looks great. It sounds great. The combat is as easy or hard as you want it to be. Oh, and you can call your horse to you at almost any time similar to how you can call the Batmobile to you in Arkham Knight. I love that feature!

Recommendation: Buy. Especially if it's still on sale!

Bonus: How NOT to fight a monster:

http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/Ragashingo/video/23865833

P.S. Yennefer.