Witcher 3 - Candle lighting simulator

The Witcher 3 is the third and final game of the Witcher series. Its based off the popular polish series of books known as Witcher which focuses mainly on Ciri. However the game's protagonist is Geralt, the sort of father figure to Ciri. Why you ask? Well Geralt is a womanizing monster slayer for hire which sounds more interesting than Ciri, the little girl who was kidnapped, raped by bandits, saved by Geralt, taken to train as a witcher, being the daughter of the Nilfgaardian emperor who wants to fuck her and create a child of prophecy, and travelling through multiple worlds to stop the wild hunt. The game isn't a retelling of the book, its a continuation of the story where the book ended. In the book, Geralt has already died, but was revived in the game and suffers amnesia.

To quickly sum up the story of the first two games, spoilers incoming, Geralt wakes up without his memories at Kaer Morhen, home of the Witcher school of the Wolf. There he meets his fellow Witchers and a sorceress called Triss Merigold. Triss claims you two are in love and then suddenly a group called Salamandra attacks and steals the secret Witcher mutagens used to create new Witchers. Then everyone separates to hunt them down and you end up at Vizima where you meet your old friends the bard Dandelion, and drunken dwarf Zoltan Chivay. Here you do odd jobs while hunting Salamandra and eventually end up wiping them out and while collecting your reward from King Foltest of Temeria you accidentally saves him from a Witcher assassin. That concludes the first game.

The second game, you reluctantly became King Foltest's bodyguard because no one says no to a king. While attacking a castle King Foltest was killed by a Witcher pretending to be a blind monk. You were captured and thrown in the dungeon for being suspected of being the king slayer. The king slayer has been going around murdering multiple kings. In the dungeon you meet Roche, the leader of the Temerian Blue Stripes. He busts you out if you agree to help him find the king slayer. If you pick no, you get shot in the back by a crossbow and die so you have to pick yes. There you sail to flotsam where the local leader has you do odd work for him and you end up having to capture the leader of the local terrorist group called the Scoatail called Iorveth. They are fighting for the freedom of all non humans that are constantly subject to racism. The game surprising will split into two based on who you choose to help. Roche, or Iorveth. Roche focuses more on the politics of the northern kingdoms, while Iorveth focuses more on the king slayer and the Lodge of Sorceresses, a secret organization of the most powerful sorceresses, many advisors to the kings of the northern kingdom, and their plot to assassinate the kings. Either way the game ends when many of the kings are killed, the northern kingdom in shambles Kaedwen, Aerdin, Temeria were lost, and Redania ends up taking in all the land they used to occupy. The lodge was found and a witch hunt started to kill all magic users and Nilfgaard from the south taking this chance to invade the northern kingdoms.

NOW THAT WE GOT THAT SHIT OUT OF THE WAY. You might be going this is a lot of fucking shit to take in. And the developers thought of that. Instead of calling it Witcher 3, they changed the name to Witcher: The Wild Hunt. Technically its still Witcher 3 but the trailers will never mention the 3 and the number 3 becomes slash marks on the screen that still looks like 3 but becomes more like a design than an actual number. This is because they don't want people to be overwhelmed to start a game like the Witcher 3 and expected to play the first two games of the series. This is partially why Dragon Age Inquisition was called that instead of Dragon Age 3. The game does a really good job letting you catch up and learn everything of what happened in the previous game through cut scenes and quests. However, if you want to, you can read through the game's ingame Glossary. Its as big as Mass Effect's and it will explain everything and everyone you've met. You don't have to read it but it will give you additional information if you wanted to learn more. Another thing is the ability to pick your choices from the previous games if you wish to personalize Geralt's quest more. You don't need to fucking sign up on a dumb website and spend 5 hours doing that shit like Dragon Age Inquisition. No, a Nilfgaardian Officer will ask you a series of questions for book keeping purposes. How you answer these questions will affect the game.

The main difference from the first two games is that Witcher 3 is an open world game. I am not a big fan of open world games. I always end up wandering around too much doing side quests, forgetting main quests, and then quitting the game after dicking around for a couple of weeks on side quests. However since this was a Witcher game, my expectations for this game was through the roof. The game turned out better than I ever could have expected. However there are still many issues that the game suffers from. We will get into that later. But first to focus on the open world. The game is split into several large areas. White Orchard is a bit smaller and is a sort of tutorial area. After completing your first contract quest you are then thrown into the main storyline where the emperor of Nilfgaard orders you to find Ciri for him. There you are free to explore 3 areas, the swamps of Velen which are currently being governed by the bloody baron and the three crones, the free city of Novigrad which is neutral to the war but mostly taken over by Redania, and the islands of Skellige which are home to the viking warriors. These three areas are much larger than the one you see at White Orchard and they are somewhat level locked but not entirely.

You are free to roam anywhere at any time. To get into Novigrad you will need a pass which you can get from completing the questline in Velen with the bloody baron or buy a pass from a shady merchant. You can even sneak in if you like, which was exactly the way I first got in. I jumped into the river and swam my way in. Skellige however, requires a boat and it costs 1000 orens you get to which is a hefty sum early on in the game. Unlike other open world games, the monsters don't scale with you. The quests, the monsters you see are all set at a certain level. You could find a level 30 quest early on when you're level 8 and you will have to wait until the end of the game to actually go back and complete them. While Velen is the lowest level of the three zones it also contains some of the highest level areas so be careful where you search. If you don't save often while exploring you might accidentally stumble onto high level enemies that kill you in one hit sending you way back to your last save point. While quests don't scale to your level, items that drop does. This is one of the most annoying things to have to deal with. Say you are level 18, and you do a level 26 quest. The reward is a sword but it scales down to level 18 so you can use but now you are missing a good weapon that you could use when you reach 26 rather than a useless shitty sword you'll replace by doing a equal level quest.

The opposite isn't true when scaling items. You could be over leveled and skipped out on the main questline. After going back much later the NPC hands you the sword wielded by the old king of Skellige, the legendary sword handed down in his family for generations. He entrusts this sword to you to help battle the Wild Hunt. You reluctantly accept something of such value but once you look at it in your inventory you go what the fuck? This thing is still level 19 and the bandits on the road are dropping level 26 swords. I don't want this fucking garbage. So much for being a legendary sword. Scaling items are out of whack in this game. There are many times where I am doing a high level quest only to be rewarded with a lower level item. While other times, a lower level quest rewards me with a much higher level item that I cannot wear until much later. However, the majority of the time you're getting so many swords that are relics, named swords but in multiples. I've found at least 3-4 copies of almost every sword in the game and they are all at different levels depending on when I found them. You'll end up selling everything and finding an upgrade is a pain in the ass. you'll keep getting low level swords until suddenly a level bumps you over the edge and you start getting swords that are much higher level than you. The best way for upgrades, however not the easiest, is to craft them but that requires you to search all over the world in obscure places to find them. I found a level 37 sword recipe in a unmarked shipwreck in Velen. By the time I finished the game, I still wasn't high enough to use it so it was completely wasted.

Open world and scaling issues aside, the game's story and characters are great. The world isn't pretty, people are not going to go out of their way to help you. You are not a hero, you are not saving the world, and you don't say no to kings. I like it better this way. You are just a nobody. A witcher is a hated profession but a needed one. People will tolerate you only long enough for you to complete a contract and then tell you to piss off to the next place. You are not all powerful, you don't have godlike abilities. You may be a Witcher, a mutant with enhanced reflexes but you still fall victim to monsters, mages, and highly trained soldiers. You specialize in monsters, people can still take you out. In the war torn lands, you will see people murdering, robbing, raping, torturing, and doing all sorts of stuff and you can turn a blind eye or try to help. You might think helping is the right thing to do but it really isn't all the time. There is no black or white only different shades of evil. That person you saved on the side of the road could've been a murderer or rapist. You help one person only for him to come back and murder the entire town with his crew. Or you stop some humans from harassing an elf only to have her call you out on your bullshit. You're not doing it for her, you're doing it for yourself. She still has to live with them, while you walk away feeling good about what you did. The choices you make usually do not affect anything right away. Its many hours later, after many quests have passed that you realized what a mistake you made and how you fucked over everything and it was probably better not to have gotten involved after all.

While a lot of quests make you throw up in your mouth a little bit. Seeing people dragged away, tortured and raped with nothing you can do to help them. Some quests are funny and/or entertaining. You can't have the entire game be dark or everyone will get depressed. The quests with Ciri are uplifting and even the romance is interesting. When you lost your memory, Triss pretended to be your lover so you would sleep with her but once your memory returned, you threw her away because you're supposed to be in love with your old lover Yennefer. There is a love triangle here and Yennefer is a little bit, well a lot ticked off at the whole situation while Triss is genuinely apologetic of what happened. See these two are friends, and in the book Geralt has always been with Yennefer. She is manipulative, arrogant, and incredibly demanding. While Triss lets you do whatever you want as long as you love her. The times you talk to Yennefer you can't help but go "holy fuck this woman is pissing me off."But you cannot hate her because you can really respect her straightforwardness. She knows what she wants and you better do it for her or there will be hell to pay. Whatever you do don't piss her off. When she threw the bed you and Triss used out the window you can ask her about it and she will tell you she doesn't want to talk about it. If you press on she goes "You want to talk about it? Ok how about for the last year while I was going around looking for Ciri you've been shacking up with my friend." You can pick "I lost my memory" as an excuse like what I did and she responds with a "Well I lost my patience," and summons a portal behind you then kick you in only to teleport you high above a lake where you fall into and have to swim back to shore and spend another 5-10 minutes to run back to where she was. Triss is the safe pick where she will love you no matter what you do and is boring.

Anyways I'm just rambling on now. Basically the story is great and you aren't expected to save the world. No that is Ciri's job. When she goes on to stop the white frost you can say things to her but she'll just respond with, "What do you know about saving the world, you're just a witcher." That fucking sums up the entire game. Its not an epic story of Geralt doing great deeds. The Witcher books were short stories that focuses on Geralt's adventure. Think of this as Geralt going on small adventures in the books. You don't have to take on the fucking hellspawn, or stop the reapers from invading the galaxy, you don't become the dragonborn and rule the world, no you just look for Ciri, and act like a father figure to her. How you act will affect her future. Does she become the empress of Nilfgaard? Or will she reject it all and become a witcher like you. Some people might not like this though. Someone I know was mad that he could not affect politics, he didn't want a game where he couldn't sway the kings, he wanted a power fantasy where he could rule the world and do whatever he wants. If you want that, try another game.

Now that we got through the good shit, lets talk about the annoying parts of the game. Combat in this game isn't as great as the storyline. Its still fun but the ability points you get when leveling up are a little lacking. You have three trees that focuses on sword combat, magic, and potions. The potion tree is really shitty. I honestly would not advise anyone to put points into it. I mostly focused on magic. While magic doesn't mean you stop using your weapon, it means the spells you weave in between your attacks do a little bit more. The majority of the skills are just increase damage by 5% or such in the tree with 5 possible points into it. Once you add more points into the tree you unlock more. I would rather it be like Witcher 2 where you had less skill points but each point changes something dramatically instead of just doing slightly more damage. In combat you will automatically lock onto an enemy. If you want to turn around and run because you accidentally stumbled into a high level area, Geralt doesn't turn tail and run he will keep looking at the direction of the monster and start backstepping even if you turn your camera around. This can get you killed. You have to spam your roll button to get away far enough that you cannot lock onto the target. Jumping any kind of distance higher than your ankles will break your legs and take huge amounts of damage. I don't get it, you're a trained witcher and you fall off a box and take 50% of your health. God forbid you trip over that hill. You end up dying and having to reload back at an old save. I honestly died more times from falling than from monsters. Hell I eat so much food to regenerate my health only because I can't stop myself from taking fall damage everywhere I go.

The camera and Geralts controls are really finicky. I'm not sure if its because I'm using a controller but a lot of mouse and keyboard players also noticed these issues. There was a patch that claimed to fix these issues but it really didn't. One issue is turning Geralt around sharply or near a door/object. Geralt will start running in circles crashing into everything. You can't just turn. You will run forward, the camera will turn and then Geralt turns around but by that time you already over shot the door and is now stuck on the other side. Climbing up ladders is the biggest pain in the ass because of where you have to stand and how stupid Geralt moves. Then there is the whole candle shit that pissed off a lot of people. The developers put a bunch of candles everywhere because it makes things look pretty. But when you're trying to loot a box and there happens to be a candle on top of it, you'll end up lighing that candle and blowing it out over and over again. They put these candles everywhere. Like is this a candle lighting simulator or a fucking witcher game. Why are there so many candles everywhere. You'll need to fidget the screen around until you can click whatever is under the candles. This can get pretty tedious. While the patch I noticed helped a bit but its still a pretty prevalent issue considering how many candles there are in the game.

Honestly I can keep talking about this game for way more because this is how much I enjoyed this game. This is the best game I have ever played and it will probably remain that way for a long time. I don't see anything coming along that will top this. Despite the small problems, it really isn't a big deal compared to the rest of the good. If you are a lover of RPGs, do not pass this game up. It may look intimidating because you haven't played the first two but its really not needed to play the third. The game does a really good job of this. Its not like Mass Effect 3 where you magically end up in a prison and some meathead guy shows up and the game expects you to have played every DLC and read every comic.