It'd be so easy to call this game perfectly imperfect and move on. It's been nearly a decade since this game first came out, after all, and there's nothing to be said about The Witcher 3 that hasn't already been said. A brief summary of my take on the core game?
Its opening 30 or so hours are some of the strongest in all of gaming, so thoroughly engrossing and complicated that it can be all too easy to notice that the game essentially coasts from that point onward on the strength of those opening world building moments and character work in Velen.
While it's important to maintain perspective here - primarily, how pioneering much of the work done here was, much the same as a Super Mario Bros. or Resident Evil 4 for their respective genres - it's just as important to recognize this game isn't foundational in nearly the same ways. Gameplay is clunky, menus far too cumbersome on consoles (that they couldn't get item descriptions to load instantly on PS5 is pretty insane) and more than anything the main story screeches to an absolute halt for dozens of hours once you reach Novigrad, only to ramp back up into a stereotypical apocalypse scenario complete with a raid-like experience and some boss battles whose "epicness" strains against an engine that can't portray that level of action in its cutscenes nor offer anything unique in its combat scenarios.
I've decided to review the DLCs as their own things as I get to them because, well, I might take a break from this for a bit but also because their grandeur honestly deserves to be addressed separately, but I've always imagined a world in which the Wild Hunt and the search for Ciri was paired back considerably if not completely removed from the game so CD Projekt could have just brought Hearts of Stone or Blood and Wine into the main game to begin with. It's when the witcher be witchin' that The Witcher 3 is at its highest highs, and too much of the base game gets mired in Save the World theatrics.
So if this isn't a purely nostalgic experience, I could see someone coming to Witcher 3 fresh, on a PS5 in 2022/23, wondering what all the fuss is about eventually. But I also struggle to envision who that person would be, because as I said even knowing all the beats the first 20-40 hours of this game is so damn excellent...and 40 hours ain't nothin' anyway!
Lastly, while the PS5 upgrade introduces console players to some new Eurojank experiences - and this was already a notoriously wrinkly game, one that I'm reminded I ultimately dropped back in 2015 for Batman: Arkham Knight while the kinks got worked out - that are pretty unfortunate at times (the autosave system being capable of hard locking the entire game, for example) the upgrades by and large are extremely worth it.
Over about 80 hours I played the game roughly half-and-half with map markers turned off and then on, further calcifying my feeling that it's not the map markers that ruin open world games for some people so much as their compulsion to complain about games letting them know where the fun can be found. Much like playing Elden Ring and Horizon: Forbidden West side-by-side this time last year, I understand the novelty of stumbling around Kovir and getting into trouble completely on my own while also deeply appreciating that I could turn Witcher 3 into a podcast game and grind out bandit camps when it came time to line my pockets and start playing the fashion side of the Witcher experience.
Probably the most important upgrades are to the lighting, which are starkly obvious in comparison screenshots but an absolute miracle in motion. This game sometimes approaches Red Dead Redemption levels of atmospheric beauty now, and recasting every possible source of light as such makes the world feel fundamentally modern despite the immense weight of its old bones. On the whole, The Witcher 3 is launched back into the conversation for best looking game around, which is just bizarre to me.
Last of my last notes in this, lol, "brief" review: I love the new Signs system. It makes the combat so much more fluid and a Sign build far more interesting on consoles than it was originally.
This game is still funny as sin, too.
Its opening 30 or so hours are some of the strongest in all of gaming, so thoroughly engrossing and complicated that it can be all too easy to notice that the game essentially coasts from that point onward on the strength of those opening world building moments and character work in Velen.
While it's important to maintain perspective here - primarily, how pioneering much of the work done here was, much the same as a Super Mario Bros. or Resident Evil 4 for their respective genres - it's just as important to recognize this game isn't foundational in nearly the same ways. Gameplay is clunky, menus far too cumbersome on consoles (that they couldn't get item descriptions to load instantly on PS5 is pretty insane) and more than anything the main story screeches to an absolute halt for dozens of hours once you reach Novigrad, only to ramp back up into a stereotypical apocalypse scenario complete with a raid-like experience and some boss battles whose "epicness" strains against an engine that can't portray that level of action in its cutscenes nor offer anything unique in its combat scenarios.
I've decided to review the DLCs as their own things as I get to them because, well, I might take a break from this for a bit but also because their grandeur honestly deserves to be addressed separately, but I've always imagined a world in which the Wild Hunt and the search for Ciri was paired back considerably if not completely removed from the game so CD Projekt could have just brought Hearts of Stone or Blood and Wine into the main game to begin with. It's when the witcher be witchin' that The Witcher 3 is at its highest highs, and too much of the base game gets mired in Save the World theatrics.
So if this isn't a purely nostalgic experience, I could see someone coming to Witcher 3 fresh, on a PS5 in 2022/23, wondering what all the fuss is about eventually. But I also struggle to envision who that person would be, because as I said even knowing all the beats the first 20-40 hours of this game is so damn excellent...and 40 hours ain't nothin' anyway!
Lastly, while the PS5 upgrade introduces console players to some new Eurojank experiences - and this was already a notoriously wrinkly game, one that I'm reminded I ultimately dropped back in 2015 for Batman: Arkham Knight while the kinks got worked out - that are pretty unfortunate at times (the autosave system being capable of hard locking the entire game, for example) the upgrades by and large are extremely worth it.
Over about 80 hours I played the game roughly half-and-half with map markers turned off and then on, further calcifying my feeling that it's not the map markers that ruin open world games for some people so much as their compulsion to complain about games letting them know where the fun can be found. Much like playing Elden Ring and Horizon: Forbidden West side-by-side this time last year, I understand the novelty of stumbling around Kovir and getting into trouble completely on my own while also deeply appreciating that I could turn Witcher 3 into a podcast game and grind out bandit camps when it came time to line my pockets and start playing the fashion side of the Witcher experience.
Probably the most important upgrades are to the lighting, which are starkly obvious in comparison screenshots but an absolute miracle in motion. This game sometimes approaches Red Dead Redemption levels of atmospheric beauty now, and recasting every possible source of light as such makes the world feel fundamentally modern despite the immense weight of its old bones. On the whole, The Witcher 3 is launched back into the conversation for best looking game around, which is just bizarre to me.
Last of my last notes in this, lol, "brief" review: I love the new Signs system. It makes the combat so much more fluid and a Sign build far more interesting on consoles than it was originally.
This game is still funny as sin, too.