An Ode to The Witcher 3

At the 2015 Game Awards, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt picked up not just the overall Game of the Year award, but also won best RPG of the year while CD Projekt Red was named the Developer of the Year.  While these awards by themselves are not always representative of a game, they do take the opinions of many veterans in the video game critic circle into consideration. On a completely unrelated note, The Witcher 3 is also my favorite game of 2015. This an ode to a game that I loved playing, so don’t expect to find any criticism here.

The Witcher 3 was one of my most anticipated games of the past few years because I loved The Assassins of Kings and also because I was curious how CD Projekt Red’s ambitious vision would manifest as a game. The gameplay videos seemed promising and I was ready to sink dozens of hours into the world of Geralt, considering that it was going to come out in the summer. From my first experience with the game, I was blown away. The final game in Geralt’s trilogy seemed like an immensely ambitious idea that could have misfired horribly. It was nothing like CDPR had ever done before and was miles ahead of The Witcher 2 in scope. I immediately knew that I was in for something special.

Fortunately, the gloves came off very early in the game and I was given the freedom to explore the massive open-world as I wished, with the caveat that enemies all over the world could potentially be much more powerful than I was. This led to my immersion in the game’s world while also letting me play the game the way I wanted. In fact, I don’t think I followed the main questline seriously until I was already about 15 hours into the game. As I discovered, the game was designed with this non-linear approach in mind and this was abundantly reflected by the game’s world. I would sometimes find a quest in a deserted town in the middle of nowhere. The NPCs that I came across in my journey around the world would also react organically to my exploits over the course of the game. In one of the later quests, I managed to slay a giant – a feat that NPCs whispered to each other when I passed them a few hours later. This dynamic nature of the world was not just restricted to the NPCs; even the minutiae of the game like Geralt’s beard or the weather was perpetually changing.

The Witcher 3 was, as you can tell, an extremely atmospheric game. When I rode my horse, Roach, through an idyllic village, listening to Polish folk music, I was unaware of anything that was happening around me. Incidentally, The Witcher 3 might have had the best score in a game this year. The three dozen or so tracks on that soundtrack seemed like they were created  for specific parts of the game. Those scenes were elevated by the music to a large extent. The sound design as a whole is excellent in the game, whether you’re in the busy city of Novigrad, or the rustic hills of Velen. These smaller details immersed me in the game’s world, which is, in my opinion, the point of video games.

While these aspects may have seemed like fluff in any other game, The Witcher 3 was, at its core, an excellent RPG. CDPR streamlined and improved upon the RPG elements of The Assassins of Kings; Geralt’s signs, combat skills, stats, and potion brewing skills were at the center of a system that was reminiscent of classic RPGs. As a result, gameplay was shaped, in a large part, by the way I levelled up ‘my’ Geralt. At first I shied away from the signs, leaning more towards a combat heavy Geralt, before changing my mind and making my Geralt a badass spell caster. I was relieved that the game retained its RPG roots, considering how RPGs are slowly becoming more streamlined; there’s something special about bringing up a menu and planning an elaborate attack involving bombs, potions, and oils. The gameplay loop did not get exhausting, as it so often does in such massive games.

This great system could have easily been undermined by underwhelming combat gameplay, but this was not the case. The Witcher 3 had interesting swordplay, not too far from its predecessor’s, but also solid enough to tie the game together. I actually thought that the combat was closer to that in the Souls games than the fast paced, freely flowing combat in action games. The system of dodging and slashing also seemed much more challenging at higher difficulty settings, and as a result, more rewarding. I especially liked how the game pulled me away from fervent button mashing – something that games often embrace.

One of the strengths of the game was its structuring of quests. They never seem tedious and the care taken by CDPR to craft the quests as a less mechanical and more organic part of the game was apparent. There is no defined structure to the quests in the game. Even the Witcher contracts, something that could have quickly become repetitive, manages to stay interesting for the entirety of the game. The quests could sometimes be of monumental importance to Geralt’s world, just as they could involve goats and silliness. As a result, I found myself doing side quests even after the completion of the main story.

The other big pillar of a game is its story and CDPR did not disappoint on that front either. There was the main questline that I started the game with, but the real story of the Witcher 3 was what I made of it. It could have been the story of a cruel Witcher who plundered every town he crossed on his journey, or that of a benevolent vigilante who tried to help the oppressed people. What I didn’t realize when I started the game was that my choices over the course of the game had far reaching consequences – a mainstay of Telltale games, for example. Indeed, there were about three dozen different endings that I could have seen. As I saw the impacts of my choices build up, I realized, not just how ambitious the game really was, but also how far storytelling had progressed in video games. In one of the side quests, I was given the choice to kill a werewolf or let him go, for instance.

The way the narrative unfolded in the various side quests, Witcher contracts, and the main quest was reminiscent of mainstays of high fantasy viz. The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire. Characters were fleshed out and as a result, seemed more relatable. At the same time, the storylines surrounding these characters seldom employed clichés and cheap plot devices and instead, kept the player engaged with intelligent writing. While I’m hardly the first person to say this, the questline with the Bloody Baron involved some of the best writing of the year, period. Making moral decisions involving his life was the icing on the metaphorical cake.

Actually, I take that back. The best part of the narrative, at least for me, was the social commentary that CD Projekt Red peppered into the game. When I went to Novigrad for the first time, I noticed some guards being racist towards some elves in the background. At the time, I barely paid any attention to that scene. However, there were multiple quests in Novigrad that tackled the real issue of racism tactfully. The game also delved into sexism and other relevant social issues and none of them seemed like an afterthought. Rather, the developers had something important to say in the context of Geralt’s world.

Although people forget about them, CD Projekt Red’s great business practices also deserves praise. The game received their continual support well after its release; the upcoming ‘Blood and Wine’ expansion adds 20 hours to the game and according to the developers, ‘is better than the main game’. It also came with thirteen free DLCs, one of them being an entirely new Game Plus mode. They also deserve praise for creating an amazing game and experience, which made me go through a range of emotions and always kept me engaged. The Witcher 3 epitomized games for me and its success also has me hopeful for CD Projekt Red’s next venture.