It took me roughly around 80-90 hours to complete the game’s main story quest on my first playthrough (since then I have accumulated over 800 hours over all). It’s hard to tell how long exactly, because I did a huge part of the side quests and explorations, but also because the timer in the stats page was bugged sometimes. This is a game that is worth so much more than the price CD Projekt RED placed on it. And today it’s even cheaper!
Before I started writing my Witcher 3 Review, I had just recently finished a few other great Single Player games. While they are not the best over all, they all held me tight until the very end and this is an important quality.
The titles are Dragon Age: Inquisition, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and then comes The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Hands down I admit the best by far is the 3rd mentioned one. It is so detailed, so polished, complicated enough and well written, that it leaves no place for any competition.
The Difficulty
The Witcher 3 starts slow, introducing you in the most perfect way into the gameplay. It offers 4 difficulty levels. More than enough for every player, nub or a veteran, to choose.
I personally started with 2/4 or the so called “Normal Difficulty”, where I will not get murdered with 1 swing, but it involves just about enough tactics and strategy movements and planing to get you going. Later on I switched to the 3/4 or as the developers called it “Blood and Broken Bones” (BBB :Р).
As I was gaining levels, I realized my explorations were paying off very well and I was stacking up resources and money through the roof already. It was time to challenge myself. The challenge provided by “BBB” was decent and made me reload on a couple of boss fights until I master the tactics and plan the potions usage correctly.
The Graphics
Insanely good. That enough? No. Ok, let’s continue. The visuals of the 3rd Witcher game are unbelievable. I need to seriously think to be able to find a decent competitor graphics wise. Right, I know, it’s not the top of the top, but for this genre, this type of gameplay, this crazy huge open world with minimum loading scenes and free traveling, it’s just a fantastic looking game. And the backgrounds, the scenery. Oh, my! You can sit on a rock and stare at the nearby forest or hill or something else endlessly. Understandably, it all comes at a pretty high cost.
My PC Hardware specs are very decent. With absolutely everything on max, I still managed to run the game with a very decent frame-rate. Usually around 50-55 with the normal drops at times down to 45 and in smaller spaces it was a stable 60. 60, because I used Adaptive Sync to help lower the amount of tearing.
I have had no intentions of benchmarking the game while playing it, so Adaptive Sync was a good idea, I thought. Sure, in smaller and emptier areas, the FPS would have reached higher numbers. Probably even 80-90, but in all fairness, I don’t need my game to run at 80FPS when my monitor is limited to 60.
The Gameplay
I probably should have started with this, because it’s the most appealing aspect of any similar game. Left it here, so you will have to go through the build-up stages to reach this. The Gameplay section is really the best of all.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is so packed with stories and cinematic cutscenes, at times I found myself asking Is really Bioware still the leader in this aspect of the RPG genre or did CD Projekt RED overtake the throne. I have to admit, I did not play the first 2 games and only recently started reading the tales (books).
Remain calm, I did a lot of research and got myself familiar with Geralt’s adventures in good details to get the grasp of the global situation and the big picture. By the way, the books are absolutely a must read for a fan of this type of games and literature. They are concentrating mostly on one person, Geralt, but all the stories are really well written and Andrzej Sapkowski has done an outstanding job with the series.
Hmm, any change you didn’t know that the Witcher games are based on books? I guess we all knew that. But… leaving this fact here. Just in case.
The Bad Things
Really a hard task – pointing out the bad things in the game. If I had to mention something, it would probably be the overextended cutscenest at times.
There are moments in the main quest where you watch a cutscene for over 40-50 minutes with barely being involved in a dialogue choices or any other form of player activity. These are very rare, though, and don’t hurt the gameplay at all. Or very, very little maybe. Another thing would be the weird start. If you are a nub (like myself) when you start the game, you should do it on one of the first 2 difficulties.
BBB is not easy, unless you come from Witcher 1 and 2 as a great veteran of the series. Third weakness I’d have to point out is the requirements. While the game delivers more than it asks for, the hardware demands are still pretty steep.
If you own Nvidia GPU, you can benefit from the realistic hair effects, which is not only limited to the player character, but can be extended at a very little extra cost to other characters, including monsters. I am sure there are more weaknesses, but they are so unimportant and easy to skip, like a bug I encountered in the very last quest, where Yenn refused to move and kept screaming at me for not sitting like a target next to her.
I don’t want to go and list them all. Every game has its issues.
The Conclusion
There is no end! I don’t wish this to end. I played the game with 15 out of 16 DLCs installed (missing the New Game +, which was not beneficial for a first run any way). They are all FREE DLCs!!! Had it patched to v.1.0.8. My hardware specs can be seen here.
The game is amazing. I still have a lot of side quests to do. By the way, the game leads you very nicely through the quests, urges you to save often and on different slots, gives you plenty of warnings before it punishes you for not completing a side quest before it automatically fails it for you after you progress through a specific moment of the story.
The time I spent with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was fantastic and I am very eager to finish the “quest markers” as well as all the contracts and side quests I have left unfinished in order to go save the world until it’s not too late.
I waited until now with the Walkthough on my VulkkVideos YouTube channel, because alongside the gameplay I wanted to share insights, suggestions, tips and other useful and valuable information. When you know the story from start to end, it’s easier to determine which quest is important, which NPC needs its story to be told to you, the viewer and it helps me a lot with knowing what to edit and how to present it for better viewing experience.
