Playing A Game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt PC

Geralt, being a man of considerable influence, has many decisions to make throughout his journey. And as I've progressed in that journey, these decisions have come to resemble some of my least favorite parts of BioWare's games, Telltale's games, et al. More and more, I'm finding that the choice descriptions aren't really what I expected.

To wit, in my last few exchanges of words, options which I thought were cunning and sneaky ... immediately triggered open conflict and resulted in piles of bodies at my feet. Whoops.

But, Witcher 3 considerably softens the impact of this problem by just being fun and interesting either way. Sometimes I'll wonder about how things might have gone; but only one time did I bother looking that up online, afterward. (The time with the magic talking tree, which I was pretty sure was evil.)

When Geralt starts saying the opposite of what I meant to say, and an NPC gets all mad about it -- I'm just like, well, get ploughed I guess. And then he does.

I think it's fair to say that this game gets away with more than it might've, due to the strength of its narrative craftsmanship. I don't even mind seeing repeated NPC models, and hearing the same background voice actor, from time to time. The quality of that voice acting, and the thematic heft of their writing, is consistently effective at immersing me in their world.

Even beyond that baseline immersion, the events and characters in the game's main quests have been particularly thrilling. Witcher 3's plot structure is pretty damn smart: The high-level goal is simple and succinct, and following its trail continually pulls in other subplots, which have their own breadcrumbs to follow and backstories to pull from. Not only are the subplots more-than-sufficiently intriguing on their own; they also frequently refer back to the main story, keeping the whole scale of the plot visible.

I think it's the best attempt I've seen yet at telling a compelling story in an open world. Compare to, say, Skyrim which partitioned each of its storylines into a neat little package; preventing them from interfering with one another, but also limiting the strength of any one story. Or Batman: Arkham City which bet most of its chips on a rollercoaster ride of a main story, such that any diversions from that - including the story's own diversions, like the random appearance of a Mr. Freeze or a Ra's al-Ghul - just felt like they got in the way. Or Breath of the Wild which avoided storytelling awkwardness by not really telling a story at all.

Witcher 3 uses that simple, heirarchical plot structure to pull off a compelling narrative and make its diversions feel well-paced. This is a great approach to writing, and I hope other open world games are taking notice of it.

Progress: Level 14, investigating a heist.

Rating: Awesome