Done all the question marks/sidequests in Toussaint and more than half of the B&W storyline, then watched all the endings on YT.
I think I'm finally finished with the game, just couldn't bring myself to play any more of it. From a technical standpoint it's been the clunkiest title I've played last year and the gameplay was rather shallow (yes, I’ve used everything at my disposal but for the majority of time there was no point as the game offered no challenge whatsoever). From 10 hours in to 120 hours in I've been doing the same thing over and over again as the majority of quests followed the same basic outline. Some of them were brilliant, I admit, but it was too much to take in. It all started to feel samey after a while.
Don't really get the hype for the main storyline either. It's really basic when you look past all those flashy dialogue bits that serve no particular purpose apart from amusing the player. All you ever do is search for people and play the errand boy. Everything appears to stand still for 80% of the game. When things finally pick up, it’s all over in a flash with no proper build-up and the ending just falls flat. The narrative feels fragmented and lacks focus, unlike the story in Witcher 2. Of course, there are characters, missions and dialogue bits that are exceptional but they’re far and in between. Many feel like filler material to pad out the story.
Stories from both expansions are significantly better and when you combine them, you get something of far superior quality than the entire base game.
The game’s very big but I couldn’t escape the feeling it’s just big for the sake of it. Witcher 2 handled its plot a lot better, you were dealing with a lot more political machinations and slowly uncovering the motives of the actions. It also had a world size better suited to what it could actually offer in terms of gameplay variety. Witcher 3 doesn’t.
It occasionally reached brilliance but most of the time it was balancing somewhere between "decent" and " very good" and sometimes it was downright boring. I've been let down by the huge graphics downgrade, then by the main story being as cliché as they get and terribly padded out, then lack of challenge and useless loot/upgrades (B&W addressed some of that by making stuff ridiculously expensive, though I still ended up with 140000 crowns after getting my Mastercrafted Feline and Wolven Gear). The final nail in the coffin were the animations and the general clunkiness of traversal which made exploration a bit of a chore.
Maybe I just expected too much after all the hype and I know it’s mostly a matter of opinion but I just can’t quite fathom how it’s being called the BEST game ever made left and right… Any other title with such flaws would be torn to shreds but not this one, for some weird reason.
It doesn’t have the best gameplay mechanics ever, far from it. It doesn’t offer the most balanced challenge and its RPG foundations are just indisputably flawed. The graphics are uneven and I’ve encountered more annoying glitches than in Fallout 4, which says something. The main story is cliché and played out exactly as I thought it would. You find/rescue your daughter, gather a team and have an epic fight with the grand evil which wasn’t really that epic, unfortunately. Some of the choices were nice but that was it, really.
I understand it’s supposed to excel “as a total package” but doesn’t that mean all the individual elements have to be way above average? And what does this game do that’s never been done before or is really exceptionally good? Gameplay? Fighting system? Animations? Challenge? Brilliantly functioning interface? Variety? Most of that is average, slightly above average or in the worst case scenario, below average.
The only things I can think of are its scale (which starts to work against it not that far into the game, unfortunately), rather good dialogue and some very clever sidequests with amusing outcomes. And maybe the main storyline if you like predictable fantasy. I've played quite a lot of better written titles with IMO better characters and more engaging plots. It’s as if the overabundance of dialogue was there solely for the purpose of hiding the shallowness of the gameplay and its rather repetitive nature (a complaint that can be raised for most games, but then again there are few which exhaust their formulas to such a degree and are equally lengthy).
If the above are enough to make it the best game ever made then I guess this distinction could apply to quite a lot of other games as well. Based on writing/dialogue alone, The Last of Us; a quite short, linear game; would’ve had to get Game of the Century just for the way it portrays the characters’ emotions, the way they speak, interact etc.
And that was only one example. I struggle to find a single groundbreaking thing about the story in comparison to stuff like Soul Reaver, Silent Hill, Ryu Ga Gotoku, Snake Eater, Red Dead Redemption, Alice: Madness Returns, ICO, Journey, Bioshock, Heavy Rain and countless others.
Maybe I’m overly critical but I'm judging it from "the best game ever made" perspective.
I still enjoyed quite a bit of my time with it but I’m glad it’s finally over. Rather surprised at myself since I loved W2 to death.
