Now Playing: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Okay so I'm supposed to talk about the game and first impressions, but holy smokes I just got to talk about how awesome CD Projekt red is first even as a guy that's never touched their content before. Well for starters they're against DRM enough to fly in front of steam and say "not good 'nuff, try ours instead" and make their own site called GOG (a great site I recommend ahead of steam if they have the game you want) while still distributing through steam for those happier there. Then they have a no bullshit common PR stance where most of their info and press releases are down to earth and normal, humane, and just kind. I do emphasize most, but I'll get back to that soon. They support pre-orders through physical rewards, remastered their first game and stuffed it with bonuses when they decided the DRM was just too bad long ago, they were confident with their game to let people play it for 12 hours, and then... well and then there's how it directly effected me with seeing a $60 retail copy that claimed bonuses. Open the game up (out of its beautiful DVD-like jacket case) and its so much that the paper holder things literally broke off as I was opening it! We're talking story manuals, physical soundtrack (screw the guys that are shoving this digital nonsense and calling it Collector's editions now, I'm looking at you Sony), a poster, a map, stickers, and at the very front of it all was a red slip of paper that is thanking the gamer, talking about their work, and restating the news that there will be 16 free updates to come for the game.

Of course there will be people out there telling me this is some awful persuasive corporate trick. Fine, yes you can say that and given the normal market I can't totally blame you. There is also the ongoing downgrade controversy (though that's still handled better than most). Still if this is corporate evil, its corporate evil done right (I've been meaning to write about that sometime actually). This stuff makes the consumer feel good, it adds value and collectibles to their product and world. Yes it builds loyalty and gets your fans pumped up, but its out of happiness while others are starving you into corner, asking for loyalty by giving you bread crumbs. However I don't personally even go that far with that idea, I think they're just doing everything right. Build something good and they will come, and then they seem to go out of the way to throw extra incentives to light the way to that good thing, is there anything wrong with that? For what little shoddiness they have down with the possible downgrading, I sure think they've done WAY more good to make it alright. Nobody else I know of goes this far out of the way to make an ordinary gamer buying a normal $60 copy at a wal-mart feel that great, and its just wonderful that they're putting this much good will out there at a time like present. Heck... even if this happened years ago, just look at this stuff! Have you ever had a new game break its own case because it was too much extra content to contain!? That's just flippin' awesome! Between the hype and the extras, its no wonder it was nearly sold out (got the last PS4 copy I was told, and to add to it they actually put it out for sale late and turned some away) Its a collector's edition without the figurine & fancy art book... and I really mean that, just look at it.

This^ is the normal copy. Now compare to this

I just had to talk about how great it feels to see people that understand the free market, and earn their loyalty through work and good will. I feel that much better buying this on day 1 and taking a pretty big risk on a game I wasn't sure about. However what good are bonuses to a game that isn't good? Thankfully that's not the case, because the real question isn't so much as "is it good", rather its "why is it so good?" because I'm not sure why I love it so much, but I just do. My first impressions (which are kind of maybe 10 hours on in at this point) with the game are steadily climbing into the idea of a masterpiece. Despite babbling on about all the extra crap for the first two paragraphs, I actually forgot what was in it the 2nd night I was playing this game because its just one of those games that totally occupies your mind and time for a while, making you forget the simple things like its map, or that there's a helpful lore book, and instead really hooked on the game. I don't quite know what it is about it, but so far this game has been taking everything I typically think about both open world and RPGs and tearing it out in a good way.

RPG stats are fun to keep up with when the combat is meaningful and there's so much to do with it (alchemy, hunting, crafting, dismantling, selling, and a very weird but interesting upgrade system), and the open world is fantastic when its so well crafted and cared for that even your out-of-game screenshots are saved by name of the area. The open world aspect is especially immersive, and if it wasn't for the internet and chores I'd have my life sucked away entirely by it. Its done at a perfect pace where every side quest, every slightly important NPC is given special lines of dialogue with choices, haggling prices, perfectly morally gray twists, and set pieces that inspire a theory on how you may have influenced it differently. The game feels just as much about the story as it does the open world size, and the two tie perfectly together. I don't feel like I'm in some robotic thin stretched world so much as a world full of stories, legends, and possibilities. Its all so unpredictable and so engaging. I can't quite figure out why they made it feel so good compared to say Bioware games, but I guess they just do the talking just enough. Not even once have I felt like there was too much of it. The gameplay itself moves at a similar pace. It might just be my favorite RPG (not counting souls stuff, because that stuff is barely RPG-ish anyways). Oh and the music, while nothing too new, just manages to do something right. I find myself actually paying attention to it, and having it inspire awe in the scenes it plays within. Its not quite on the level of say Skyrim, but its close and feels much better than the typical orchestrated soundtracks. I especially love the softer tracks. I'm so happy the soundtrack comes with the game, and I'm enjoying it now as I type (Cloak & Dagger FTW!).

Love the story, and its pacing is perfect!

Yet despite the massive size marketed on the box and interviews, its actually so many of the small things I love. Maybe cut-scenes and dialogue trees for side-quests is a bigger one of the small touches so I'll just gloss over that again. What really got me was that you have real-time facial hair. Seriously. The fact that I had a long beard after waiting on a wraith mission just got such a weird thrill out of me. Its all the resources at your disposal, the way you logically use nature as your health kits rather than any single dedicated magical source. Its the fact that the animal AI is very realistic, unpredictable, and scared. Its that awesome feeling of piecing together a mystery and tracking things. Or just the little moments and surprises in the middle of missions. Things like that just have me all so happy and thrilled to keep  playing in this amazing new game. Of course I still love the size as its an excuse to keep experiencing it, and it really is massive. However its the small things that keep me really interested... I mean heck, I even got excited over spending 10 minutes in a menu to craft my first armor set, that's just unlike my usual self but Witcher knows how to make the small things interesting.

The weird thing though is that's also where the game sort of stutters on, certain small things. Its actually really weird really. You hear of this being the next big thing in AAA, you hear on how it might be GOTY, and all this hype for a massive project by a team that has been dedicated to giving you high end PC RPG experiences... and yet some of the silliest polish flubs are left clear as daylight. Its nothing actually bad, its just that its amazing how many little oddities are in there. Cut-scene pop-ins, trees that actually fade in and out disappearing as you bump into them, scenes and loads stuttering, laughable quest tracking that might get you lost if you rely on it too hard, camera angles glitching out, and some weird combat hiccups. Its nothing to cry over, but its the kind of combined lack of polish that my mind associates with middle tier obscure games mimicking AAA rather than the next big game. That's not exactly an insult either, while everyone obviously wants the best polish possible the reality is that's tough, but this game is so worth going through regardless. The whole thing has a middle tier charm about it really, aside from just how massive and narratively detailed it is. The combat is different, the inventory feels old school without being terrible, the fixed character is a strange but welcomed change from the norm of the genre, and there's just a lot of neat little things your typical team just doesn't think of. Its great really, and I can tolerate any small glitches as long as it stays away from some of the major stuff some people are reporting (crashes and save issues).

The biggest complaint I do have though is on the combat hiccups I glossed over. Now I'll be loaud about admitting that I'm flawed in fighting and that I could use more practice, but some of these things just aren't my fault. Sometimes rolls or swings don't quite work, both you and enemies just don't connect right all the time, sometimes entire functions lock-up or just decide to take a break on you, and then there was a boss fight I recently had where the sword fighting enemy was not only immune to blocking for an unexplained reason, but would also hurt me if I attacked him while blocking (it wasn't a counter-attack either, it just plain hurt me). Oh and on that last one, it was inconsistent because his block animation sometimes didn't matter and stunned him anyways. I love the combat on paper, but in execution it doesn't even follow its own damn rules and these moments can be a little frustrating. That previously mentioned boss fight ate up pretty much my entire health inventory by the time it was over, but I kind of felt like it was an unnecessary sacrifice if the combat had actually worked right. The worst wasn't actually even that fight though, the worst thing happened during a typical bandit battle in the woods. Riding on horse back, and the very last guy left was low on health when suddenly everything except the steering stopped working. Bow wouldn't fire, sword wouldn't swing, I couldn't get off my horse, and even the bandit was kind of stuck to his position for a bit. I had to nearly die by letting myself get hacked off the horse to get things running again, just to finish off a lone bandit. Thankfully that was a freak occurrence, but still a rather hair pulling one. Funnily enough though one of the best combat encounters was with a werewolf side-quest that out-leveled me (level 3 taking on a level 7 quest) and pushed me to try and try again.

When combat does work, it is great

Still complaining about this game, even something that sounds as important as combat, is like complaining some amazing old treasure you found at an antique shop has a tiny scratch on it. At the end of the day, you've still got something incredible on your hands. I absolutely love this game so far. I'm almost glad R&C got delayed so I could take a risk on this instead. So many times I just find myself saying out load that this game is just "sooooo good!". I've got a bunch of potential youtube videos planned, some exciting quests to venture into, I'm so excited about the main campaign's direction and constant mystery, I'm hoping to see some of the characters return, every new dialogue cut-scene has me excited to hear the conversation exchange and what choices might present themselves, and I keep looking at that map with eyes of wonder thinking "what else is out there....". On top of that I already see a lot of replay potential and a sense of discovery in what was already traveled upon. That goes for everything, choices I made in conversation, the way I did quests, the way I've build my character, and just that curiosity of how I'll do things differently with the knowledge I have on the core mechanics. I just hope this enjoyment lasts, its hard to tell with RPGs. Borderlands had me addicted for a week, and now I never want to look at the series again because I'm so sick of numbered gun stat comparing. So I'm just going to keep my fingers crossed that this game just gets better rather than worse over time, but there's really no telling with RPGs.

Its all enough to make me look at the silly cover quote and acclaim of "defines next-gen" and has me nodding my head. Its a truly new experience for me that capitalizes on features of the old like dialogue cut-scenes and choices, open world explorations, and options while also doing just enough new and specializing in the newer hardware to give it a feeling that nothing else before hand could have contained such a good game. The AI, the scale at which it calculates things like even the beard growth and diverse time and weather, and then even something like the screenshots being named by their area, its all pretty incredible and it feels like Projekt Red  was truly making this special for the present time. Its kind of hard to believe they've only been working on it for 3 years (as claimed on the red slip of paper). It truly does feel next-gen, above and beyond Trials, Killzone, Wolfenstein, Bloodborne, Far Cry 4, and the other games I've played. Though Shadows of mordor comes close with that great nemesis system. That's not to say any of those games are bad or any lesser, but they're all marks of the past in some way where as Witcher 3 just feels so powerfully new and unique to me. Then there's also a rather humorous but good article on how amazing it is that Witcher 3 simply doesn't slow you down with NPCs, as they keep to your pace most of the time. Maybe its just my lack of experience with RPGs or even just the series itself, but I can nod my head and say that this was a risk worth taking traveling to risky and unknown territory, and it feels like it does the best it can in most areas.

Cool

However what's terrible is that I haven't gotten further whenever I've spent time making this long article. :p So if you'll excuse me, its time to go back to Witcher 3. I'm off to track the bog witches and see what they may be up to. Oh and again thanks for being awesome CDPR, I look forward to whatever your next IP may be, and I should probably look into grabbing the original witcher sometime if I end up finishing this one. I'm truly interested in their work at this point, past, present, and future. However one thing at a time, lets get back to witcher 3...

Riding off into the sunset!