So now we’re going to talk about the gameplay.
Part of the difficulty of talking about the gameplay of The Witcher 3 is that it’s a hugely influential game--some of the games I played in the past few years (I’m mostly thinking Assassin’s Creed, but it’s not the only one) take lots of cues from this game. A video game this big and successful gets a lot of imitators, and I played it five years after it came out, so I suspect that some of my criticism and comments on the gameplay are going to sound kind of dumb.
But we’re going to try anyway.
If there’s one thing that I think works as an overall criticism of the way the game works, in multiple different parts of the game, is that there are alot of complicated ways to do things, and not a lot of incentive to dive into it. Sticking with more basic approaches will almost always get you through any part of the game.
COMBAT
Combat in this game is, for the most part, loads of fun. It’s not difficult to work out the basics, and once you figure out a system that works for you (for me, quick attacks and dodging, with only occasional signs aside from Quen). There are some kinks: I know that Geralt’s whirling sword style is fun to watch and straight out of the books, but it also means longer wind-ups for basic attacks, giving opponents more time to attack. I’d also have liked if blocking arrows was already something you can do before you have to buy that upgrade, because it’s very annoying to have to deal with (although I imagine that’s the point).
I had it set so that Geralt automatically drew his sword when entering combat, and that mostly worked. Geralt has two swords (or whatever weapon you assign, but usually swords)--the steel one for human opponents, and a silver one for monsters and supernatural enemies. There were a few fights where there are both kinds of opponents, and so you have to switch swords mid-fight or else whale on opponents doing barely any damage if you’re not careful. There were also a few instances where Geralt, for reasons unknown to me, just didn’t draw his sword, which is one of the most frustrating things--going up against bandits or monsters and Geralt only attacking with his fists.
Opponents are helpfully given a health bar that tells you whether or not this enemy is too high a level for you to face. It is kind of dumb that some, like enemy guards, can kill you in one hit if you’re too far below the level. But it gives you a clear indicator of what fights you should or shouldn’t pursue.
The game gives you a helpful bestiary too, which tells you what works against certain kinds of monsters. It’s also fun to experiment and see what works for you. It makes monster encounters feel like I imagine it’s like to be a monster hunter--researching weaknesses and habits, and coming prepared for each fight.
Overall I thought this aspect of the game worked well. However, there are plenty of options in combat that I didn’t really see the point of. Like, I didn’t even work out the Whirl ability until the DLC--and that is, admittedly, a more useful ability, albeit still one that you really don’t need for anything. You’re probably better off just sticking to basic moves that work for you, although I suppose it is a big enough game that experimenting and branching out isn’t really punished. I guess my play style just didn’t really go for that.
SIGNS
Geralt has access to some basic magic, referred to as ‘Signs’ because they’re cast with quick movements of the hand. A bit like how it works in Runemarks, actually.
The Signs you can use are:
-Aard (telekinetic backward blast)
-Igni (fire blast)
-Axii (quick hypnosis/Jedi mind trick)
-Quen (shield/force field)
-Yrden (magic trap)
There came a point in the game in which I rarely used any Sign in actual combat except for Igni and Axii, the latter because it’s darn handy to have around. I did Aard and Igni for funzies, but I didn’t use Yrden much at all unless fighting a wraith in which you HAVE to use it to make the monster stand still. There are some upgrades you can do on Yrden but I didn’t see much point to sticking points into something in hopes that it might be useful.
Outside of some conversations, I don’t think I used Axii at all. I upgraded it enough so that I could use it in dialogue to get out of fights, but that’s about it. There was a way to upgrade it so that your enemies attack each other, but while that sounds cool I thought it’d take the fun out of whaling on people with swords.
LEVELING UP
I never liked having to select between different unlocked skills, and considering just how many things you can unlock, I didn’t like how few slots are available for you to assign those abilities. Especially considering that some of the upgrades that take up slots are increased damage or being able to resist damage better. Those are things that shouldn’t be taking up upgrade slots! I should be able to upgrade my damage and not sacrifice my ability to have cool whirly sword moves!
It also seemed at times that progression took very slowly. If you start doing story missions, it’s not bad, but combat will get you a pitiful amount of experience points, and there are some small side quests that I completed and got rewarded with, like, five experience points. And I get that not every side quest is going to give you a level up, but it was kind of lame. Once you get into the storylines, level ups are much more common, but there was a short while in Velen that I killed a bunch of time exploring and running into things I couldn’t take care of.
I will say though: if you do go through the effort of doing side quests and levelling up before progressing with the story, you will find yourself vastly over-leveled for the story. Which is a great feeling! Coming up against the Witch Hunters or Wild Hunt or whatever and being able to kick their cans into next week.
Also! You had to buy a special potion to do this, but you CAN reassign your skill points that you earned, which means if you didn’t like the way your skills panned out you can re-do them. Again, this costs in-game money, but by the time you’ve developed your skill tree enough to care about re-doing it, you’ve probably got the cash to spend. AND you pick up a few of these without having to buy them if you explore enough--I had a few and I wasn’t even looking for them.
EXPLORATION
I would have liked it if it was more obvious how different areas are leveled? Or more strictly divided? I assumed that because Velen is one of the first sections in the game, that everything you find there will be around the level of the main story happening there. Except it isn’t--when I was level 7 or so I ran into a level 25 griffin just wandering around, and it killed me in one hit, which was… not great. But it also makes it great to go through the game and marking things on your map and coming back to them later when you’re strong enough.
There are also too many things on the map. It’s not too much of a problem in most cases, because I really like exploring open worlds, but it gets to an absurd extreme in Skellige, where there are bajillion floating smugglers’ caches as question marks floating in the ocean around the islands. I gave up on that pretty early on, because I just didn’t care! I had no reason to care about that. I didn’t need supplies or money that badly, especially when each one of those was surrounded by a swarm of sirens.
MOVEMENT
Movement was fine, but it took some getting used to on my part. I had just come off of playing Assassin’s Creed, Uncharted, Jedi Fallen Order, and Horizon Zero Dawn, all of which are games that include a lot more verticality than this game. The fact that I couldn’t climb up buildings and cliffs, but only over ledges--that was something that bugged me. But that’s not bad game design, that’s just that I was used to playing different kinds of games where climbing is one of the main game mechanics.
Still, I would have liked the jumping and climbing mechanics to have polished a bit more? Again, that’s not a large part of the game, so it’s not a massive problem, but at times Geralt had trouble with ledges and it was annoying.
The only incredibly frustrating movement other than that was while riding Roach, I think. And even then it wasn’t that bad unless you were trying to get somewhere in a hurry. Roach would sometimes get stuck on trees and fences even when you glanced against them, making her irritating to use. And of course, sometimes Roach will freak out if you’re in danger for too long. I didn’t have too many problems with this, as I didn’t try mounted combat a lot, but when I did wheeling around on Roach was a pain.
Races were… look horse races seemed okay, once you figure out your bearings, but I think that they could have made the checkpoint banners a bit easier to see, especially if you’re racing at night. I ended up following the map in the corner more than following the road and that worked out for me. I did still sometimes run off road, which basically meant you lost the race, and that’s annoying.
INVESTIGATION
This game throws SO many investigations at you, and I thought it was going to get old after the first few, and it surprisingly didn’t? They all run the same way: you show up somewhere, and to investigate what happened, you use your Witcher Senses to highlight relevant things, and then go over and interact with them. It sort of made one feel like a detective, and that’s what it was going for. So good job!
The main problem I had was when Geralt picks up a scent, and you have to follow the highlighted scent trail. Sometimes it was very easy to follow; other times, not so much, and I wandered the woods for ten minutes trying to pick up the trail again. They could have done it better in some cases, I think.
INVENTORY
HA! Alright this is not great. Look, the Inventory system is a massive mess. It’s not completely incomprehensible, but you’re likely to have such a massive collection of random crap, that’s terribly sorted into vague categories. Skyrim also had a messy inventory, but it was sorted a lot better. You didn’t have to dig through a bunch of other random crap to find that one book you just picked up. You go into the ‘Book’ section and start there. In this game books are in a section labeled something like ‘other stuff’ for not weapons, armor, food, or potion ingredients. It’s pretty obnoxious. Maybe having all of these separate tabs would have been a hassle to go through, but it would have been more organized! And easier to find what you’re looking for.
CRAFTING
This was one of those things that I wasn’t sure if I should care too much about, because part of the fun of an RPG like this is going and picking up new gear and weapons. Except if you crafted your own weapons and armor, you’ll be way ahead of any of the stuff you find, level-wise. When I crafted my own weapons, I kept finding weapons that were pretty crappy in comparison. I liked having superior weapons, but I felt like I was missing out, especially when I got new weapons and armor in story quests that were clearly meant to be important and I wanted to try them, but they were so behind the gear I had made myself that I just stuffed it in the extra chest and never pulled it out again.
It’s balanced slightly by the fact that, especially once you get to the upper levels, crafting is made less practical by how rare the ingredients you need are. You have to go quite out of your way if you want to craft half the things you get blueprints for, and it does feel pretty pointless when there are so many swords and armor sets lying around. It almost feels extraneous, like it was something they added because that’s a part of RPGs, but I did like it overall so I don’t mind that much.
CHARACTER ENTRIES & BESTIARY
The character entries are an incredibly helpful way to keep track of all the characters. Because there are A LOT of characters, and if you haven’t read the books then you’re going to need some help figuring out who is who. And it updates as the story goes on to tell you what happened, in case you forgot! It’s great!
The Bestiary is even better, because if you don’t care about the story at all, it gives you hints about how to kill monsters. It is a little annoying that some of the monsters don’t get entries until you kill one for the first time, unless you find the right books or materials beforehand. But once you do have that information, it’s valuable because it gives you each monster’s weakness and what materials you should use when approaching them in the future. Very handy!
EQUIPMENT DAMAGE
Your equipment can take damage! That’s annoying, and that’s one of the things I hated about Oblivion and Fallout 3 because you have to spend a bunch of resources making sure your gear doesn’t degrade too much. Mind you, it’s not as bad in this game because you find repair kits out the wazoo, and even when your gear gets a lot of damage you can still use it. So I didn’t mind this too much, but I didn’t like it very much either.
POTIONS & FOOD
It was good that you could map certain consumables to button inputs so that you can just chug them on the go. That’s great! However, not a lot of the food really felt… like it was that great for you? It only slowly regenerated tiny bits of health, so by the end of the game, if I was eating anything in a fight, I ended up just chugging forty potatoes or something. That’s kind of on me though; I imagine if I paid any attention at all to what different potions did, I’d find a helpful health potion that would have solved that problem.
I also didn’t use potions much at all. Black Blood, sometimes, and Cat and Orca. I suppose I used the oils quite a bit. But mostly I relied on basic solutions to the problems I faced. They came in handy when I did use them, I just wished that they weren’t as much work to make and brew.
ECONOMY
There will be a while during the main game when you will be struggling for cash. That’s okay. You would think that taking witcher jobs would win you much more money than it does, but it usually doesn’t. Where I made a lot of money was taking the weapons I’d picked off of bandits and selling it at the nearest blacksmith store.
You can negotiate for more money on witcher assignments. That way you can easily get a hundred or so more gold coins for any job. I usually didn’t, because I didn’t mind that much, and when it came to roleplaying the fact was that a lot of the people hiring Geralt seemed very desperate, and I played Geralt in such a way that I thought it’d be out of character for him to gouge a massive price from these people. Mind you, when it came to the Nilgaardian army, or the Redanian army, or any massive douchebag, I was happy to haggle for more money.
DIALOGUE
Okay so there are some lines that Geralt will always spout that have become memes in the fandom, for good reason.
“How do you like that silver?!”
“Wind’s howling.”
“What now, you piece of filth?!”
Good times, good times.
I didn’t have any problems with the dialogue choices for the most part. There are a few times when there’s a timer and you have to pick what to say quickly, and I thought that fit the situations. There were other situations I thought would make sense with the timer, but I don’t exactly mind not having the pressure of quickly picking a dialogue option.
There were a couple of occasions in which I thought I couldn’t really predict how the conversation was going to go? The prime example is this one conversation with Keira Metz in which depending on your dialogue she either goes off to her doom, goes off to help you at Kaer Morhen, or tries to kill you in an optional boss fight. The first time I tried this conversation I got that last one, and I was bewildered, because that’s not what I was going for at all, and I’m still not sure how it escalated to that point.
There are some other dialogue bits in which the way to get what you want isn’t clear. Some of the dialogue options that are critical to getting endings with Ciri are not so clear. You can look up what you’re “supposed” to say to get the result you want, but if you’re trying to organically get certain results on the first playthrough you might be up a creek.
STUPID CANDLES
Alright this goes beyond frustrating at times and goes into freaking infuriating.
So Geralt has some magical abilities, including Igni, which is a way to make fire. And one of the ways this manifests is to be able to light candles, torches, and braziers with the push of a button. The thing is that this being a faux-medieval world, there are torches and candles EVERYWHERE, and the button to light them is the same as the usual action button. So very often you’ll be at the shop counter trying to talk to the shopkeeper and instead Geralt will light the candles.
This is especially rage-inducing when you’re doing an investigation or something, and you have to go grab something that’s on a desk, and you’re trying to pick it, and you can’t, because you just keep lighting and putting out the candles. And you have to position Geralt, and the camera, in a way that the candle or torch or what have you isn’t in the way, isn’t the thing highlighted when you’re trying to complete whatever action.
I understand that the makers of the game wanted you to feel like this was a cool little power that you had. And exploring caves, especially ones it was easy to get lost in, it was cool that I could light braziers or torches to make it easier to see, or to mark the way I had already gone and make it easier to tell which path to take. But there had to have been an easier way to implement this.
There’s something else I wanted to talk about, wasn’t there…
Oh yeah.
GWENT
Okay, it’s rare that I like minigames in video games that much. Usually I’m terrible at them. I absolutely despised Nine Man’s Morris in Assassin’s Creed III and basically all the board games in that series. Don’t get me started on Orlog or the drinking games in Valhalla. The only one I think I remember loving much was Shuffleboard in the tie-in video game for Madagascar (weird, I know). I’m just not any good at board or card games in general, as my Trivia group could tell you.
But Gwent? Gwent is pretty awesome.
The premise is that you pick a faction, and each of your unit cards (which can be melee, ranged, or siege) has a point value that adds up to your total attack points. At the end of each round, whichever player has the highest point value wins. There are cards with special abilities, like destroying enemy units, bring back your discarded units, and switching out units in the field with ones in your hand.
And spies. Oh so many spies.
It helps that there’s a tutorial very early on, although even then it took me a while to pick up on a lot of the game mechanics. The Scorch card threw me for a loop for quite some time. But I liked playing it, and it wasn’t that difficult to learn the basic rules, and it felt rewarding as an activity in the game, because you gained new cards from each new player you defeated. You could also win money, I suppose, but I rarely ever wagered more than a couple of coins because I didn’t feel like losing money over a card game (especially at first, when I struggled a bit with gathering money).
Too often in video games the minigames take a while to learn, and there isn’t much reason to play them other than in-game money. Which is nice, I guess, but at the same time there are easier and less embarrassing ways to get cash in most of those games.
I loved Gwent. I loved playing it, I loved collecting the cards, I loved trying out different play styles, and I loved playing with different decks. Gwent was one of the highlights of The Witcher III for me, that I felt kind of sad when I collected all of the cards because I didn’t have much motivation to play it anymore.
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This is, overall, a very well-constructed game. There are some missteps in how it plays, but for the most part it holds together well, and it’s loads of fun to play. And it’s not difficult to understand how to play either, so while it takes some getting used to in order to fully utilize all the mechanics, it isn’t that big of a learning curve.
It’s fun. And in a game, that’s what matters.
Right! So next time is the last part of the review, in which we’ll talk about design, music, and graphics!
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