Similar to The Witness, I just never played The Witcher. Like, any of it. Witcher 1 and 2 were janky as hell, and I had better things to play in 2007 and 2011. Wife played Witcher 3 at or around release (as evidenced by our ownership of the ultra collector’s edition hardcover strategy guide) and it just didn’t seem like a game that gripped me. Anyway, I was deep into a Destiny-shaped hole at the time.

So I dedicated February of 2020 to finally sitting down and playing The Witcher 3. Destiny had quieted down, there was a brief calm-before-the-storm of March, and it was on Game Pass so whatever.

It was really good. Not sure if it deserves the game-of-the-forever status some people give it. But still really good. Shockingly competently built. Zero quest bugs. And I squeezed everything there was to squeeze from it, finished all contracts, the main quest and both DLCs. Got all but one upgrade (couldn’t be bothered farming cockatrices), and 50/78 achievements.

What’d I leave on the table? Gwent. Dunno, I just couldn’t get into it. And the game wants you to play an absolute assload of Gwent. There’s like 10 different achievements for it including collecting all 8 million unique cards. Just completely not my bag. But story-wise I did damn near everything there is to do, over 90+ hours, and enjoyed it thoroughly.

What didn’t I like apart from Gwent? There’s too many ways to play the game wrong, and zero reward or encouragement to find alternative “right” ways to play. Once you get Witcher gear it’s objectively better than anything in the game. The highest-tier relic gear in the game caps out at like level 48, 8 above the highest Witcher gear, and it’s straight up worse. Same deal with general playstyle. There’s a combo with upgrading a shield ability that translates inbound damage to Free Health and it completely invalidates bothering with anything else in the game for 90% of fights. Why would you ever use anything else? Idunno so I didn’t bother.

It just weirds me out when developers spend so much time filling out garbage upgrades that straight up do not benefit you. Like back to the weapon stuff, a solid 99% of non-Witcher weapons are basically strength increase and some set or random rolls on perks. Thanks to the glyph / socket system, you can build basically any of these perk-sets into Witcher gear and get set bonuses from Witcher gear on top of it. So why bother with ANY of them? There’s maybe 10 unique weapons in the game with truly unique abilities baked into them. They’re all lower base level than witcher weapons. In-universe it makes sense to have there be such a difference, but that doesn’t make it not suck from a gameplay standpoint to never really be able to find an upgrade for anything.

Oh, also people who couldn’t finish the game suck. I played most of it on difficulty 3 of 4 with minimal challenges. Yes there’s a lot of content, but it can all be squeezed out in under 100 hours, and you don’t have to do all of it. So to the whines of “abloo bloo witcher is so long and hard! no one actually finishes the witcher! you get like a third of the way in and get distracted!” shut up. If you consider it such a masterpiece finish it.