Final verdict: D+
Final playtime: The playtime counter is bugged and won’t show your real
playtime. Big FUCKING surprise.

Aright, shut up. Lemme tell you one thing: this game SUCKS. It deserves none of the praise it’s gotten because it is straight booty.

First of all this game is the buggiest shit I have ever played. It took me hours to be able to start playing because the game kept freezing during the start right after the opening cutscenes, which, by the way, YOU CAN’T FUCKING SKIP AND TAKE FUCKING FOREVER. I retried again and again and again but it would always freeze in the same spot. You don’t even know how fucking sick of those stupid fucking intro cutscenes I am. God damn. They’re not even great cutscenes. If I’m gonna be made to watch something at least make it a fun intro. Fuck. Anyway, I had to do the ol’ uninstall and reinstall to get the piece a shit to work. ‘course, that’s only the beginning of Witcher 3’s bugginess. It holds the dubious honor of being the first PS4 game that has legit crashed for me. Granted it only happened like 3 or 4 times total throughout my entire time playing the game so that part’s not terrible. Still, it’s only scratching the surface of how buggy this game is. There are so many bugs in this bitch game I can’t even list them all but we got all kindsa shit. We have quests that don’t trigger (always annoying to see a quest marker but the game refuses to trigger it), we have quests that do trigger but are bugged in such a way that they can’t be completed (including a notoriously bugged part of the main quest series that prevented you from advancing in the game), a bug that prevented you from receiving exp from quests, bugs that erroneously list quests as failed when they were successfully completed, corrupted saves, lost saves (back up your saves in the cloud people), bug that made you lose all your money, bug that made you jump constantly without pressing any buttons, bug that disabled buttons, alchemy recipes disappearing from your inventory, countless glitches.

In the interest of fairness I will say that CDPR has been surprisingly fast and constant with the patches. They’ve been putting out patches for Witcher 3 at a rate of about one every couple of weeks, and if you play the game now a lot (but still not all) of bugs have now been fixed. But what about us who started playing when the game came out? Of course we just get fucked and have to struggle while waiting for the patches. It’s plain gross. Are you going to tell me this shit is acceptable? To release a game this broken? I remember a time when you could play through an entire game and never encounter a single bug. Now we see clearly untested garbage being put out on the regular. Batman Arkham Knight was so bad they pulled it back out of the market for fuck’s sake. Sure, only the PC version was that busted, but that’s no excuse.

Some people are gonna be like “Well it’s because games these days are so complex and have so many factors and variables that you get so many bugs! You can’t compare it to back when games were simpler!” Yes I can and that’s the point. Games are becoming too complex for no good reason at all. Or worse, they are becoming more complex at their own detriment. Witcher 3 is a perfect example of this. This game is both massive and complex, and yet it is a WORSE game than both Witcher 1 and 2. I will elaborate more on that later, but my point is that we don’t NEED games to be more complex in this way because it doesn’t make the game better and it doesn’t make it more fun. NONE of the added complexities in the Witcher 3 make the game better in ANY way. It’s all worthless bullshit. All of the best games I’ve played have been with really low levels of complexity and extremely low hardware requirements. For example, the Danganronpa series are extremely simple with very low hardware requirements and yet are INFINITELY better than this piece of shit.

CD Projekt used to be cool but now they’ve sold out and made their game all triple A major corporate mouthwhore warner bros studio level. That’s why it’s such a boring, pointless, untested mess. The only reason why you’d want all the triple A bullshit is because the dumb masses will buy it more. Let’s talk about one of the biggest and worst changes to come in Witcher 3: it is now an Open World game. Yep, that cursed bandwagon that seemingly every idiot developer is jumping on these days. The explosion of open world gameplay is quite possibly the biggest tragedy to happen in modern gaming. It ALWAYS makes a game worse, without exception, and I’ve already explained why in the past. Of course, the masses, those unwashed subhumans, being the uncultured swine that they are, just keep lapping this horse shit up. Developers have their fair share of the blame as well, most of them being utterly incompetent proles with seemingly not the faintest clue of what makes for good game design. SO many games are going open world nowadays as if it were the future. Yeah, a future of games that suck donkey dick. Zelda is going open world but that’s no surprise considering Nintendo is a garbage tier company full of limp wristed faggots. Final Fantasy is going open world but that series has been absolute garbage for well over a decade so we’re not losing anything of value there. But Metal Gear Solid going open world?! Now you’ve crossed a mother fucking line. That series was still cool! Granted I haven’t actually played it, but history tells me it’ll suck now.

But I’m getting sidetracked. We’re supposed to be talking about Witcher 3. As I said, it has also now gone open world and is so much worse of a game for it. The game now has too much of that Elder Scrolls feel and it’s HORRIBLE. First of all the world is ENORMOUS now. 35 times larger than Witcher 2, if you can believe it. 35 fucking times. That’s WAY too big. Why the FUCK do you need the world to be that big? The answer is that you fucking don’t. The amount of empty space in this game that does nothing but waste your god damn time because it takes forever to get around is ridiculous. It gets even worse once you get to a part of the game that’s mostly ocean with a lot of islands because sailing on boat takes around THREE TIMES as long to get anywhere as it does on land.

Worse still, the game now has hundreds, HUNDREDS of bullshitty boring “undiscovered locations” dispersed throughout the world Skyrim style that you can go to, except 99% of these are pointless boring ass filler. They are usually stuff like bandit camps, or a guarded treasure (which is 99% of the time useless junk loot), or monster nests. Sometimes you’ll find an optional quest, which is almost always some boring, insipid bullshit that you complete in like 5 minutes for almost no exp and certainly no worthwhile reward. Seriously, there are too many pointless boring filler quests, and too many of them only give like 5 exp and 20 gold. And gold is utterly WORTHLESS. You’re perpetually swimming in absurd amounts of cash and there is never anything even remotely expensive to spend it on.

Even WORSE still, this game commits the Elder Scrolls sin of filling the entire world with worthless junk loot. There’s junk loot FUCKING EVERYWHERE. EVERY house you go into is filled with bullshit water, bread, plates, candlesticks, pelts, beer, ALL GARBAGE. And not just houses, every single barrel, crate, bag, box, chest, corpse, plant is filled with stupid worthless junk you can loot. It’s INFURIATING and makes you not want to loot things or explore because it’ll just be more junk and more wasted time. And you already didn’t want to explore because the world is so retarded big and full of pointless empty space. And that’s when they hit you with the 0.001% probability random barrel with a useful unique recipe or crafting diagram, which now makes you feel like if you don’t check and loot everything you might miss something like this. FUCK you. I feel like I’m in a god damn skinner box, and not even a good one at that. At least the rat gets a piece of cheese a decent percentage of the time. Or… whatever it is rats eat. Whatever man. Rats will eat anything. You could probably give them some straight up dog shit and they would eat it.

Where was I? Oh right, GOD I hate this fucking game. Witcher 1 and 2 were so much better. Their worlds were smaller, they didn’t make you waste your time so much getting to places, there wasn’t so much junk, so much filler, so many boring quests. The sad thing is that sometimes the stuff that made 1 and 2 fun seems to still be there and shines through, and the game feels fun and engaging for some periods, and then at other times it feels so buried in bullshit and time wasting that it feels distressingly boring and difficult to muster the motivation to keep playing. Some quests, mostly the major story driven ones, still have that Witcher feel where your choices affect the story and the game world reacts to your choices in the future, but there’s also a huge amount of quests with choices that feel very superficial and only have an immediate and usually very tiny difference right as the quest ends and then it makes no difference at all in the long run. Too many quest choices feel weak and unimportant, which makes the game feel overall less reactive than previous ones.

Moving on, combat is very similar to how it was in Witcher 2. Decent, but nothing special. Geralt’s movement and controls feel a little laggy and clunky exactly the same as they did in Witcher 2, which is frustrating, but I got used to the laggy controls in Witcher 2 and I got used to them in this game as well. CDPR added an alternative movement option in the patch 1.07 a few days before I finished the game which makes Geralt’s movement slightly smoother, so if you play the game now I’d recommend enabling that new option. I really hate how slow Geralt’s default move speed is during combat, he goes into this annoyingly slow crab walk and you have to either sprint or spam the dodge button a lot to move anywhere fast. I will say that I like how the dodge feels, and I like how they gave you two options, a smaller quickstep with fast recovery time and also a roll that recovers slower but covers more ground.

I also hate how easy this game is. It’s honestly pathetic. I played on the highest difficulty from start to finish and it was always a walk in the park. I remember Witcher 2 being harder in dark mode early on, regular low grade mooks could commonly kill you in one hit, but in Witcher 3 it seems Geralt can take more punishment and everything was always trivially easy from the very beginning. The only time it’s ever tough is sometimes if you’re fighting enemies 10+ levels higher than you that you’re not supposed to be fighting yet. And even then it’s not really hard as much as just the fact that you’re barely moving their HP bar with your attacks and it takes ages to be able to kill them. Aside from that, signs are incredibly broken and once you invest in enough sign intensity everything becomes even more of an absolute joke. Igni is especially broken, not only does it hit in a wide area, it disables every enemy that isn’t immune to burning, and the burning effect does an incredible amount of damage per tick, killing the strongest enemies in seconds. Yrden is super ridiculous too, slowing everything that comes into your area almost to the point where they may as well be immobile. In short, even if you’re playing on Death March this game is straight baby mode.

Next, the new skill system FUCKING SUCKS. Now even if you spend ability points to learn a skill it won’t take effect unless you equip it, and you only have 12 slots maximum at the highest level. Are you fucking kidding me? You only have room for 12 skills? It’s so much less fun to level up and to get ability points now that you aren’t even allowed to use most of the skills you get. What a shit ass pet fucking system. Here I am with a bunch of possible skills and I can’t use any of them because I only have two fucking slots. Because of this terrible system there’s a ton of stuff that feels like too much of an opportunity cost to be worth getting now and it’s awful. Such a waste of skills that would otherwise feel nice to get, now you’re just like nope, no room. By the end of the game I was sitting on like 15 ability points because there was just no longer any point in getting any more skills. I was out of room and couldn’t use any of them. What kind of asshat comes up with shit like this? You can’t even argue that it was done to balance and limit your power because as I just mentioned, the game is ALREADY retarded easy. So you already failed on that front. Besides, even then it would be an awful way to go about doing it.

As if that weren’t enough, they went full on baby mode with the alchemy system as well. It’s REALLY stupid that you only have to concoct a potion ONCE, and then you just have it forever and it only takes 1 alcohest to replenish your entire library of potions and bombs. Because then what the fuck is the point of gathering all those herbs now? Seriously? There’s so many herbs to pick in the game but you only need enough to make a potion one time? What this does is that it turns herbs into yet another pointless junk item that you don’t want to waste time picking up. In the previous games ingredient gathering for alchemy was important because you could run out and you needed to have a lot of ingredients to keep replenishing all of your potions. They had value and were worth picking up. Now they’re worthless, and besides you can just buy them all at the herbalist anyway with your infinite supply of cash that will never, ever run out.

Secretly the best part of Witcher 3 is the card game. They’ve replaced the old dice poker minigame from the previous games with a (very simplified) magic the gathering type collectible card game. It’s really great because it’s much more involved and strategic than dice poker, and also much less dependent on pure random chance. Everyone in the world plays the game and you can challenge most merchants as well as important NPCs. It kind of reminds me of Triple Triad and Tetra Master in Final Fantasy 8 and 9, or that sweet ass Pokemon trading card game for the Gameboy Color. Plus, every person you beat gives you a new card, so a lot of the fun of hunting new people to play with and beat is about collecting new cards and improving your decks. My only gripe is that later in the game you stop getting new cards for beating new people, and that takes a lot of the fun out of it.

What else? Oh yeah, loading times are HORRENDOUS in this game. Holy shet. You will dread reloading a save file and having to hear that god damn “where you are in the plot” summary again. The quest logs are very glitchy and less detailed than they were before. In Witcher 2 I loved reading the quest logs just to see the way they described what I was doing and the choices I was making, they were super meticulous about writing different things in the logs even for seemingly trivial differences in the way you did things, but in this game they’re very poorly done. Scrambled entries are extremely common, entries with no text, entries erroneously describing stuff you didn’t do, and just generally not as much work was put into them.

In all seriousness, this game could’ve been pretty good, it has some good parts but it’s buried in too much bullshit. The story is okay but nothing special, it’s pretty straightforward fare and not interesting enough to justify any of the game’s bullshit. CDPR, as per usual, is absolutely and utterly incompetent at doing romance plotlines that are appealing in any way. All of Geralt’s possible romantic interests, as always, are nothing but bitches and whores, every last one of them, and it’s unbelievable that he can stand any of them. Nigga clearly has rock bottom standards. Leveling up and gaining ability points is not very engaging due to the shitty skill system, and exploring isn’t either to due to the extremely lopsided ratio of junk to worthwhile loot.

Witcher 3 is an absurdly massive game, and you could easily be playing it for months on end if you want to do everything, similar to Skyrim. The problem, of course, is that just like Skyrim most of that content is just. Not. Good. I tried to do everything but eventually I was just overwhelmed by how boring it all was, and by the sheer amount of it. If I have to sail to one more fucking place in this game I’m going to kill myself. The mere THOUGHT of going to all those undiscovered locations I’m missing just to find random pointless loot that I’m gonna go sell to get even more pointless gold fills me with pure existential despair. This must be what Sisyphus felt. It’s surprising that I could even muster the willpower to beat the game, honestly. In short, fuck Witcher 3. It’s a shit game and not worth playing.

Final Verdict: D+

Final Playtime: The playtime counter is bugged and won’t show your real playtime. Big FUCKING surprise.