WILD 9 EXCELLENT FULL
WILD 9 EXCELLENT PS4

Every time I felt like I was on the verge of an interesting revelation, I’d have to suddenly stop to escort a goat, or search for a lost, narcoleptic dwarf. Thanks to lots of excellent dialogue and voice acting there is some emotional payoff along the way, but it’s mixed in with too much padding in the form of meaningless fetch quests and collectathons. It effectively maintains focus and momentum, but it feels more like a wild goose chase than an intriguing mystery to unravel, like the one we got in Assassins of Kings. My single biggest issue though, is that it never becomes much more: the overly long main story is essentially just Geralt running errands for people in exchange for information on Ciri’s whereabouts. Our tale begins as a multi-continent search for Geralt’s long-lost lover Yennifer, and Ciri, his surrogate daughter. You might call it another case of The Elder Scrolls Syndrome. This new open-world map obviously has ramifications for the structure of the story, and though there are flashes of greatness, the main story is ultimately the least fulfilling part of The Witcher 3. On a GTX 980, Witcher 3 ran at 60 frames per second at all times on ultra settings. Thankfully, PC players can expect a lot more. None of it ever impacted gameplay in any meaningful way, though it did compromise the beauty of the experience ever so slightly. 30 frames per second was sometimes too much to ask, transitions between The Witcher 3’s two main maps are just a bit too long, and minor glitches do pop up from time to time.

WILD 9 EXCELLENT PS4

The one caveat on all that though, is the technical performance on both the Xbox One and PS4 versions.

WILD 9 EXCELLENT FULL

That a world this size still feels so purposeful, and full of things to do is quite an achievement. A handy minimap points you where you want to go, which might seem like a crutch, but honestly, without it, I’d have been hopelessly lost.

A full day/night cycle and dynamic weather pull it all together, cementing The Witcher 3’s landscape as one of the most authentic-feeling open worlds I’ve ever seen. It’s difficult to express just how huge and open this world is: verdant, rolling fields liberally dotted with swaying foliage of every shape and size fill the space between loosely connected, ramshackle townships where people struggle to scrape by. The Witcher 3 is as dense and deep as the other two games in the series in terms of RPG mechanics, and the overwhelmingly massive open-world environment has at once made that depth more intimidating, and in the long run, more rewarding.

Wild 9 excellent