I started playing The Witcher 3 a couple months ago, on and off, got about 10 or so hours in. I had played it back in the day when it originally came out, but also just for maybe 5 hours or so. It’s a really solid, incredibly well made videogame that I absolutely do not give a shit about, at all.
My experience of the game is that it’s largely a bunch of gruff, manly white men grunting at each other talking about “everything got worse when the Black ones came” (yeah there’s some enemy army – who aren’t Black, there’s almost no PoC in this game, it’s Fantasy, you see! – that has a NICKNAME “the black ones”, but still). The first big quest line is one wherein the game goes to like extreme lengths to humanize and give extra chances to a rich, drunken domestic abuser Lord guy. Why? Of all the stories to tell, you want to try to make me “see both sides” with this wealthy authoritarian a-hole who beats his wife? I feel like when you choose to work hard and humanize that guy, instead of… almost anyone else in the universe, that says something about your values as a storyteller. The most important choice storytellers make is choosing which story to tell.
The game is really good, as I mentioned, and by good I mean, extremely polished and smooth. It is an incredible videogame product. You can kind of just turn your brain off and go follow the arrow, click on things and pick things up, and it’s very chill and relaxed and I mean this all in a positive way. I actually like the general experience of playing the game *other than* when there’s dialogue or when there’s combat.
The world is extremely fleshed out and rather detailed, which is cool – partially this is because it’s just a well made game, and partially this is because it’s the 3rd game in a series, which is itself based on a series of books. There’s a ton of little details in there. I have the most fun when I’m just moving around and looking at things in the world and not interacting or reading dialogue. The thing is, I don’t like this world. It’s depressing and it doesn’t ring true to me as a world, it just looks like some teenager’s Hobbesian fantasy of a wild west that you can become the KING of!!!
Still, moving around in the world and just seeing stuff is fun. But a huge problem is, it always comes down to combat, and I don’t find this combat system to be satisfying or engaging at all. It’s kind of just annoying. It’s not like Elden Ring “challenging”, but it’s also not like Breath of the Wild “satisfying” either. It’s not even as fun to fight in this as it is in Diablo, where at least you get new moves sometimes and monsters drop random fun loot sometimes. It just feels laborious to fight in this, and fighting is the central focus of the game (as is the case in almost all RPGs).
There’s also just a lot of things which are really just… distasteful, in a way that only a company that has too many men in charge would ever do. Like in the card game Gwent – which I like, as a game. Sidebar real quick, but I LOVE IT when there is a card game in an RPG. And Gwent is a really good minigame, one of the best I’ve seen! Anyway, there’s a card in Gwent that has flavor text which tells you that this character on this card is a rapist. What was the intended experience of seeing this flavor text? Because I can promise you, a lot of boys and men saw that card and laughed in a creepy way. It’s fuckin’ gross, man, and yeah – that’s just a tiny flavor text on a tiny card. But nobody seemed to question it. And there’s little “Choices” like that one, all over the place. Most videogames don’t seem to have a problem not-suggesting that the units you’re deploying are rapists. But this is the kind of game where that’s the kind of thing you gotta be on the lookout for.
Part of why I played it is that I heard that Witcher 4 would feature Ciri as the main character, and I will say that she was way more likeable than most of the characters in this game. So I will definitely keep an eye out for Witcher 4 and might play it when it comes out. Maybe.
EDIT: My friend Mikhail from the discord said:
What Witcher 3 excels at is creating an engine for adventures. Just look at the world! Look at all the adventures you could have there!!
Too bad they decided to populate the game would with assholes I don’t care about and bad videogame
Anyway, overall, I personally think it’s a solid videogame and an EXCEPTIONAL videogame product, but also pretty uninteresting and just kind of… blech.
Rating
4/5 Stars – Never Playing This
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