Bewitched

I started to play The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on PS4 this week.

This isn’t even remotely a review, just some initial thoughts.

I’ve never played any of the Witcher games in the past and similar games such as Skyrim and Dragons Age have passed me by.

This game has you playing as the character Geralt, a grey haired young Chuck Norris lookalike with a voice like a phone call making Liam Neeson. You travel across the land on your horse “Roach” occasionally stopping to be killed and then looking at this screen.

I look at this screen A LOT. It is the loading screen, and every single time you die, you will look at this screen for a good full minute while the game reloads the tiny bit you just played. Why? Because this game is HUGE!!

The map itself is tremendously large, and it is packed full of characters, missions, side missions, treasure hunt missions, Witcher missions and enough character customisation to make your silver sword wilt.

These loading times are where I don’t get on with the game (it is otherwise fantastic to play). They should be a thing of the past now, they really do spoil the flow of the missions and are extremely annoying when you realise you hadn’t saved recently and have just lost all of the items you had looted from the bandit camp you just took ages to destroy only to be stupidly killed when you trip over a pebble.

There are also so many missions that upon accepting them, they can be failed without you meaning to. For instance in one side mission you will be asked to rescue a farmers son from a burning building so you can accept or not (the game is FULL of choices) but on the way to the building you will run into a main story character who if you interact with them takes you away from the side mission making you fail it. Also you will accept missions, start them only to realise that you need to be level 15 , when you’re level 3 and so need to leave these as well.

Some missions need you to have crafted certain potions or items that you haven’t yet collected. Fairly early on a young lady died due to me not realising I could have made her swallow (yes really). I only read of her death later on when I checked my “failed missions” I was gutted.

The graphics are superb in this game the whole world seems alive. The weather and day/night cycles are great and taken advantage of with certain creatures only coming out at certain times of day etc.

There is also a Magic the Gathering style card game within the game called “Gwent“. I would happily buy a full game of this on it’s own (or maybe a companion app) it’s really good and you actually feel like you win by merit rather than the NPC basically cheating you. My tip is bet 1 crown and play if you lose a few you can kind of get to know what deck the NPC has and choose tactics accordingly.

One thing I was very impressed by was the packaging

CD PROJEKT RED have done an amazing job, took me back to the old days of actually getting something for your money (remember that?!)

The game is in the usual case which has a nice slip case. It also has a cd soundtrack, wolfs head stickers, a Witcher Universe compendium thing and a map as well as instructions, yes actual instructions.