(This is the last post about the Witcher 3.)
I finally finished the entire pack of Wild Hunt (WH), Heart of Stone (HT) and Blood and Wine (BW) two days ago. The world is absolutely incredible, with so many intricacies tied together. I never managed to complete RPGs before: the old Star Wars were too clunky, Torchlight just felt grindy (and too easy after a few spells), Dragon Age never really took hold of me. So I was surprised how much I enjoyed jumping into such a large universe, and loving every moment of it. By around 10 hours in, I was reading a bunch of the in-game texts and notes to figure out what’s going on.
Still, there are some issues. The combat mechanics felt broken in a sense. I hated how there’s instant kill mechanics for some of the bosses, and the monsters (and people) just felt like paper even on the hardest difficulty. The storyline for WH is so long that I forget the end goals a lot, while there’s pacing issues with WH and BW. After all, if there’s murders with a time limit or a global crisis which only you can solve going on, one shouldn’t be really chilling out and drinking.
But besides these, the game never felt grindy. The income balance felt fine for most of the game, and doing the side quests is actually a pleasure. There’s a few simple quests in the beginning, but by the end, it seems that all the quests had some twists going on. There wasn’t simply fetch or kill quests… it was kill, but note that this monster kills for a (almost) valid reason quest.
I’m really tempted to do a play through over the summer with a different build and ending.