Admittedly, it’s a fairly impressive flow diagram of branching story choices and decisions – it would make a great choose-your-own-adventure book or Twine game. But if what you play expansive RPGs for is to explore an interesting and engaging fantasy environment, this is really the last place you should go. It makes the critical mistake of communicating the details of your surroundings mostly via a minimap in the corner of the screen, to the extent that you’ll rarely be taking in the world itself.
Not that you’ll be missing much. The Witcher 3 is 1000 square miles of identical thatched roof cottages and fields, populated by barely sentient racists shambling about aimlessly. It’s like taking a Megabus through England. Try playing without the minimap and you’ll quickly realise that the landscape isn’t designed to be navigable without it, the only real landmarks between the identical villages and castles being the occasional road sign written in a fictional language. The organic push and pull of a perfectly designed open environment that would be perfected by Breath of the Wild is completely absent.
This sense of messy disconnectedness, of being trapped in an endless landscape of repeating locales would be put to much better – albeit probably unintentional – use in the developer’s next game, Cyberpunk 2077. The sci-fi RPG is plagued by many of the same problems as CD Projekt Red’s other games; needlessly complicated and superfluous RPG mechanics, floaty combat that’s tied into a turgid hidden numbers game, sore lack of interesting or emergent ways to make it through the endless enemy encounters.
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