Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is undoubtedly a masterpiece. It almost feels superfluous to share my opinion as you can read hundreds of thousands of other positive reviews, but having just beat the game I still wanted to talk about what I liked and didn't like while it's still fresh on my mind.

To give you an idea of my impression of the game, the last major open world fantasy game that captured me for as long as this game did (over 100 hours) was Skyrim (which I have about twice that much in, though I haven't played Witcher's DLCs yet). This is a huge game. The story is enormous, the world is enormous, the sheer scope of how many possible side quests, contracts, treasure hunts, etc is enormous. You can really lose yourself in this game.

There are four major open world environments, the largest of which is the main map that consists of Velen, Novigrad, and the surrounding towns, villages, and wilderness, which by itself is already more than large enough to be host to your typical open world game. But then on top of that you have Skellige, a Svalbard-esque archipelago, as well as the smaller Kaer Morhen and White Orchard (the latter of which serves as the prologue area).

From snowy mountaintops, to murky swamps, to forests and grassy fields, this game's environment and detail is rich and beautiful. Sometimes you can just catch yourself watching the volumetric clouds wift over the mountains and down into the trees, or the sun shining through the leaves at sunset. The quality of the models and animations are all what we've come to expect out of AAA titles, but this game does really well with keeping cut scene conversations full of personality, while there is some notable reusage of character models and voice actors for various villager NPCs.

The melee combat with the added perks of the Witcher's various abilities (spitting fire for instance) is incredible and never gets tiring. I also like that you can buff your combat against different kinds of enemies with various oils and potions.

While the actual skill/perk system offers quite a large variety of things to choose from, with how limited the quantity you can actually equip is, I found myself always chosing the red combat-based ones. Honestly it felt a bit too restrictive because once I found skills I liked, I pretty much just ignored the feature altogether, only swapping out for some stronger skills occasionally that were locked behind a requisite level. For a game that is purportedly an rpg, to have a skill system be so underwhelming seems... Odd to me.

Never the less, the level-tiered weapons, armor, and upgrades more than enough made up for that. I especially enjoyed completing the mastercrafted Wolf School armor and swords. I will say there's plenty of armor I avoided wearing altogether outside of combat simply because it looked kind of silly on Geralt, with weird jester-like stripes or bulky armor that made him look potato shaped. It would have been nice to have a bit more aesthetically pleasing variety of armor, but I guess they were going for a more realistic style.

Speaking of Geralt, the characters in this game are fantastic, full of personality, quirks, and backstory. I love how all the journal entries are written by an in-game character Dandelion, who is responsible for chronicling all of Geralt's adventures. The game handles interpersonal relationships (romantic or otherwise) with other characters very well. Your dialogue choices hold lots of sway in your future interactions with those characters, particularly when it comes to Geralt's various potential love interests. It feels natural and unforced, and is also completely avoidable if one doesn't want to bother with it.

With regard to the story itself, the lore of this world is big. I don't remember just how many witcher novels there are, but its a lot, and two full games preceding this one that I did not play. So at first, I found myself a little intimidated by just how much stuff was going on in this game, but it does tell you everything you need to know at one point or another, so you can safely play this without having played the first two. It's a lot to take in, but so is the whole game.

What I struggled with the most is just keeping track of what was happening with the main story. I'd just get sidetracked, sometimes for literal weeks (irl) doing side quests, contracts, and general exploring before doing another main quest. Fortunately to some extent the developers anticipated this by having a recap play for you at every loading screen, which was somewhat helpful.

It's also quite a long game, obviously, especially for someone like me that can't help but explore and run off on a dozen other side adventures every time I enter a village I haven't been to before. Eventually I had been playing it for months and just had to take a break off and on before picking it up in full a few years later. (I have been playing this game off and on for the past 6 years.) And when you come back from a break its a little hard to get back into since you have to get reacquainted with all the characters and their individual subplots each time. I had the same issue with Skyrim.

That being said, I can hardly say a game having "too much fun content" is a negative, just be prepared that you know what you are getting into. This is no 20-30 hour open world game, at least not unless you rush through it focusing mainly on the main quests.

Obviously this is the type of game for people who like to lose themselves in a world for a while, a game that they can keep coming back to for many months, which makes it easily worth the current $40 price tag (you might as well get the complete edition, I will eventually come back and play the DLCs after a break, I imagine).

Easy there Roach, wind's howling...

Despite the game being labelled "Early Access" for the price point this feels like a pretty complete game, and a really fun cooperative game to play with friends.

On that note, I did try playing the game solo when I first got it and found it to be both terrifying and extremely difficult. It definitely feels better geared to having someone else around to watch your back, or at least to panic and run back to the ship and take off so we don't lose all the loot we found.

The gameplay follows a pretty simple loop of exploring a procedurally generated abandoned building of some kind to look for valuable scrap items to bring back to the ship before midnight falls. After 3 days of work you bring the scrap you collected back to The Company to sell for profit, which you can use to buy things to help you survive, ranging from the basics like flashlights and walkies, to teleporters, stun guns, and jetpacks.

The challenge is you have to avoid a wide variety of diverse monsters that will instantly kill you in a myriad of different grotesque ways, with very little means to defend yourself other than panic, run, hide, get back to the ship OH GOD GET BACK TO THE SHIP DONT GO IN THAT DOOR WAIT NO OH GOD ITS COMING I CA---

One of the fun things about this game is its use of proximity chat to communicate with your fellow players only extends to the living. While you can get walkie-talkies to speak with each other remotely (provided that you aren't cheating by using something like discord), you can only hear people when they are within a few feet from you, and the moment they die, their voice cuts off rather abruptly.

There is also a radar feed and terminal on the ship that a player on the ship can use to try to help communicate about hazards, monsters, and scrap to the people exploring the abandoned buildings, as well as opening some locked doors, disabling mines or turrets, or using a teleporter to pull them back into the ship to save them, at the expense of losing anything they were carrying.

While I don't want to spoil all the different kinds of monsters, there is a wide variety of different kinds of AI behavior that players will need to get familiar with in learning how to deal with each one. Some of the monsters are pretty docile and will only bother you if you bother them. Others you can defend yourself against if you have a suitable weapon, like a shovel. And others.... Just hope you don't run into them and if you do, best hope you have enough stamina because man is the stamina bar in this game punishing, but it makes it a valuable resource you have to keep an eye on if you plan on being able to run away, particularly if you are carrying valuable and heavy scrap.

The only thing this game is lacking right now is a bigger variety of places to explore, slightly more variety in the procedural generation, and some added levels of progression that persist and reward the player for surviving longer and meeting more quotas, beyond just being a basic rogue-like with no real "end-game," so much as a late-game that eventually gets impossibly challenging.

That being said, the game has a bustling modding community that make up for a lot of the game's current shortcomings. They have added so many new features and elements to the game they've more or less done the dev's job for him in getting the game to see its full potential. New moons, new mechanics, new monsters, new items, new scrap, gameplay tweaks, better settings, new interiors, and lots of other fun additions like cosmetics and suits. Although its not run through the Steam workshop Thunderstore and the R2ModManager work well enough, with a great feature allowing you to send your friends a simple code to get them setup with the same mods and configs as you to avoid any incompatibilities.

Overall, my friends and I have had a blast playing it, and I highly recommend it, as I think it is well worth the $10. My only hope is that the dev will continue to work on the game and add more content since he really has managed to create something pretty special with this game, as its rather exploded with popularity, particularly among the streaming community. Continued development and content would really do well to keep this game something players consistently come back to.