To give you a bit of context to this review, I used to only play pirated games. Screw spending money on games when I could get them for free right? Then in may of 2015, I pirated the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt after seeing all the hype surrounding the game. One year later and over 350 hours of gameplay later, I was simply blown away. I now own over 140 games on steam and have never pirated a single game since. This game changed me. It’s a masterpiece from start to finish no questions asked.

Gameplay: This is simply put the best open world I have ever seen in a game. There are side quests that rival other games’ main missions. The attention to detail is incredible. I recommend never fast traveling because you will miss out on the beauty of the open world. As for the combat; it’s no Dark Souls but it’s still very up to caliber. Some people find movement of Geralt (the main character) kind of stiff but I had no such problems.

Story: I came into the Witcher 3 with zero knowledge of the Witcher universe. I didn’t play the previous entries in the series or read any of the books. This is still to me the best story I have ever experienced in a video game with The Last Of Us coming in as a close second. Nothing more needs to be said. The story is just… ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing. To give you an idea I usually never read books unless I need to for school assignments. After beating the game, I ordered the series of books of amazon because I got so attached to the Witcher universe.

Graphics: Absolutely superb. The game is now over 2-and-a-half-year-old and the graphics still hold up tremendously well. Whether you are looking at the textures, the weather effects, the flora etc.… Everything looks sharp.

Optimization: The game runs well. Make no exceptions you still need a pretty decent rig to run the game but it should be expected judging by this game’s graphics. On my old rig (gtx 970/ i5-4590k) I was getting 55-60fps with most of the settings on ultra. Now on my new pc (1080ti/i7-7700k) I get around 90-100 fps at 1440p with ultra settings.

To finish off, the only con I could think of is that after finishing this game, your expectations for a game will be so high that most games you will play afterwards will fall short lol. This is why I am planning to finish most of my current backlog before returning to my favorite game of all time: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.