The story of The Witcher is one that spans numerous short stories, novels, films and, most recently, video games. While the events of The Witcher and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings might not be considered canon to author Andrzej Sapkowski’s original works, they accurately capture the feel of the writing. The story of the video games takes places immediately after Geralt’s encounter with the sectarian mob. Our hero and his lover, Yennefer, are somehow brought back to life. The mystery behind this and what the Wild Hunt—a group of specters considered to be an omen of misfortune and death—want with them is told through the three games against a backdrop of war and strife. The Witcher 3 mostly revolves around the search for Ciri, Geralt’s adoptive daughter, and the final confrontation with the infamous King of the Wild Hunt.
The Witcher served as a great introduction to the game’s universe. The Witcher 2 built upon that but there were many limitations. The sequel strived to provide a greater degree of freedom in terms of movement, mechanics and story. While the mechanics and story definitely saw improvements—especially the combat—the movement was limited to specific paths. For example, exploring a forest in The Witcher 2 was cumbersome because there were only certain trails you could walk along. The Witcher 3 is a title that truly benefited from the addition of an open world environment. This can’t be said for many games, but in case of The Witcher 3, you never know what’s around the corner. Hunting monsters has never been this terrifying especially when exploring the vast world. The creature around the corner might be a simple Drowner or a fearsome Fiend. Best be careful.
The world is much bigger than games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Skyrim. It is truly a remarkable technical achievement. If The Witcher 3 only provided the Velen and Novigrad map, it would have been a massive experience. However, with the addition of the Skellige Isles, the scope goes to an unheard of level. This title sets the standard for open world adventures going forward. The developers have promised brand new areas in upcoming expansions so the game will offer even more to the player soon.
The story grips you from the opening cutscene and every quest, no matter if it’s hunting a minor ghoul or completing an important campaign mission, draws you into the rich lore. Usually when we experience role-playing games, we tend to reach a point where we skip the dialogues and forgo reading the notes found throughout the game. The Witcher 3 is a rare exception because everything offers valuable information. The notes, books and glossary should be considered as a guide to help you hunt the various monsters found in the world. How do you take on Drowners? How do you contain a Wraith? The answers to these questions and many more can be found only by reading about these fascinating and deadly creatures. It’s vital that you learn this information…or at least read about it before you engage the beings.
The Witcher 3 features one of the best sword-based combat systems ever designed. The signs, runes and generous loot system make it complex and challenging to master. Each beast requires a new strategy. Some can be vanquished by rather careless swings but others need precise timing and dodging. The flexibility this combat engine allows players is unique and remarkable. It’s fast, responsive and brutal. The decapitations are a sight to behold. Combat in The Witcher and The Witcher 2 always felt clunky and clumsy. The improvements made for The Witcher 3 are significant to say the least. Even a simple action like parrying feels satisfying. You sense the sheer power of Geralt’s blows through every move and it’s astounding.
The Witcher 3 offers a lot of replay value because there are multiple paths the player can take. Little decisions add up and you can join either side of a conflict. The player can even let some monsters go free. Random events make you realize the impact of your decisions later on. Disrupt a fanatic’s brainwashing sermon? He’ll send his henchmen to kill you. The game is filled with these decisions and you would have to play through the title numerous times to truly explore all possible paths.
If you’re not into playing the campaign multiple times, you can always do the countless side quests, contracts, treasure hunts and more. Finding hidden treasure has to be one of the best aspects of The Witcher 3. It’s a great way to obtain rare loot and find significant upgrades. The Witcher 3 approaches Diablo’s level of satisfaction because you always feel like the next major upgrade is only a chest away. It usually is. The game will easily take over a hundred hours to complete if you rush through everything. However, if you take the time to read the books, learn about every monster, craft upgrades and more, it’s a much longer and engaging experience.
The graphics looks crisp and clear on Xbox One. The textures in the environment and on models are very high-resolution and only once in a while do you see a blurry hill or path. The lighting and dynamic weather are the true heroes here. The way the light bounces in cities and in the forest is gorgeous. Rain impacts visibility and substantially changes how everything looks. The art direction deserves praise because the environments are varied and every region feels distinct from the other. It’s a beautiful game in all regards.
An aspect of the game that deserves special mention is the phenomenal voice acting. While not everyone’s performance is stellar, Doug Cockle does an amazing job as Geralt of Rivia. The tone, projection of sarcasm and general demeanor are spot on every time. Jaimi Barbakoff as Triss Merigold and Charles Dance as Emperor Emhyr Van Emreis deserve tremendous praise as well. The cast makes their characters believable through the emotions expressed in their voices. It’s great to see that a lot of attention was paid to the voice acting which seems to get pushed to the side in many other role-playing games.
There are some other features longtime fans of the series will enjoy. The game lets the player enter the choices they made during The Witcher 2 campaign to see how it modifies the story. This takes places after the tutorial area when you familiarize yourself with the gameplay mechanics to some degree. The Witcher 3 also lets you play as the powerful and mysterious Ciri. Ciri has her own special moves and is much quicker than Geralt. She can also teleport out of danger and regenerates health much faster. This is a treat for fans and we hope we see a Witcher game featuring her as the main character sometime in the future…if not in a game then at least in an expansion.
The title isn’t without its flaws though. The Xbox One version of Witcher 3 has little performance issues. The only problems encountered during gameplay were garbled audio and stutters during some cutscenes. Gamers experiencing issues other than these with the Xbox One version should reinstall the title, especially though who bought it digitally. The dynamic resolution scaling that maintains frame rate works rather well and it never felt as though the performance detracted from the fluid combat experience. The Xbox One version runs between 30 to 40 frames per second and this adds to how fluid it feels. With that said, sometimes the jump in frame rate between 30 and 40 when riding a horse can make it difficult to maneuver. While every title has issues immediately after launch, the garbled audio is the most concerning. The player is forced to play with subtitles on and sometimes, has to mute the sound. It gets so severe that the noise coming from the television is painful to hear.
There are also some side quest-breaking bugs that mostly plague random encounters. If you start some missions and leave the area, enemies disappear and never reappear. This presents a problem when you have to rescue a merchant from a cage but the bandits who have the key no longer exist. Another example would be when you have to track down a smuggler but lose the trail simply because you left the immediate area for a few moments.
Lastly, sometimes the game stops responding at the loading screen. The black screen with the revolving snake never goes away and stays there until you restart the title. This isn’t usually an issue but if you’re in the middle of a difficult quest and loading a cutscene causes the game to crash, you might have to do it all over again. A patch that addresses these issues should be available next week. Hopefully, the problems mentioned here will be fixed because they detract from the overall experience and cause frustration.
The Witcher 3 is a difficult and controversial game to score. We gave Dragon Age: Inquisition a perfect ten even with its flaws that, some might argue, could be considered more severe. Skyrim was also a magnificent game as far as content goes even with its performance issues on consoles and numerous game-breaking bugs, many of which were never fixed. The Witcher 3 will get patched soon and the minor issues will be addressed. There’s no doubt about it. While this review highlights all the problems experienced during our playthrough, it should be noted that there are workarounds for many quests. Judging by content alone, we feel that The Witcher 3 offers a far superior story, combat experience, decisions and consequences model, among other elements, to current games available in this genre. The graphics, dialogues and meaningful side quests just elevate the experience to another level that other role-playing games haven’t reached at this moment. Even with its technical flaws, it is still an excellent title that everyone who owns an Xbox One should experience. For that reason, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt deserves our third ever ten out of ten joining Ori and the Blind Forest and, as mentioned earlier, Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.