The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Released on October 15, 2019 for the Nintendo Switch by Saber Interactive, CD Projeckt Red's The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt features action RPG gameplay from a third-person perspective, in a vast, medieval Europe-inspired open world.

Part of my job in the mid-2010's entailed purchasing high-end graphics cards for other people. Most of the boxes for those graphics cards seemed to say the same thing: Look at how well I can run The Witcher 3. Indeed, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt drew raves for its graphics in 2015, which all but ensured it wasn't going to arrive on Nintendo's Wii U console. Unfortunately, as a Nintendo fanboy, I've missed out on several great games because Nintendo's consoles haven't had the power to process them. Wild Hunt wasn't just receiving accolades for its graphics, though--the gameplay, story, and the game's massive world's design were being highly praised. The Witcher 3 won numerous awards and even received that most lofty comment from several publications: "It's one of the greatest games of all time." Great, I thought, watching Playstation, XBox, and high-end PC users enjoy CD Projekt Red's action RPG to their heart's content. I get to miss another one.

How can I continue when you won't let me start?!

Since the Switch blew onto the scene, though, developers have made a point of bringing seemingly impossible-to-port games to the diminutive console. Older titles like Skyrim converted smoothly, but suddenly more recent or even contemporary cross-console titles like Doom and Wolfenstein II started to make their way onto the Switch. Could Witcher 3 be close behind?
Well, I'm reviewing it, so obviously the answer is yes.
Finally, in late 2019, thanks to porting work by Saber Interactive,  Nintendo Switch owners got to experience The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for themselves. But is the game just a faint ghost of its former self, or the thrilling experience other gamers have enjoyed for the last five years?
Well, how would I know? I haven't played the other versions. But I've played this one. 80 hours (without even touching the two massive expansion packs!). With that much time sunk in, as subjective as one opinion can be, I can definitively say The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for the Nintendo Switch is a thrilling experience.

Unless this looks boring to you, in which case, I guess you could flash freeze some gasoline, and roller-blade across it on flaming skates? Or mainline some strychnine?

Of course, before I could find Wild Hunt to be a thrilling experience, I had to get past my own expectations...and for some reason, I was really expecting Witcher 3 to be like Skyrim. Immediately, something is different, though. Instead of making your own original character from a choice of different classes, and customizing your personal appearance, you're placed in the shoes of Geralt, a grizzled, no-nonsense monster slaying mutant called a "witcher." As a child, Geralt was given mutagens to give him heightened senses and abilities, and trained to hunt and kill beasts in a land known as "The Continent."

Let the bodies hit the floor

While roaming the countryside killing monsters for contract, Geralt gets sucked into a search for the Emperor's missing daughter, Ciri. Turns out its personal, as Ciri was trained by Geralt when she was a child, and Geralt considers her to be his adopted daughter. She sure seems to be more fond of Geralt than the emperor.
The player can choose to keep Geralt on a straightforward, Ciri-hunting path...or send him down a thousand story bunny trails, fulfilling seemingly endless open contracts across The Continent's 52 square miles of territory (3 times the landmass of Skyrim!...but don't worry, there's methods of fast travel!).
At first, I couldn't help but negatively compare Witcher 3 to Skyrim. Witcher 3's soundtrack, composed by Marcin Przybyłowicz and Mikołaj Stroiński, while quite good, is a bit less epic than Skyrim's Jeremy Soule-composed classical masterpiece, utilizing more folk instrumentation than big orchestral cues. Likewise, Skyrim is set in a majestic land of snowy peaks and lush valleys, and The Witcher 3 spends most of its early hours in a swampy, flea-bitten land. Even the combat didn't seem measure up--Skyrim gives so many options, and the combat in Witcher 3 barely even ups your experience points!
Then, it happened...

I saw a whale. 10/10. review over. Oh, yeah, you can sail a boat in this game.

Spoilers for a subquest here, but it's one of a million subquests that has nothing to do with the game's plot, so this reveal is peanuts in the scale of the entire game:
Maybe five hours into The Witcher 3, I come across a collection of huts near a large wood. I need to talk to a particular person in front of the huts in order to follow the main quest, but I notice a guy working outside, talking to a woman, and decide to talk to him instead. Turns out the man is a hunter named Niellen, and the woman he's talking to is Margrit, his sister-in-law. Niellen's wife has gone missing, and Niellen is worried, as apparently his wife had wandered into the woods, where wolves had recently been spotted. 
I tell Niellen I'll look for her, and then head deep into the forest, going to a spot on my map where other village folk all agree the wife seemed to frequent. When I get to the spot, I use my "witcher senses," by holding one of the Switch's shoulder buttons. Witcher senses allow the player to see and follow smells, and to notice clues an ordinary person might miss. Strangely, Margrit shows up and attempts to bribe me to abandon my search--she thinks that Niellen will be destroyed if he discovers his wife was eaten by wolves. I am given a choice, but I decide not to accept the bribe, and I keep looking. Sure enough, I eventually find the body. There are wolves near, but there are also tear marks on Niellen's wife's corpse that are too big for a wolf to have made. I look closer, find evidence that she was killed by a werewolf, and use my witcher senses to find scent trail. I track the werewolf's scent through the forest, to an isolated hut by the sea. 

Can I just pause for a moment to tell you how much I love that horse (you can call him for a ride anytime in the game!).

The hut is locked, but the trail leads to a dank cave beneath it. What's waiting there, but a large and hungry werewolf. After a tough battle, where I knock the werewolf's health down to nearly nothing, Margrit runs in and begs that I spare the werewolf. It turns out, she's in love with him--and the werewolf is Niellen. Turns out she's always loved Niellen, and has been jealous of her sister's marriage to him. Niellen, a good man, had been going to this cabin before every full moon, so that there'll be no humans around that he could hurt when he transforms. One night, jealous Margrit lead her sister into the woods near the hut, only hoping that she'd see a transformed Niellen, and be so disgusted she'd want to leave her husband...so that Margrit could finally have Niellen to herself. Unfortunately, the plan went awry when the werewolf spotted the wife...and killed her. When Niellen overhears Margrit's confession to you, he, loving his wife deeply, while never feeling the same for  her sister, flies into a rage, and tries to kill Margrit. 
At this point, you can choose to let justice take its course. Margrit is responsible for her sister's death, and maybe she deserves to die. Or, you can tell the werewolf he's not killing another person, and finish taking him out. I chose the latter, and let Margrit flee, while I took care of business. After killing the werewolf, I find a key to the cabin in Niellen's pocket, leave the cave, and open it. Inside sits a broken, weeping Margrit.

All that dramatic angst makes me want to set someone on fire.

This is a subquest. A subquest! Witcher 3 has hundreds of subquests.  Hundreds of complete mini-narratives just waiting to be explored. It's insane. And what actually gives you the lion's share of experience points in Witcher 3? Completing subquests. This is an action RPG built around stories. These mini-narrative's are leagues ahead of "I heard they're reforming the Dawnguard."

I prefer the dusk anyway.

Witcher 3's strength lies in the depth of its storytelling. No, every subquest's story isn't as deep as the hunter and his wife's, but many are or come close. You'll want to experience as many of these as you can, not just because they make your character stronger, but because...well, they're addictive. I can't count the amount of times I told myself "Okay, I'm just going to follow the main quest today," only to get sidetracked a dozen times. Truly, and this is a compliment, Witcher 3 is one of the world's great time-wasters. Look up from getting just a little sidetracked, and three hours have passed.
Thankfully, the Witcher 3's menu tells you if you're at a sufficient level to tackle any given quest. Some quests will be too difficult to complete at your current level. Some will be so far beneath you, you won't gain any experience from them (but you may want to complete them to see their story unfold, anyway). This at least ensures that at some point, you'll want to tackle the main quest, as it helps lead to higher levels more quickly...and also leads you to harder subquests. So on a literal level, Witcher 3 doesn't waste your time at all, it just beautifully eats it.

No, YOU'RE attracted to a video game character!

Leveling up doesn't exactly increase your stats like in a traditional RPG. Instead, it gives you an ability point, allowing you to unlock or upgrade from an ability tree that includes options to better your attack, alchemy, and magic skills. I skipped all the alchemy crap, powering up my attack skills, and beefing up my ability to shoot fire out of my hands. Geralt can perform several spells, like a telekinetic blast, a persuasion technique, and the aforementioned fire casting technique, among others. I built up Geralt to be a sword-swinging, fire-blasting brute because I do that in any game that let's me...including Skyrim. You can instead gear Geralt toward having more mage-like abilities, but I'm about as subtle as a hammer, and never do that when one of my other options is "be He-Man." Leveling up also gives you access to using higher level swords and armor, which in effect, levels up your stats.

Doesn't this game know that I'm OCD and going to agonize over which of these combinations is even .01% better than the other for the next six hours?

As far as combat goes, Witcher 3's your standard hack'n slash material. You've got a light and heavy attack, the ability to parry, roll, etc. It's not overwhelmingly deep, but it's fun and rarely gets old. The ability to cast spells in combat, utilize bombs you can make with your alchemy skills, as well as whip out a crossbow adds to the variety. The depth is really in the customization allowed by the ability point allocation, though, as you gear Geralt into whatever type of warrior you wish. Sorry, that was too much alliteration.
Once I got used to the game's systems and fell in love with its storytelling, Wild Hunt leveled up the experience yet again. The game's plot eventually takes Geralt away from the mainland, and onto a ship headed to the Skellige Isles. The ship wrecks, and Geralt wakes up on the beach, trusty horse, Roach, at his side. After a brief scrap, you take control of the witcher once again, for the first time away from the flat-landed swamp, and as enormous mountains loom in the background, suddenly, over a gorgeous violin and mystical harp, an angelic vocal soars into the soundtrack.
Experiencing this moment, as the flotsam of the wreck turned over in the emerald surf, and all that beauty coincided, I felt a sudden surge of overwhelming emotion...and teared up.

INFJ's LIKE BEAUTY, OKAY! LEAVE ME ALONE! DAMMIT, TREE, STOP LOOKING SO PRETTY!

Yes, I'm a more emotional person than most, but I think by that point in Wild Hunt, most other gamers will be similarly enraptured. While the swampy lands early in the game endeared themself to me (the Polish developers based that area on their homeland, and I started to find it similar to my own south Louisiana haunts), the game greatly diversifies it's settings, taking you to a vast medieval city, the beautiful, mountainous and daunting Skellige Isles, and several others I don't want to spoil. The way the entire game builds up to this moment feels like a sure sign of greatness.
However, regardless of that moment, I did still have one reservation: Witcher 3's performance on the Switch. The framerate didn't slow down or anything, but the graphics, blurry and low-res at times, certainly seemed like a major downgrade to what I'd seen on other systems. Worse, the game crashed on me nearly a dozen times. This was extremely frustrating. I never lost a ton of progress, as thankfully, Wild Hunt allows you to save at nearly any time and autosaves frequently, but the experience was still very frustrating. The loading times are long, and having to reboot the entire game is a major inconvenience.
Thankfully, right after the day I made it to The Skellige Isles, Saber Interactive released an improvement patch, which not only greatly improved the game's visuals, but eliminated the crashes--in fact, Witcher 3 never shutdown on me again. I played the game to the end, 80 hours in total, without another performance issue.

Here's a picture pre-update. It's pretty. Pretty blurry. Oooh, burn!

Here's a shot from the same area, after the update. Notice how much sharper Geralt's model and the landscape are. Also, I've got a chicken sandwich now. Talk about an upgrade! All pics from this review, sans the one previous to this one, are from after the update.

Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is truly a great game. It does have just a few minor issues beyond the ones improved by the patch, though. As much as I've praised its storytelling (which is fitting, considering the Witcher games are based upon the work of Polish novelist, Andrzej Sapkowski), the developers have slathered the game in what they've called a "Game of Thrones sauce." This means they've made sure to earn Witcher 3's "Mature" rating, and at times their attempts are, like Game of Thrones' worst moments, excessively crude. Many characters use the full spectrum of profanity (Almost hit a peasant with Roach, and they're sure to lob a "Fuck!" in your direction), which can get a little over-the-top at times.

On a side note, I've been dreaming of wandering through the woods, running into this antlered demon, and fighting it to the death for my entire life.

The game is quite violent, which I mostly enjoyed, though it also crosses the line with it at times, usually when it blends it with sex. Like Game of Thrones, Witcher 3's main story, if only for a small portion, incorporates a sexual sadist who brutally tortures and murders the women he sleeps with. It's a brief part of the game, but it's stupid, and unlike the majority of Witcher 3's story, unimaginative.

Why you gotta make me wade through this filth, game?

Through the choices you make as Geralt, you can get the titular witcher into some romantic situations, some of which lead to sex. The sex scenes are explicit, though at least the nudity between Geral tand his lovers is equal opportunity. Also...there's a brothel where you can use Geralt's coin--hard-earned from fulfilling monster contracts and fighting enemies--on prostitutes, to no gameplay end. More aesthetically useful: you can send Geralt to any of the many barber shops strewn across The Continent, so that he can get the hairstyle and facial hair of your choice.
Another annoyance: at select moments, the game leaves Geralt's perspective, and forces the gamer to play through a flashback with Ciri. These portions are fine, and usually short, but when you've been wandering around 52 square miles of territory, free as bird, doing whatever you want, the sudden constriction can be a bit annoying.

Yes, one more paragraph, actually.

Outside of those minor flaws, I very much enjoyed Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. I am so glad the developers not only made the attempt to, but successfully got the game running on the Switch. I'm reminded of 20 years ago, when Capcom let Angel Studios take a seemingly impossible stab at porting Resident Evil 2 over to the Nintendo 64. They succeeded wildly, as well. Thankfully, unlike in those late 90's days of the Nintendo 64, developers are making ports of high-profile cross-console titles not the exception on the current Nintendo console, but the rule.

SCORE: 9.5/10