Geralt of Rivia (and his horse) trotted into gaming lore with an engrossing tale of friendship, love, magic and sorcery — with a whole bunch of exploration and sword fighting thrown in.
while the Witcher franchise has been around since 2007 it was the series’ third instalment which exploded into gaming’s upper echelons of excellence with incredible scores and game of the year awards.
The Witcher 3 was more than a great game — it offered new experiences to gamers and perfected others.
RELATED: The Witcher 3 Dev Explains How the Game Pulled Off Its Massive Open World
10 Open-world level-up
The previous two Witcher games were far more linear experience — thus Witcher 3: Wild Hunt blew the worlds of Skellige and Novigrad, White Orchard and Toussaint into vast explorable landscapes.
While Skyrim and GTA 5 breathed life into the open-world genre, and Assassin’s creed quickly took hold of it too, The Witcher’s diverse locations and detailed infrastructures are quite simply breathtaking.
9 Side Quest Attention
Few fetch and return quests here. Side quests didn’t get a lot of love before the Witcher, with Skyrim offering infinite quests that began to blend into one another in their mindless repetition.
By combining deep lore with interesting and well-written side stories, the Witcher was able to create a world where every action seemed right for your character — side quests became less of a chore and more of an integral way of building a world which made sense.
8 It’s a Visual Feast
The Witcher 3 proved you don’t need detail to to make graphics incredible. Well — detail in the sense that the individual leaves, or grass or buildings aren’t pushing the graphic limits of modern machines today. But the way the CD Projekt Red team built up atmosphere, with wind whipping through the trees and a dynamic weather system, makes for endless moments of awe. The world looks incredible, better than many games today, in the way the sun glances over the horizon and turns the landscape a dusty orange, or rain whips down in torrents.
RELATED: 10 Secret Side Quests Everyone Missed In The Witcher 3
7 A World That Lives and Breathes
The world that Geralt lives in is broken by war and strife. And the CD Projekt Red team captured the mood of a weary country with the detail and precision of a HBO drama.
Right down to the broken wagons on the side of trails, to the soggy alleyways of cities, the world seems alive, enhanced even more by the effect your decisions can have on whole towns, or families and kingdoms.
The gamers in The Witcher interact with every level of society too, helping out peasants and lords and ladies alike.
It proved that detail and care makes for incredible experiences.
RELATED: The Witcher 3: The Hardest Decisions During Blood and Wine ( And Their Consequences)
6 It’s Not The Size Of The Developer
Perhaps the best thing The Witcher proved to gamers is that small-time studios can produce the best of the best. CD Projekt Red isn’t small by most standards, with over 1000 employees. But compared to other open world creators like Ubisoft, the company hasn’t produced the same expansive library of open world games — and still, Witcher 3 is considered better than most of Ubisoft’s open world offerings.
5 Long live The Single Player Experience
Single player games are dead. Well, that’s not true, as all gamers know, but as titles like League of Legends and Fortnite took over the charts a few years ago, many companies pivoted away from single player experiences to focus on multiplayer games — which are more lucrative with more options to include micro transactions.
With the massive commercial success of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, single player games were proven very much alive, and companies like Ubisoft and Rockstar have since released single player experiences that have been lauded as some of their best.
Who knows, if not for the precedent set by The Witcher, if Assassin’s Creed Odyssey would have ventured into single-player only territory.
4 Let Me Tell You A Tale
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a vast story that benefits from the deft hand of a skilled writer. The series was adapted from the novels of Andrzej Sapkowski — a writer who already had won over fans with in-depth fantasy worlds.
The story wasn’t an after-thought, it was an integral part of the experience.
While games like Far Cry let the player operate in a fun, wide-open sandbox, few games before The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt attempted to combine a detailed, massive world with a story as in depth as any single player game.
3 Sights Over Speed
Geralt is slow. Faster, maybe, on Roach, his trusty steed — but the game encourages slow movement. Fast Travelling is cumbersome and gamers are reminded whenever they voyage through the wild lands of the Witcher of how much is packed into this world, how much there is to be missed when you travel to fast.
RELATED: 10 Hidden Secrets Many Players Still Haven’t Found In The Witcher 3
A similar system to the Witcher, where NPCs call for help from the side of the road and chance encounters with danger are the norm, is replicated in Red DEad redemption 2, which layers its world similarly to make the voyage just as much fun as the mission you find at your destination.
2 Make Some Decisions For Us
Unlike Skyrim, or GTA, or Far Cry, or Red Dead Redemption online, this world isn’t yours to control. And that’s refreshing. You take the reins of an established character and rather than entree into a sandbox world, your constrained by the limits and story you find yourself in.
That’s a strange tension, but The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt pulls it off.
1 Streaming support?
With the release of the Wildly popular The Witcher Netflix Original, open-world games (games in general) were catapulted into the forefront of popular culture. Few other games have ever gotten a huge budget, well-received release like The Witcher did, which also stayed so true to the feel and look of the game.
The Witcher proved that gaming worlds had stories to tell — that they were in-depth, and worthy of a big screen rendition.
NEXT: How Open World Video Games Can Evolve
