THE WITCHER 3 THE WILD HUNT (GAME)

THE WITCHER 3

There are bears in the banquet hall-shit! Just as I’m making good progress schmoozing the castellan, we’re forced to dash back to the feast hall, where a grizzly bear is busy biting the head off a guest. It shakes the corpse in its jaws and roars, its muzzle matted with blood. Most of the guests are strewn in pieces across their dinner.

No problem. I’m Geralt the monsterhunter, famous throughout the land for being able to solve problems like sudden impossible bears. The castle is built into a vast crag, and suspended a hundred feet above the sea. There’s no way three monsters waltzed up the winding pathway and talked their way past the guards. Something strange is going on here.

I draw one of my swords and equip my fire spell, Igni. A chirpier hero would make a “time for the main course” gag, but Geralt - in the mould of your typical hypermasculine RPG antihero - has never tried to be funny in his life. I lock on and circle the bear, using the dodge command to sidestep its paw-swipes. When I can, I plant a couple of flamboyant, spinning strikes on its bum until it flops over, dead. A few surviving guards are cautiously swatting at two other bears further down the hall. I help them out with my fire spell and soon those bears are dead too. And lightly roasted. Aw.

Skellige’s most influential families had gathered to get drunk and reinforce ties, but the bear incident has them pointing fingers. One barely-alive witness at least manages to solve the mystery of the magic bears before literally spilling his guts: they’re shapeshifters who snuck into the party in human form.

This is entertaining stuff. The four hours of The Witcher 3 I’ve played are full of twisty, self-contained plots that make me feel like Mulder in a medieval X-Files. There’s a bigger grand arc, of course, concerning Ciri - a woman with magic powers trained by Geralt at a young age – and the intentions of the supernatural horsemen of The Wild Hunt. That’s set against the backdrop of a war between Redania and the expansionist imperial forces of Nilfgaard, who you see charging across the border in a post-credit sequence at the end of The Witcher 2. In spite of all that grand fantasy setup, you spend a lot of time in conversation with peasants and workaday warlords, solving local problems in return for information.

The game desperately wants to be a gritty HBO drama but, while it undoubtedly has the production values, it’s slightly too silly to pull it off. The bear attack is a memorable moment, but I can’t help but chuckle at the options I’m given in the aftermath. Should I (a) go with the woman who wants to launch a forensic investigation into the massacre, or (b) saddle up with the angry man who wants to charge into the wilderness and take revenge on all bears?
Option (b) it is. I find myself investigating a decimated outpost a five-minute horse ride north of the castle. Its inhabitants have been torn apart and I don’t even need Geralt’s witcher vision to know that powerful animals are responsible. I can use witcher vision to track the culprits, though. Holding down the button highlights important environmental clues like footprints, savaged corpses and dropped trinkets - I ended up using witcher vision in almost every quest I played. My bearhating friend - the hairy Scully to my Mulder - remains close as we follow prints up a winding path to a cave entrance.


The Witcher 3’s dungeons are as detailed and atmospheric as its sweeping outdoor areas. Torchlight glistens against black rock as we plod deeper into the mountain. Sure enough, we’re confronted by a bare-chested axeman with suspiciously bear-like qualities. He charges; we fight.

Combat is the aspect of The Witcher 3 that I’ve been most worried about. Your move set is comparable to The Witcher 2, so you have heavy and light attacks, and a dodge command. Dodging now causes Geralt to dart rather than roll, though you can hold the button down to have him dive-roll a greater distance - ideal when fighting monsters with big, long arms. You can also hold a parry button to block, and tap it at the last second to parry an incoming strike and send your opponent staggering.

Geralt has the same spells as he did in The Witcher 2. He can summon a shield that negates a hit, blast enemies with a spray of embers, push them with a concussive blast and trap them in a circle of glyphs. They’re best used in combination, but the fiddly interface demands that you pause combat momentarily to flick between options. Hopefully, this problem won’t translate to mouse and keyboard setups - only controllers were available for the demo.

The combat system works quite well against humanoid enemies. Their easily parsed stabs and swipes are well matched to the speed and distance of your dodge, which makes it satisfying to hop around an attack and cleave someone in half. The system falters when you fight larger creatures. The lowest point of the demo was a fight with a griffon who seemed totally resistant to lock-on. It attacked with slashes and bodily shrugs that dealt damage at unpredictable angles. The fight was full of “bullshit!” moments symptomatic of poorly represented hitboxes. I would use my sluggish long-distance roll to avoid an attack, run back into range and swipe ineffectively at its haunches, my hits sometimes registering, sometimes not.

The protective Quen spell serves as compensation for taking the odd unexpected hit, but that replaces one frustration with another. It must be cast constantly like a nervous tick – especially in tough fights, and there are plenty of those. Geralt may be a super-mutant monster hunter but he can be cut down quite easily. I admire the punishing difficulty, because it encourages preparation through alchemy and the crafting of better equipment – a strong staple of the Witcher series – but the difficulty exaggerates the foibles of the combat system.

It’s a nagging annoyance rather than a severe problem, and some fights were great. In one area, I solved the mystery of a haunted well and drew out a spirit. I had to lure it into my magical circle trap to give it physical form, before killing it with my silver sword. The fight required plenty of preparation. I had to gather clues from the abandoned buildings near the well, and even go down the well to retrieve an amulet that could summon the spirit. As you learn more about a monster, your journal updates with precise details about the thing’s habits and weaknesses. You grow the journal over the course of the game, like a Pokédex, becoming an expert in the world’s creatures as you explore. The context, spooky locale and clever use of Geralt’s magic all contributed to the feeling that I’d really tangled with something supernatural – and that was just a side quest.

The cave is admittedly less exciting, but still hides a few surprises. I kill the bear man and press on to the heart of the cave network to find a band of cultists worshipping a forbidden bear god – naughty ultists! A brief cutscene shows a warlock performing a rite with some initiates. After a few words of power, bears emerge from the shadows and brutally kill and eat all the initiates. Letting out blood-curdling half-man, half-bear screams, they then proceed to grow human faces and transform into men. Ah, they’re not humans pretending to be bears, they’re bears pretending to be human. Is this all part of some elaborate bear coup?

The bears are easily dispatched, but the warlock causes problems. For some reason, his stick attacks can’t be parried – another frustrating combat inconsistency. A few combos and Quen barriers later, he’s dead, but a note found at the scene suggests the cult is being manipulated by a darker force hoping to destabilise the region through acts of bear terrorism. Sadly, the rest of that mystery lies beyond the limits of the demo.

Time to go exploring. I summon my horse, who materialises from nowhere at a whistle, and ride back to the castle. If you gallop on a road, your horse will automatically follow its course, which gives me ample time to admire the stunning scenery. The Witcher 3 doesn’t look quite as extraordinary as it did in early videos, but it’s going to be one of the most impressive open worlds to grace the genre.

Skellige is a cold and rugged place inspired by the Highlands of Scotland, and it responds beautifully to changing weather. Dynamic rainstorms roll over the hills, and gales set foliage blowing. Skellige is especially lovely in pale sunshine, so I meditate to speed up time and resume the game at sunrise. I walk to the base of the cliffs below the castle, where peasants are busy building ships, arguing, boozing and enthusiastically fulfilling poverty stereotypes. CD Projekt RED is good at hustle and bustle. Even this small pocket of humanity feels lively.

I talk to a few folk and find out that fishermen are being snatched at sea by reckless swarms of drowners. You can take on witcher work pro-bono if you’re feeling compassionate, but I’m only going to ply my trade for coin. You can even haggle with NPCs trying to hire you for monsterhunting business by adjusting an askingprice slider. I push it up a little bit and the worker still gladly hires me. The fish business is booming in Skellige.

I talk to some more villagers, and they give me information about deaths and drowner sightings on the coast north of the castle. Highlights appear on my map as they reveal new details. I decide to hike the distance. As I walk over the rocky moors, the sun rises behind the crag. The fields are quiet and I take the opportunity to enjoy a moment of reflection. The Witcher 3’s world is divided into large zones, but you can walk seamlessly between adjacent ones. The developers estimate that it will take around 25 minutes to travel the length of the longest stretch on foot, and the world they’ve created is easily pretty enough to make that journey worthwhile.

I reach the coast and find some human remains. It’s magic-eyes time again. Geralt examines the remains, mutters something about them being fresh, and suggests that there’s likely to be a drowner lair somewhere in the area. I try to follow the coastline and end up taking a shortcut through a forest full of spidery monsters that are a much higher level than me – The Witcher 3’s enemies don’t scale to your abilities, so it’s best to travel carefully. I manage to flee back down to the coast, where I find abandoned fishing equipment and more clues. I realise that I’m not just following an objective marker any more; the objectives are folded into the environment. I’m actually exploring.

There’s no sign of a lair on land, but near the fishing equipment I fend off a few drowners coming out of the sea. I decide to swim out a little to examine the rocks from the water. Aha! There’s a dark opening hidden away. It’s a cave full of human remains – yay!

I’m doubly pleased because every sidequest I’ve taken on during my four hours with the game has been this elaborate. I wonder if CD Projekt RED has actually managed to create an RPG free of boring filler quests. I have a feeling that many of them will rely on the overuse of Geralt’s witcher vision, which could start to get old ten or 20 hours in, but I’ll take that over dozens of mindless fetch tasks.
I’m confident that the quality of the quests and the open world can paper over The Witcher 3’s issues. Combat is merely passable, there are still glitches to iron out and horse handling needs work, but the world is exciting and rugged. I can’t bring myself to care about Geralt or The Wild Hunt either, but I love the day job. I’m going to spend hours wandering the world, filling my journal and hunting monsters in caves.

I feel satisfied as my demo time draws to a close, but there’s still one thing left to do. I study the sounds of distant drowners gibbering for a moment, then swig nightvision potion, unhook my silver sword and stride forward into the darkness.