There is no morality meter, no paragon or renegade rating. It may not shift the main story’s conclusion in monumental ways, but I often returned to places I’d visited earlier to find that a seemingly small decision played out in a very big way. The other upside is that, more often than not, these hunts and other side activities provide interesting insights into a land being destroyed by war, and the many forces that play a role in shaping it.
The payoff here is twofold: in keeping with the lore, these represent your most reliable stream of income, which is refreshingly significant due to an appropriately stingy in-game economy. Geralt's quarry ranges from ethereal wraiths that need to be made tangible before you can harm them, to Foglets who conceal themselves in thick smog, waiting for a chance to strike. Aside from the bevy of standard side-quests, monster lairs, and bandit camps generously littered about The Witcher 3’s gargantuan land mass, you also get a bunch of monster-hunting Witcher contracts to persue. The same can be said for a lot of the side quests you pick up in the field as well.
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They’re all so meaty and full of rich story content that they feel like they should have been part of the main story. Underground turf wars, assassination plots, love triangles, and unexpected alliances are all part of these optional romps. Depending on your decisions in The Witcher 2 (which can be handily recreated via some dialogue early in the game), you’ll see lots of familiar faces returning to play a role in Geralt’s search, and once they have, they offer you a secondary line of quests that typically provide far more interesting scenarios to dabble in. Thankfully, they all get chances to shine once you venture off the beaten path, and that’s where The Witcher 3 gets nearly everything incredibly right. It’s also worth noting that though you will get along fine without playing the first two games in the series, without the context provided by the Witcher novels, Ciri is more or less a complete stranger until the last quarter of the journey, which made it difficult to care about finding her as much as The Witcher 3 expected me to – especially given the slew of intriguing characters who are relegated to supportive background roles. Heck, even Geralt can barely hide his frustration with the constant parade of menial tasks at times.
Every time I felt like I was on the verge of an interesting revelation, I’d have to suddenly stop to escort a goat, or search for a lost, narcoleptic dwarf. Thanks to lots of excellent dialogue and voice acting there is some emotional payoff along the way, but it’s mixed in with too much padding in the form of meaningless fetch quests and collectathons. It effectively maintains focus and momentum, but it feels more like a wild goose chase than an intriguing mystery to unravel, like the one we got in Assassins of Kings. My single biggest issue though, is that it never becomes much more: the overly long main story is essentially just Geralt running errands for people in exchange for information on Ciri’s whereabouts. Our tale begins as a multi-continent search for Geralt’s long-lost lover Yennifer, and Ciri, his surrogate daughter. You might call it another case of The Elder Scrolls Syndrome. This new open-world map obviously has ramifications for the structure of the story, and though there are flashes of greatness, the main story is ultimately the least fulfilling part of The Witcher 3. None of it ever impacted gameplay in any meaningful way, thought it did compromise the beauty of the experience ever so slightly. 30 frames per second was sometimes too much to ask, transitions between The Witcher 3’s two main maps are just a bit too long, and minor glitches do pop up from time to time.
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The one caveat on all that though, is the technical performance on the PS4 version I played for review.