The hype around The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt reminded me of a time back in about late-2011 when I first bought and played Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. That is to say, everyone everywhere seemed to be playing the latest, greatest RPG. I too had jumped on the bandwagon, taken an arrow to the knee, and spent some serious attention on that wide world of dragons and swordplay adventure. I’ve easily sunk over two hundred hours into that game across multiple campaigns on at least three platforms.
The biggest difference was that a few years later, in 2015, when Witcher 3 was released for sale I was busily preoccupied by a few other side interests that had me neglecting most video games.
I let the whole Witcher 3 craze slide past me: Never bought it. Never played it.
The advantage therein, of course, is that four or five years later when this award winning title appeared for a song in an online discount sale I found myself enticed into picking up a licence to a new-to-me game with incredible ratings and amazing community insight.
…if I could ever find the time required to play yet another massive RPG.
Thus The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has been sitting in my virtual Steam library for a long while now. And being a fan of massive RPG games it has been teasing me to actually download and install it. Oh, and maybe even play it, too.
Thanks to my speedy internet bandwidth, the 32 GB install only took about an hour this morning. I killed the time with a five mile run around the neighbourhood, a shower, some lunch, and then a backyard play with the dog. After that, I settled into my office chair, in the dim glow of my PC monitor, and booted the game… five and a half years after everyone else.
As the game opens, I was treated to a five minute cut-scene with plenty-o-exciting action. Oh, and then a fade to some soft-core animated action. (Um?) And then a twenty minute combat tutorial which turned out to be a character dream. And then I rode a horse for about fifteen minutes… and onto the actual game.
What I would call playing Witcher 3 commenced about forty-five minutes after loading the software.
I suppose since I started off comparing this game to Skyrim at the beginning, I can continue. In Skyrim I seem to recall opening my virtual eyes as a prisoner being transported to my execution, watching a scant few minutes of story play out, then running for my life from a dragon attack… and into the game.
Playing commenced about ten minutes after first loading the software.
I offered to give my neglected game titles each about 90 minutes of my time. But for Witcher 3 so far half of that I was pretty much just watching a short film play out as I opened doors and followed the fighting instructions on screen.
I guess what I’m really trying to say is that my introduction to the game today resulted in only about 45 minutes of actual gameplay which amounted to a half dozen combat encounters, a lot of horse riding, a few lengthy conversations, and the kicking off of the first (of many?) fetch quests… and then a random monster killed me and I figured that was a good place to stop.
Does that position me to offer a fair assessment of a five year old game that has recieved otherwise stellar reviews around the web? It’s a beautiful game and I can sense both the depth of story and action behind it all. And the thing is… I’m not a game reviewer, but I am a gamer …in my forties… who doesn’t often have two hundred spare hours to devote to complex, slow-burn gaming titles these days. Economy of time and playtime and… gah, get on with it! I’m very tempted to leave it installed and come back to it again, and I very likely will, but I’m also just as apt to open up one of my old Skyrim campaigns and revisit a world I don’t need to watch any more cut scenes to understand.