I did not have any experience with the Witcher games prior to Wild Hunt. I had Witcher 1 & 2 but hadn't gotten around to playing them. However, I heard awesome things about Wild Hunt, and also heard that you could play it without having played earlier games, so I decided to give it a shot. I spent a little time near the beginning of the game slightly confused, and every once in a while a character popped up that I was clearly expected to know and didn't, but overall, I had very little trouble understanding what was going on, and I thought the game and the character interactions did a great job of explaining things, so yes, you are definitely able to start with Wild Hunt if that is your desire.

The Good: Where do I even start with this game? Never having had any experience with the Witcher before, I was really blown away with the story. So much so that I immediately went out and got all the books the games are based on, and I'll probably end up doing a replay of Wild Hunt now that I've read the books and have some more backstory. I can't compare the combat system to the older Witcher games; as a newbie, it was a little awkward to learn at first, but once I got familiar with it, I enjoyed the combat and all the options (potions, bombs, etc.) you have available during a fight. I think the NPCs really sold the game for me - I'm normally a "no companions" style player in RPGs, but I really looked forward to every interaction with Geralt's friends and enjoyed the missions where I got to travel alongside Yen, Triss, and other NPCs. With a lot of games, I have trouble being sold on the emotional connection that pushes the player to finish the main quest, but Wild Hunt does a great job of rounding out Ciri as a character and making you want to find her. The map is huge, with tons of places to explore and NPCs to meet. The card minigame (Gwent) is a lot of fun and a good way to break up some of the questing if you need a diversion.

The Bad: A few of the quests, especially some in Novigrad, suffer from the problems that all RPG quests face - somewhat repetitive and a lot of back-and-forth. The difficulty leveling of the monsters seemed to drop off after about Level 15 or so - combat seemed to get really easy after that point, even against boss or contract monsters. I don't think the romance questlines were set up well for good decision making - you meet one character and can complete her entire quest line well before meeting the other. The talking load screens were also very annoying to me, but that's a minor gripe.

General Info: I really liked the pacing of the game. At first I was a little unsure about having quests tagged with the level you should be completing them at, and also with the low amount of XP given for random monster hunting, but that really helped me to keep the number of side quests to main quests balanced and not tear through the game quite as recklessly. I spent around 100 hours on my initial playthrough and got a fair amount of side questing done, but still had many more side quests I could have done if I hadn't been so anxious to play out the main story. My main determining factor in how much I like a game is the plot, and this game has plot and lore in spades, as well as strong characters that really make you pull for them (or against them).


Overall: I strongly recommend this game to anyone who is a fan of open world, RPG, or fantasy games, as well as anyone who chooses games based on strong stories. Tons of content, tons of replay value, and overall a great bang for your buck.

System Specs Used: Intel Core i7-3610QM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 670M / 3GB GDDR5, DDRIII 12GB RAM, Windows 7

New System Specs Used: Intel i7-7700HQ, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 / 8GB GDDR5, 32GB DDR4 RAM, Windows 10