The Witcher 3’s opening hours are magnificent – they’re so great that I’ve played them four times now. The problem is, I’ve never actually gotten beyond them. There’s nothing in particular that makes me stop – there’s no difficulty spike, narrative wobble, boring gameplay sequence, or anything else that scares me off. I just, for one reason or another, always stop. I know I can’t be alone in this, so I’m writing it to let you know that you aren’t alone either. I’m also writing it to hold myself responsible. The next time I start The Witcher 3 will be the last time I start The Witcher 3. Unless I end up falling in love with it and playing it 500 times over to try out some new, miniscule bit of DLC.
First, let me get my excuses in. I initially picked up The Witcher 3 when it launched, and just… didn’t click with it. Okay, that excuse isn’t great, but at the time, I wasn’t working in games, and existed almost exclusively on pre-owned games funded by my own trade-ins. I needed to either push on with The Witcher, or quickly flip it to recoup most of my losses, investing them into another game. Those funds ended up going towards Batman: Arkham Knight, which is better than it’s given credit for.
Related: What Lore Is The Witcher: Nightmare Of The Wolf Based On?
Still, it’s no Witcher, is it? History will tell you I made the wrong call. Once The Witcher 3 dropped in price significantly a few years later, I picked it up again. Fate, however, was against it. I had long been thinking of jumping ship from Xbox One to PS4, and The Witcher 3 was actually the last Xbox One game I ever bought. A cheap enough, battered enough PS4 bounced into my local game shop before I’d gotten too far into The Witcher 3, and so the whole Xbox, and all of its games, were traded in for Sony’s console.
At that point, I picked up a PS4 version of The Witcher 3, and tried nobly to rush through to where I had last played up to when the box was green, not blue. But I didn’t get a PS4 for The Witcher, I got it to play Nier: Automata, God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Spider-Man. This time, I think history will look on me with sympathy and understand why my third run of The Witcher 3 never really got off the ground.
As for my fourth, that one hasn’t technically ended yet. I started it a few months ago, when there was a gap in the release calendar, but new games have kept it at arm's length, and whenever it’s had a chance to break free, something else in the backlog has batted it back down.
Here’s the truth though – I like starting it over and over again. We’ve all had that sensation of booting up a game we haven’t played in a while, and suddenly feeling lost. Everything is unfamiliar, the crisis in your soul existential. Who are these people? How did you get here? Why do you have a sword in your hand? Oh my god… the killer… all along… it was… you!
The start of The Witcher 3 has become comfortingly familiar. The rest of the game? Not so much. The Bloody Baron quest is fantastic, but I’m starting to feel pity for it. That’s pretty much as far as I’ve gotten in all my playthroughs, and while it’s a wonderful piece of narrative design, each time I revisit it, I feel as if I’m stealing its power. I don’t get to see its impact on the wider world, the story that unfolds after it, or how seeing it changes Geralt, if at all.
Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books feature several short stories, and the Netflix adaptation borrows from this style as well – but the games are supposed to be much more cohesive, with every adventure and side quest folding into the next. All I’m doing is reading the same short story over and over again, then closing the book and setting it down.
I've enjoyed every minute of The Witcher 3, I just haven't played very many of them. Even in my initial playthrough, I didn't hate it, I was just aware that its current value would soon fall, and I needed to stick or twist. I should have known you don't hit on a soft 18. One day, I'll finish The Witcher 3. Until then, we'll always have the Bloody Baron.
Next: Why Did So Many Of You Play Mass Effect Wrong?
