Spoiler Alert: This piece may contain some Witcher spoilers.
As the gameplay presentation gets underway, we see Geralt atop a beautifully rendered horse in a jaw-droppingly beautiful landscape. This takes place immediately following the Griffin slaying mission shown off during the public Press Briefing.
I want to make them stop playing so I can just stare at the sky. It was so damn pretty.
The visual step up from the previous game cannot be overstated. This clearly the most beautiful Witcher yet, and one of the most beautifully rendered games I’ve ever seen. The lighting is vibrant and organic, it filters through the trees and diffuses among the moisture in the air. The specularity on even the horse’s hair is enough impress. It rivals even the most impressive, super-modded Skyrim.
CD Projekt Red has polished the landscape down to the last detail, even the types and placement of each tree and patch of foliage, the architectural style and building material of every individual building, it is all so immaculate down to the smallest detail.
I cannot express how gorgeous this game is.
Anyway, back to the tale at hand: Geralt is en route to Novigrad – the biggest city in the world of the Witcher. He is heading there to meet up with a man named Dykstra, who sent Geralt on the quest to kill the Griffin in the first place. Dykstra is a man with a lot of information to sell, for the right price of course.
The constant chatter of NPC call outs makes the world feel so alive. It’s easy to convince yourself that the world goes on without you, even when you ride away or turn off the system. Novigrad sports a lively community, everything from fishermen and merchants and sailors to mothers, fathers, and children playing games in the street.
And the city feels so very authentic. Each building seems to tell its own story, each has its own style in its own state of immaculateness or disrepair.
Geralt finds Dykstra in — where else — the local tavern. It turns out he took the Griffin job because he is searching for a certain “ashen-haired girl.” We never do get her name in the presentation, so I’ll take their cue and not mention it here. Fans of the series probably already know who I’m talking about though.
The voice overs are better than ever, and that’s saying something since The Witcher series has traditionally boasted some of the best voice work in the gaming.
Dykstra did some digging and found that the Ashen-haired Girl was recently spotted in the company of a childlike creature going by the name of Johnny, who lives in a burrow in the swamps around Valen.
It should be noted that the transition out of the tavern is seamless.
Since it would take roughly 20 minutes to travel the distance required to reach Valen — a distance which looked to be only about half the width of the whole world map — we got our first glimpse of Fast Travel. You’ll need to find a sign post in the world to initiate fast travel, and you can only fast travel to locations you have already discovered. So it won’t be quite as point-and-click-and-teleport as Skyrim, but I think we can all agree on this one: thank goodness for fast travel. Twenty minute pony ride across the world? I don’t care how pretty it is, ain’t nobody got time for that.
(Disclaimer: Some people not only do have time for that, but enjoy doing it. No judgments here.)
The world changes around you constantly, weather changes may roll in and the time of day is always in flux for example. These things will affect the behaviors of the city’s inhabitants.
The world map itself is cool and old-school, looking like it could have come straight out of a LOTR book. And, holy crap, the world is just massive. It was impossible to tell how the scale would compare to a game like Skyrim, but I’m sure they’re at least comparable.
The inventory looks improved, streamlined, and far more intuitive. There’s also a Diablo style cell-based storage system (a dagger taking up two cells, etc).
Upon reaching the swamps around Valen, Geralt uses his new Witcher Senses mechanic to track down Johnny — in actuality, it’s not a huge departure from the Medallion’s function in Witcher 2, but it looks like they will expand the functionality. Witcher Senses mode looks a bit like Assassin’s Creed’s Eagle Vision, but the world stays closer to its original colors: There’s an FOV blur around the edges, the colors desaturate slightly, and things like footprints and blood stains are highlighted.
The swamp forests are full of fog, swamp gas, and plant life. The environment artists have done an impressive job of making the world feel like an organic end-product rather than a constructed set. Even the reflections on the swamp sludge have the perfect, greasy specularity.
We get our first look at Johnny who, it turns out, is a “godling.” He is small, child-like, and greenish blue with creepy eyes. Wearing a Mogli-style garment at his waist and a circlet of twigs in his blue-black hair.
But our friend Johnny can’t talk. And wouldn’t you know it, he needs a favor. Never could have seen that coming.
As Geralt proceeds through the swamplands, the sound design really jumps out at you. The noises of the forest at rest buzz and swish around you, and the occasional monster noises are as horrifying as ever. His Witcher Sign sound effects are more visceral and satisfying than ever, they feel far more powerful thanks to the improved sound.
The combat is extremely fast and fluid, and there are plenty of environmental opportunities to take advantage of. For example, at one point, Geralt smashes a bee hive to confuse the fight and distract the monsters. Geralt darts around the battlefield with lighting-quick dodges and lunges, herding his enemies towards helpful environmental opportunities. Later in the demo, Geralt uses Igni to set off an explosive barrel of oil, and at another point, he ignites a pocket of flammable swamp gas beneath a monster.
There is much more climbing and vertical movement in the new game: ladders, cliffs, mountains, etc.
Geralt sports a new weapon as well: A small wrist-mounted crossbow named Gabriel with customizable ammunition. He uses it to take out a next of shrieking harpies, and recover a shiny flask from them.
At this point they took a moment to just look around and examine the landscape.
The draw distance is extreme, to say the least.
Terrain traversal in general looks more fluid and intuitive than ever. It looks like, to the same extent that The Witcher 2 vastly improved fluidity over The Witcher, The Witcher 3 will push the fluidity further still.
Johnny gets his voice back thanks to the object you reclaimed from the slain harpies. He’s still childlike and joyful, and a creature of nature to the core, in fact he makes a point of how much he enjoys defecating to the sunrise.
Johnny did see Geralt’s Ashen-haired Lass, running off toward the witch’s hut.
Johnny helps Geralt get an audience with the witch, who doesn’t usually speak to strangers. As we’d expect from a Witcher title, the dialogue is mature and real. It feels sincere and organic, and stylized perfectly to the world.
The old lady casts a magic ritual, and channels a triad of female spirits of the wood, The Crones. As usual, they require Geralt to destroy a dark power before they will tell him what they know about the Ashen-haired lass.
The classic radial pause menu returns from Witcher 2, with a slight reorientation. But the mechanics of meditation, potion drinking and brewing, etc, should feel familiar to fans of the series.
Random encounter monsters are faster and creepier than ever. And during a fight with a few swamp monsters, we saw two separate forms of Igni, one was a cone, AoE flamespitter version, and the other was a single-target, flamethrower style spell. Hopefully this hints at multiple uses for every Witcher Sig
As usual, there is a constant day/night cycle. In The Witcher 3, this cycle will affect the number, power, and type of monsters you’re likely to encounter, in addition to the availability of quests.
The Meditation menu looks largely unchanged, with the expected options: Wait til time of day, consume mutagens and potions, character advancement, and so on.
Geralt continues his quest and spots a werewolf. To prevent the werewolf from using his regenerative abilities, Geralt hits him with a silver shrapnel bomb.
He quickly dispatches the werewolf and moves on to a cave where the “Dark Power” lives. In The Witcher 3, you will now be able to swim and dive to discover secret underwater passageways.
Geralt finds the “Dark Power” who pleads with him to help her. She claims she is the only one who can save the children. This is one of Geralt’s infamous decision moments, a classic moral quandary: Would you trust this creature or not? It could significantly change events going forward. The presenter decides he doesn’t believe the corrupted tree spirit, so he kills her.
Back at the witch’s hut, the Crones take physical form and, well, they’re horrifying.
The ladies reveal all they know about the Ashen-haired woman, but the presentation cuts off before we hear the whole tale. Suffice it to say that, according to the Crones, she “proved a very naughty girl.” Which is, you know, ominous. Also there was a bunch of talk about elder blood.
To summarize: I can’t wait for this game. It looks drop dead gorgeous, fun and fast-paced, and overall, promises to exceed the already high bar of quality we expect from CD Projekt Red.
