The Witcher is a great game, don't get me wrong. Everything about is just perfect and the characters we so memorable, the game is what every gamer wanted and it delivered with such great praise. The only downside, being the biggest, was how it made me see how small other games are, it just makes you hate it. I love Fallout 3, being one of the best games I've played on the 360 and had the best DLC for its time, but after playing Witcher 3 with all of its DLC, everything just looked so stupid. The DLC compared to the Witcher felt so small and so little even though Fallout had more DLC to offer. I thought that Horizon was a "Meh" game that could have some improvement, but after playing the Witcher, I despise the game for ever trying to achieve such greatness as the Witcher or even touch the RPG genre! I don't know why this happened, but I guess it was because it took off some blindfold we had after playing such a marvelous game. Hello and welcome to this Comparison Blog!
I must say that the game is perfect once more before we begin, because it's just that, a perfect game that seems to have no flaws. The combat is smooth with some easy to understand difficulty to it, every mistake is rightfully punished and gives the player enough room to learn more skills from it. You try to slash someone, but they keep blocking and parrying it. You struggle to fight and then you remember there's a parry button that's so easy to remember. That's another thing about this game, the controls are easy to remember and are easy to get use to even after you forget. It is difficult and challenging to fight people of your level or above, but it's fun and easy to move around the controls. The weapons in the game have such great and balanced stats that don't try to break the game or ruin any challenge with easy to use abilities on those weapons, with different types to follow like an Axe, Sword or Mace having different traits and damage qualities to them. Such a thing is a dream in most RPGs where most weapons are over the top and powerful; that's not the case in this game. I just love it! But when you compare this game to something like the beloved Horizon Zero Dawn, a game that is compared constantly to Witcher 3, you don't the same kind of weapons. They removed the qualities of the weapons and the uniqueness to them with different ammo types and abilities that seem tedious and over-complicated to use. Instead of having the player unlock the ammo types and abilities, they had him risk his own money to see if this weapon is better and more useful than the one he has. Now he can only use freezing projectiles.
Even the game's combat is boring compared to the Witcher, having the player throw everything he's got at a robot and hope he's weak to it. And even if he is, the weakness won't do much to satisfy you because those "weaknesses" barely do enough damage to have fun with. The Witcher had the player at a disadvantage with the enemies, you had to find the weakness of the monster and use it. It was satisfying compared to regular attacks. You saw his life bar go down by just enough to see a difference and the game made sure that these enemies weren't going to be easy after finding their weaknesses, either limiting you with a heavy use of a magica meter or from a blade that breaks very easily. Witcher has the player enjoy a fight while giving him a challenge, you find an advantage and you use it to the fullest, but doesn't make the game easier, but just more satisfying. It's not an annoying encounter with the player constantly using the same item on a robot bird because this one item doesn't seem to do enough damage.
Another thing that this game seem to accomplish is the world's atmosphere. In most game, you find a place that gives off the same feeling as the rest of the world, nothing special, nothing new to discover, just the same assets for the developers not to waste time and I get that. Skyrim is one of the best games when it comes to the world, giving everyone this feeling of a bleak land with a hint of war and peace. You feel that the game has its own life to it, although you see almost the same structures, pottery, furniture, architecture, almost everything feels the same, but we still feel that the game has this life to it. In the Witch, the only same assets you will find is clothing. weapons and NPCs. Everything feels so real when you first play it. The castle feels like you can be there in real life and the lands and country feels so much like Europe. The game has the player travel on foot for him to look at everything, witness the forest and the AI interacting with it, go through the mountains and watching the water flow though its crevices, it's all beautiful and has some meaning to it as well as AI interactions. That's another thing I adore about Witcher, the AI has so much livid emotion to them that it feels like you're actually strolling in a poor man's village. In Skyrim, it's mostly mountains covered in snow and more snow. It's a boring look and I wish they put more floral or vegetative life in the scenery. There are some places in the game that stands out because of that, but those places are small and short lived. I wish they put more thought into the world's aesthetic instead of copy and paste snow and black rocks and gray grass that makes the game so muddy and unpleasing to look at. The AI interactions is flattering to say the least, but there are only four that I can think of that are world building: Royals passing through Skyrim to Cyrodiil, Thieves mugging you, Thalmor/Stormcloaks transporting a prisoner and a guy asking you to take something and not give him away to a guy threatening to kill him. They mostly feel forced, scripted and interrupts your game entirely. In Witcher, you see Bandits trying to kill people or plundering guards, pervy marauders trying to rape a wondering lady, a traveling merchant selling things on foot or a random number of guards going to their next post. I love that, you can ignore them all together and pass by them, or interact with them, getting a new mission, locations or items from them. It gives off this organic world that feels to great. Even enemies interact with each other, having mystical creatures hunt for food or stumble upon a bandit camp. I just love it!
Even the AI had this job they always followed, not like how Oblivion did it where the AI would kill off important characters, ruining the game's story or guild quests, it was like seeing people wake up and go to work kind of thing. Seeing a guard get out of the barracks and go back to their guard posts. It's so livid to see something like that happen, most games just have every NPC sleep at this time period while guards scout the town without even sleeping. It gives off this illusion that these useless NPCs have some kind of purpose to the world, that they're more than just a model following a line of code. Every other game make everything feel so robotic, giving no humanity to them at all, making the world so... Robotic.
Then the voice acting is just perfect and so great. There is one guy (that I won't mention) that has bad voice acting, but he can easily be ignored. Voice acting is one of my dream jobs and listening to this people do their job and is a Voice Actor's ASMR... What? I had nothing else to phrase it to! Well, these people behind the voices in the game is just marvelous. Jo Wyatt does a marvelous job with Ciri, Denise Gough made Yen have such a soothing voice and Doug Cockle did such an amazing job with Geralt, morphing a character that we all can love and enjoy. I love the people who voiced in this game, but I wish I never stumbled upon this game, because I'm starting to see flaws in a lot of voice work I use to love. God, Skyrim was one of the best in my opinion, but now it just sounds stale or our version of what Resident Evil's voice acting was.
As for the game's story... Well, it's mostly a great story, something you can get almost commonly in the gaming world. The game has a great one, one that I would say is the best, but it's not the only one that has one. I loved Oblivion's lore and story, having something interesting to read or a character that seem to be larger than life, sparking a never before heard of fairytale like the Grayfox. The only difference between the two (besides setting and all) is that the Witcher is a well written book series that has a lot of spin-off books involving Geralt getting new missions to pay for food that night. It even gives some character for Geralt that the Developers used to their advantage in the game, making side quest based on those spin-off books. I love that a lot and I can never see anyone doing that to another source. This game has such a marvelous tale and comparing it to others would be like comparing Star Wars to Lord of the Rings, there would be no difference, but setting.
I won't talk about graphics since I can play Fallout 3 and 4 and still enjoy the game. Plus it would make me a hypocrite, and that I am not! The game really opens your eyes to flaw in games you loved, it's disheartening and it tells you a lot about the difference between that game and the other. Anyways, I hope you liked this and please tell me if you think the same! Did you play Witcher 3 and your perception of the gaming world changed forever? 'Til next time...
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