Okay, maybe not that many, but it kind of feels like that many, and at the same time, as you say, it’s filled out. That’s usually a bad idea, but boy did they deliver here, or at least that’s my impression at the 1,345 hour mark. The developers boasted about how much grander The Witcher 3 was going to be than anything else. You stop and gaze at the game’s bosky expanse and think back to all the comparably teensy games that use to seem big. MP: “The future of video games is a gaming singularity so unfathomably ginormous and ingenious you can’t play anything else.” We’re either blessed, or doomed.īut yeah, I couldn’t agree more about the scale being off the charts. I feel much the same way in the world of The Witcher.
Then, the idea of being able to run from one end of the world to the other in basically a straight line was revelatory. The only analogue I can think of is the first run through World of Warcraft way back in 2004. This all has a rippling effect which, once you start to understand how big the world is, is fairly mesmerizing.
MORE: This Is the Insane Number of Copies The Witcher 3 Sold They’re littered throughout the world, many in hidden documents found serendipitously at said points of interests. What’s boggling about this is that quests aren’t only displayed with little yellow exclamation points hovering over NPC’s heads. These are question marks that only reveal themselves-as hidden treasures or bandit camps, for example-once you jog over to check them out.
The game’s mechanic for letting players know about what’s available around them is pretty simple: reading the message boards in the various towns and hamlets puts points of interests on the map nearby. The Witcher 3‘s world, by contrast, crammed with stuff to do, stuff to see, stuff to get lost in. But this feels (pardon me) next level because those worlds are large, but largely empty. The game is being compared to Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. I don’t know if you’ve had a similar experience but, several dozen hours in or so, I find myself having these mildly disconcerting dissociative feelings when I realize just how much ground I have left to cover. (In my experience, it doesn’t.) But the sense of scale in The Witcher is pretty consistently confounding. Developers love to tell journalists “how much bigger the map is this time around,” as if map inflation correlated to fun. This is the kind of thing that’s often said about a new game, especially of the open-world variety. The conversation took place over email over the period of several days. This is a lightly edited dialogue between TIME’s games critic Matt Peckham and assistant managing editor Matt Vella about playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
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