Witcher 3 Personal Review
I just started to play Witcher 3 lately. I love this game a lot like a lot of people. However, As an easily-distracted/not-up-to-date/slow gamer, I usually spend time to read every line of dialogues (never skip one is an honored tradition and shows my respect to the writer), and complete a lot of side quests. Most of the time I play story and swords, occasionally blood and breaking bones. This review is somewhat like my game play--- non-systematic and incomplete.
Aesthetics
Witcher 3 has won tons of visual design award, such as the Golden Joystick Award for Best Storytelling, Best Visual Design and Best Gaming Moment. I really like the organic, vivid and alive landscape in this game. One of the most important landscape elements is plant. This semester I used cluster analysis to study human cognition of plants, and I found that usually you'll need to model 10% of plants species to cover all species in a region (since the other 90% are visually similar to that 10%.) It's interesting that I found out the overall plant species created in this game are 200+, and Poland (where the main scene is based on) is home to some 2,300 species of vascular plants, plus about 2,450 species of mosses, liverworts and lichens, which is about 10%. The only thing I find a little unsatisfying is that I can usually go through trees.
Mechanics
This is an open world game. The mechanics of this game is similar with other modern RPG game (combating, collecting ingredients, crafting......), but I'd say compare to some games, the control of this game is really easy, especially the combat. You don't need to memorize a lot of key combinations if you play on pc. With meditation and change of difficulty at any time, different levels of skills can find their comfort zone. I found the witcher's sense was kind of annoying in the beginning because I'm used to find treasures on my own, but later on getting used to it. If I was to add something I'll probably add more professions, or better, you can be a witcher-hermet, witcher-assassin, stuff like that.
Story
I enjoy the story very much. This game give you an immersive feeling of the world because it tells story not just from a group of characters, but from all walks of life, from beggar to the king. You hear quarrels of the blacksmith and his wife, the woman looking for her pan, (that was one of my favorite quests, you literally just break her door.), as well as the story of nobleman and kings. Then you begin to learn about people, the land, you mission and yourself. I always believe that the key to good lie/story lies in the details.
Technology
The game uses the REDengine 3 game engine for nonlinear role-playing video games set in vast open world environments to achieve a complex, multi-thread story, in which the players' choices matter. (source: "Press release posted to IGN forums". Projekt RED. 1 February 2013. Retrieved 4.23.2017.)