From a player's perspective
During the fifth anniversary of The Witcher 3: Wild Huntās launch, Polygon released an opinion piece in summation of the gameās impact. There was an exhaustive discussion of the Witcher franchise, and how the production for Witcher 3 was made to take step significantly beyond its precedents. In my experience with games that have an open world, the player is expected to spend hours upon hours exploring, levelling up, and doing quests pertinent to the story while ensuring that it involves enough mundanity, and despite being one of the earliest of its kind in the community, Witcher 3 managed to check off all boxes and perhaps even exceed them. The writer collected insights from a quest designer from CD Projekt Red which thoroughly helped in further elaborating on the gameās main objectives from an insiderās perspective. Whilst the game poses as a great challenge to improve, understandably so, as it comes as a rule with most media that the third in succession is either redundancy or completely detached from its original objective. As such, it was relieving to find out that the third of this series has completely advanced in user immersion without risking its remarkable aspects from its previous narrative formats in Witcher 1 and 2. Reading the article, I found myself agreeing with the observations used to describe the game experience such as its ability to make the player feel involved in such a way that they are in a natural environment, where everything is alive and constantly at work. These details made it seem as though the world was not formulated in code and softwares, rather, a mirror of reality where the results can be preceded by small, seemingly irrelevant actions we forget to take into account.Ā
As a player I would usually encounter sidequests that maximise interactivity and the depth of the story, these quests may very well involve none of the main circle of characters or central story arc but would contain clues or non-playable characters (NPCs) which may span over the main quests. In addition to this, the climate of the entire game changes depending on the quest being done and the manner by which it is done, these include background chatter and gossip regarding the quest objectives and progress that might include other characters or monsters. To say the least, the writer of the article has evidently played the game first-hand,Ā there are clear depictions of Witcher 3ās player immersion being modeled after nonlinear, realistic instances that create a multifaceted world-building game experience. Despite these technicalities and processes thatĀ the piece has uncovered, it still lacked the less subjective points of view coming from those who have indulged in the game themselves. With the Witcher series running for years, it has gained traction across the gaming community, even building a fanbase dedicated to their games. The article failed to include testimonials from old and new fans alike, and how they feel about the progress of the game during the time which they were subscribed to the game releases, eventually citing critique on the gaps and the nostalgic value of the game for the players. Although the writer did make a few connections across its games, the mention of Witcherās Netflix feature did not include a better elaboration of the differences between the gaming immersion and the viewing experiences of its audience. It is only fitting that, in reverence to the history of the game, there is a complete timeline that includes a breakdown of the content found within the franchise.
