Summary
- The Witcher 3 is a great game, but its open world often lets it down.
- Where the side quests are intricate and handcrafted, rich with detail, much of the world is repetitive and uninteresting.
- It often makes exploration a slog, so it’s a shame to see The Witcher 4 following suit.
After finally being unveiled at The Game Awards, CD Projekt Red revealed that The Witcher 4’s map will be “more or less” the same size as The Witcher 3’s, continuing with an open world. But that was easily the worst part of the last game.
The Witcher 3 is one of the best RPGs of the last decade (which it’s just about still part of), with some of the most intricate, heartfelt side quests in gaming. It was showered (or I guess, bathed) in deserved praise, winning the second-ever GOTY award at TGA 2015. I revisit it nearly every year, whether that’s just to play Gwent or go monster hunting, but I always find exploring the Pontar tedious.
With a vast open world, most of the time you’ll be trudging along empty fields from repetitive question mark to repetitive question mark, looting bog-standard gear. If you want a change of scenery early on, you’ll run into arbitrary overleveled enemies marked by a skull, which aren’t so much a challenge to overcome as they are a glaring red wall at the end of the map shouting ‘Not yet!’
It’s not rewarding whatsoever, and most of the time I found myself getting so bored that I’d just barrel through areas, avoiding enemies, to reach the next Gwent player. I can’t put my finger on one question mark that ever stood out. The best parts of The Witcher 3 were its denser, smaller zones — the lavish, bustling cities, or the rural hamlets you’d spend hours questing in. Not the unending fields of the same bandit camps.
The Witcher 2 Had Far Better Structure
The Witcher 2 struck a better balance. The game was split into smaller locations like Flotsam, Vergen, Kaedweni Camp, and Loc Muinne across three chapters. These were open areas where you could chat with characters, buy gear from merchants, find quests, and hunt monsters, adorned in lavish set pieces like the thrilling intro battle. Like Baldur’s Gate 3, it wasn’t linear, but a string of handcrafted, carefully designed areas to learn inside and out.
Everything had a reason for being where it was. Not only was loot more valuable, but enemies were carefully chosen because each zone had to stand out, making encounters unique as opposed to the unending waves of bandits and wolves we find in The Witcher 3.
It also ensured that the game had better pacing. More often than not, I’d get so swept up in ticking off every checklist item in The Witcher 3 to tickle my completionist brain that, by the time I got back to the story, I’d be completely lost and overleveled. The Witcher 2 kept the flow going from start to finish, because it wasn’t bogged down by open world guff.
The Open World Genre Is Oversaturated Now
In 2015, The Witcher 3 was a huge step forward for the genre, iterating on the likes of Skyrim, Far Cry 3, and Dragon Age: Inquisition (which itself won the first ever GOTY). But open worlds are even more oversaturated now than they were ten years ago. The boldest and most exciting examples aren’t the checklist marathons, but the daring convention breakers like Elden Ring and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
The Witcher 4 probably won’t throw out the rulebook. Already, it looks to be building on the foundations The Witcher 3 laid, which by now, are tired and overdone.
With an open world that big, you can’t make every encounter meaningful: the swathes of empty land between points of interest will inevitably grow tedious to explore and pacing will suffer. That’s the downside to the genre, and with every studio dipping their toes in over the last ten years, the cracks have never been plainer to see.
One of the best RPGs of the last decade is weighed down by such a frustratingly basic open world, and it’s a shame to see the sequel following suit.
The Witcher IV is a single-player, open-world RPG from CD PROJEKT RED. At the start of a new saga, players take on the role of Ciri, a professional monster slayer, and embark on a journey through a brutal dark-fantasy world. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it aims to be the most immersive and ambitious open-world Witcher game to date.