Recently – I say recently, it was before lockdown, so a lifetime and a half ago – I started a new game of The Witcher 3 from scratch. Not because of the Switch port; as impressive as that is, this is a big-screen game for me. A little bit because the Netflix series had pushed the game, which celebrates its fifth anniversary today, to the front of the public consciousness and so into mine. Mostly because there was nothing new I fancied playing, or rather I fancied playing nothing new – I wanted the soothing feeling of old routines, patterns of thought and movement worn smooth with use. I wanted to go on a quest and upgrade my armour, and quest again and upgrade again, like I did five summers ago. I wanted to be weak and become strong, to be drab and become stylish, to be simple and become sophisticated. I wanted a comfort game.
What I have found is a game that is just as I remembered it – of course it is, I know a lot has happened, but five years still isn’t long ago. I still love it, but I don’t love it for quite the reasons I thought I did. Those are not the things that drew me back in, and certainly not the things that have kept hold of me.
I had grown accustomed to thinking of The Witcher 3 as a masterpiece of world-building and storytelling hung on a serviceable, not to say mediocre action-RPG framework. The combat was a little sluggish and lacking in refinement, perhaps, and it never seemed to matter much where you invested your skill points. The consensus – which I hardly disagreed with – had it that the game’s greatest achievements were its rich, humane tapestry of questlines and the lived-in texture of its landscapes; its portrayal of a messy, complicated medieval world that was past redemption.
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This isn’t wrong. But playing the game a second time, I can’t say I find myself as enthralled by the writing as I was. My thumb taps restlessly on the dialogue skip button. The script has its grace notes, for sure, and I still admire its emphasis on telling stories on a small, human scale within its grand fantasy setting – the way it has the confidence to lead with the private struggles and intrigues of even incidental characters, knowing they make far more interesting motivation than any magic MacGuffin. But in the harsh light of hindsight it’s uncomfortable how often the writers’ stabs at bitter-little-pill realism – a sort of kitchen-sink Tolkien – tip over into edgy nihilism for nihilsm’s sake. It’s harder, now, to forgive the sudden lurches in tone, the often wooden comedy, the dreadfully paced, talky midsection and the excruciatingly unsexy romantic scenes. I still wouldn’t call it bad, far from it. But the art of video game storytelling is growing up fast, and from some angles the Witcher 3 comes across as quite the awkward adolescent, its voice bouncing up and down the octaves.