I bought The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on a whim recently, having seen The Witcher series bundle on sale for about 70% on Steam. I figured, hey, why not play this triple-A game that everyone has been raving about since it came out? Besides the background cries in my head of “You, stop it! You’ve already got like 30 games you either haven’t played or haven’t finished!” it was a great idea.

Once I turned it on, I was in awe for a couple of reasons. The music is beautiful. Check. The graphics are great. Check. The facial animations are much better than pretty much any other game I’ve seen in the past couple of years. Big check. My computer can actually run this game! CHECK!

Seeing as I had no experience playing any Witcher games before and never read any of the books, I was a little lost on the plot. I feel that, besides not really detailing what a Witcher is until I’d already caught up with the story, the game did a good job of letting the player jump into the game without concerns for understanding the plot. The story is well-written, and dialogue is darkly funny. Everyone is dying. Geralt still snarks about everything. Being able to choose his snarks and what kind of man he will be is great.

For example, I recently tackled a mission where I was supposed to burn bodies for some flame-priest guy. He treated Geralt like an outcast, just like everyone, and (spoiler) Geralt uncovers that this dude tried to cover up a murder by having you burn these body piles. In the end, I could choose to look the other way or to refuse to keep the secret. I can’t play Geralt as a bad guy, so I told the priest where he could stick it. The priest did not appreciate my choice and attempted to kill me, but Geralt can shoot fire out of his hands, so you can guess who won this one.

The ability to choose to be a hero even though the world around Geralt portrays him as a heartless, money-driven monster makes me feel so connected to him. It’s the best way to characterize the player-controlled character– to allow them to choose what path they want to take, even in cases where the character is already established. Watching Geralt be an overall nice dude and then have people thank him graciously for saving them just feels good.

This characterization is integral to making the game tie together well in all aspects. Without getting insight on Geralt’s thought processes, his motivations would be less clear, and we would generally not know as much what kind of person we get to play as. Also, he’s a funny guy. He knows what to say to piss people off, and the writers sure knew how to create good situations for this to shine.

My proverbial hat is off to you, CD Projekt S.A. Now back to dying three times every hour or so because of random wild dogs and wolves.