I'm just gonna repeat a "hot take" as I am doing my umpteenth Witcher 3 replay now with the graphical update:
Witcher 3 should have been the last word on this particular style of open-world-RPG-lite-quest-based style game. None since have even come close and I can't imagine none ever will.
Yes I like Ghost of Tsushima and the recent Assassins Creeds and the Horizon games, because that style is my most comfortable. But every time I go back to W3 after one of those it's kind of a joke how they can't hold a candle to how W3 puts together a quest that takes advantage of the setting and gameplay, and how everything feels narratively fulfilling while engaging the exploration, combat, and story.
I had a friend visit and he hasn't played a console game in like 20 years, though we used to go to arcades and play Nintendo as kids. He saw my PS5 and asked to see what a current game looks like, so I show him Assassins Creed Valhalla, just running around the open world and picking fights. His immediate reaction was boredom at the idea of talking to NPCs. And some people are like that- it's not for everyone, this whole "quest" structure. This is why I cringe when someone is like "you HAVE to play this or that game" and it's like, no, no one has to do anything, not everything is for everybody. I get that.
But there are genres, or styles, or frameworks that game lean on, and this particular one- with narrative quests but in some sort of open world, but also side activities- is sort of the default now with big budge games and cinematics. Far Cry, Immortals Fenyx, seems like this new Forspoken game...
And I'm like... why, even, when W3 already figured it out.
Probably best non-W3 one is Tsushima, I do see it praised for it's story and animations and characters, and I would agree with the praise, I like that game. But its quest structures are so ridiculously simple that it doesn't really use the setting in an interesting way. And the story is essentially your basic samurai revenge-turn-hero stuff; which is great, I love that, but it's not exactly original.
The last W3 quest I replayed is one where you gotta lift a curse from an island to help a sorceress. It's a side quest, but the sorceress helped you in a main quest and in order to get this you have to do a couple of optional things- dialogue, a little puzzle- the mechanics are basic but the way it threads together from elven ruins to a magic lamp to a village to her house, all while the dialogue is building this flirtation while also scheming. And then the actual island throws a bunch of enemies and again at its core the mechanics are simple, you walk around and point your lamp at stuff but the music, the visuals, the way it lets you explore in a narrow tower in a larger world, giving you as much local history as you're willing to pay attention to, with the creepy vibes of ghosts, culminating in one of the best visuals I've ever seen in a game.
And no one has come close to this, even with all the fancy graphics. I mean I defend Horizon every chance I get but why couldn't they do something like this, I don't get it. I think honestly Ragnarok came close in terms of tying gameplay with story, but they were able to relay on forcing the quests to be much more narrow and guided because it's not as "open world" as these other games.
Even the same company came out with Cyberpunk which got middling reviews (I'm not playing it because it's first person). I guess maybe lightning strikes once or something but then maybe stop making these kinds of games or something, I dunno. Can the Witcher 3 writers and designers make an Assassin's Creed game please? That world is begging for a great story action game and even though I like playing the new ones I'm not gonna pretend they're actually, you know, good.
