The main quest had a part where you travel to a particular and very over the top kind of place which to me was a nice analogy for Toussaint in my opinion.

The accents were very annoying though, some of the voice actors didn’t get it at all and as a result sounded just weird and not french at all.

The antagonist was way less developed than anyone from the main game or the HoS DLC characters BUT I liked him/her quite a bit and actually wanted to find out more and see more scenes with him/her. Which is why I was a bit sad there wasn’t as much and not as cool backround stuff to do with the antagonists history as there was for Olgierd.

Where the new area is beautifully crafted and shows the same attention to detail the other maps received by CDPR the story felt a bit rushed to me. There were some bits where I thought I might have done something wrong because it changed so suddenly. There also wasn’t a single moment in the story that could hold up to the brilliant boys night spent drinking in Kaer Morhen quest or the wedding from HoS. Still as I said in the beginning I enjoyed my time with both DLC packs immensely and it’s an amazing value for money. Small hickups here and there where the quality could have been better but it’s as good as DLC gets in my opinion. I haven’t been as satisfied with any DLC since the Dark Souls 2 Crown trilogy.

You’re right about the game having too much combat. The game came dangerously close to having an actual believable world instead of the usual theme park open worlds with an attraction every 10 meters. W3 has ton of quests, most are well written, and it’s quite enough to give you reason to travel the world. All those monster nests and travelling groups of monsters make world less realistic. Come on, villagers, you hire Witcher to kill that specific monster even though there are nests and groups of hellish creatures all around your village? And how do you survive at all if even witcher can be overwhelmed by dozens of drowners on his trip between two villages?

I too never used parrying cause it’s useless. You may say sign build is worse at melee but the thing is you’ll use those signs anyway. Every sign is *always* useful against specific enemies whether you upgrade it or not. You always cast trap against advanced ghosts, you always cast aard against humans to get free hist, you always cast shield cause it’ll save you from at least one hit. I *could* stop using those obvious strategies but it would be self-imposed challenge. So as far as I care different builds only affect which part of the same strategy will be more effective.

Both expansions do liven up the combat a little bit. The fights with random bands of monsters are repetitive, but they have some really good bossfights where you have to use your head, and Blood and Wine has you invading bandit-packed castles where you fight 20+ bandits at the same time, which is basically a great excuse for Geralt to really cut loose. I don’t agree that all playstyles are the same — my signs build was definitely bad at trying to fight people straight up, and I rarely used stuff like dodging or parrying because I never had to.

That said, the combat in Witcher 3 *is* repetitive, largely because there’s so much of it. It’s an okay system that buckles under the sheer weight of encounters and they probably should have toned down the number of fights with random bandits/wolves/carnivorous plants in favour of the more interesting designed stuff like in the Witcher Contracts.

I didn’t have a huge problem with Geralt’s characterisation in Hearts of Stone – yes, he’s more straitjacketed than he was in Wild Hunt, but this expansion isn’t about him (except for the bits with Shani). I think it’s a strength of the Witcher series that it deals with a defined protagonist rather than the blank slate of most RPGs, and part of Geralt’s character is that, when push comes to shove, and with much grumbling, he will usually Do The Right Thing. Wild Hunt muddies the water by never giving him such an obvious choice, but O’Dimm is an evil bastard and it makes sense to me that he’d side with Olgierd at the end – not because he likes Olgierd, but to fuck over O’Dimm, both because of what he’s seen during his travels and because I’m sure he didn’t appreciate being dragged into this. Your interpretation – that Olgierd deserved it and O’Dimm is basically Lawful Evil and keeps his word — is equally valid. So it does keep up the ambiguity somewhat.

And my problem wasn’t the fact that Toussaint was more pleasant than the rest of the Witcher world, it was that it was absurd, and almost nonsensically so. If they’d toned the ridiculous accents down just a little I’d have had an easier time with it.

Anyway, that’s probably why world is not that engaging for me: it feels much more familiar than, say, Dragon Age world. What puzzles me is how people call it best game of 2015 ignoring absence of gameplay. The game distances itself from RPG genre by making sure you always have the same tools and they’re always viable. It’s especially evident in New Game Plus I’ve started to get better ending and play expansions. Even if I don’t put any skill points in Igni it’s still a fiery storm capable of breaking any defense. Even if I change my build to completely non-combat I can still attack people to stun them and do some damage with the help of oils. In fact I’m pretty sure that whatever your playstyle you can try any build and you won’t know what skills do you have unless it’s something like enabling alternative spells which are useless. I haven’t seen anything new in game battles since I fought this griffin with newly acquired crossbow in the first location. And I rarely has been challenged: only high level monsters made me concentrate on this dodging and striking routine. I’ve played on highest difficulty but later I became bored with it – every freaking drowner could survive 10 hits so the only thing that was challenged was my attention span. Meanwhile W1 and W2 had actual choice in character development giving you new abilities and changing your fighting style.

Still there’s this new mutagen system. Maybe it makes endgame more challenging and wakes me up.

I agree with you that Blood & Wine is significantly goofier than the base game. However, after 188 hours (!) of playtime, I’m quite happy to wrap up the Witcher 3 with what amounts to a sequel that isn’t incessantly grim. No aborted fetus monsters, no domestic abuse, no suicides; actually, the grim stuff in the Witcher 3 is pretty frontloaded in the Velen region, isn’t it? There’s lots of lighter quests in Novigrad, Skellige, and Kaer Morhen. Regardless, it’s nice to play a Witcher game that juxtaposes Geralt’s serious attitude with a bunch of weirdos and silly adventures (and trips to the bank). Also, Toussaint is clearly meant to be evocative of Southern France and Spain. There’s more than one reference to Don Quixote, including “Dulcinea Windmills.”

*For my part, a lot of it has to do with details that the game doesn’t go into in any great depth, like how Olgierd very obviously tried to create a contract that he could weasel out of, or how Olgierd made a living as a pillaging bandit, or how there’s zero evidence that O’Dimm himself made Olgierd’s heart “turn to stone.” He certainly seemed to liven up when he realized how screwed he was at the end. I wanted the game to let me push back a bit on his narrative as being unfairly wronged, but it mostly forced me to sit quietly and come to my own conclusions.