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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (PS5) Review

December 16, 2022 | Posted by Marc Morrison
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Image Credit: CD Projekt RED
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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (PS5) Review  

Should you play The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on the PS5 (or presumably the Xbox Series X)? Yes.

Neat, I’ve finally been able to review a game in under 20 words, my work here is done and the paycheck is in the mail! Kidding aside, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on new consoles does offer the same general game with a few modest improvements here and there. However, one or two choices I might question a bit.

I’m not going to delve too deep into the nuts & bolts of Wild Hunt, honestly. You pretty much all know the actual game, delving into quests, hunting monsters, playing Gwent trying to grapple some unwieldy gameplay systems here and there, it’s all here, only now it looks a bit nicer. I’m not going to say it look as nice as something native to the PS5, Ragnarok or Demon’s Souls or something like that, but it does look improved. This is generally helped by Wild Hunt on previous consoles being one of the prettiest games around, so them bumping it up some might not get to “current gen”, with whatever arbitrary standard you have, may or may not pass it, but Wild Hunt is still incredibly pleasant to look at.

One big thing with this update is that it includes “a selection of community-created mods integrated into the story”, which, to me, is a hill of beans. I’ll be honest, the last time I played The Witcher 3 was back around 2015 when it first came out, so while I think the mutagen system looks different, I honestly couldn’t tell you what is different in this respect. There’s no way, I can find, to actually display what mods are active and what aren’t. More to the point, I generally prefer mods that would break the game, like granting me a 1-hit kill sword, or just giving me infinite money/carrying capacity. Something tells me, these mods probably aren’t in the game.

There actually is new content here though and that is nice. The big thing is a new quest to get you some Witcher armor that is modeled from the Netflix show, which does look nice. You do have to be somewhat along in the game, the quest doesn’t unlock until you hit level 15, but that’s probably like 15 or 20 hours, depending on how good you are at Witchering.

Aside from that, there is a nice bevy of other content for you to try out, from different character appearances, to some new items, new beard/hair options and about a half dozen other new quests. There is just a helpful “Additional Content” subheading in the glossary if you want a full breakdown of new stuff.

Both DLC packs are baked in as well, Hearts of Stone & Blood and Wine. Thankfully, like before, you can just opt to play these from the main menu with a boosted Geralt character, since you originally had to be at level 20 to even start them.

Hearts of Stone is a bit of fun, you are tasked with trying to fulfill the wishes of a rich guy that are generally thought impossible. It’s kind of like doing a medieval version of an Ocean’s 11 heist, including breaking into a bank vault.

Blood and Wine, on the other hand, plays a bit like a murder mystery. An unseen enemy is killing knights in a land and Geralt is told to find out who/what is doing it and stopping it. Blood and Wine is almost big enough to be its own separate game so both expansions, along with the core Witcher 3 will keep you busy for over a hundred hours, easily.

That might be actually my biggest problem with this version of the game, and part of the mod stuff I mentioned above, Witcher 3 certainly can take its sweet time to actually *get* going. It’s not a criticism, per se, just an observation. Having a more accelerated way of playing, either through outright cheats, or else through game balancing, would have been very welcome. I can understand if the developers didn’t want to outright rebalance the game from scratch though, so I’ll concede this point a bit.

9.0
The final score: review Amazing
The 411
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on current gen consoles remains a great game, and at present, the best way to play the game since the PC version is a tad shaky at the moment. It’s a game you can just lose yourself in, and when you glance up, 8 hours will have passed by and it almost feels like nothing. If you haven’t played it before, it still is a pretty one of a kind game, and if you have played it before, there’s more content and a few quality of life improvements to make it more enjoyable.
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