Witcher 3

CD Projekt brings all this to life to thrilling effect. The landscape is rugged and fertile, sometimes twisted but never bleak, soaked in a sense of place so pungent you can smell it. It's lit by lurid orange sunsets breaking under ashen storm clouds, and lashed by wind and rain. (The decision to animate the trees fully in the wind must have caused the programmers untold pain, but boy is there an atmospheric pay-off.) It feels alive. What impresses most is the combination of sheer size with a kind of geographical intimacy, every creek and ruin feeling like a place with a past. It is, as Matt Wales claimed last week, a masterpiece of world-building.

This is why I love The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It is crass in some places and overreaching in others, but despite its grandeur and its fantastical setting, it is a game made by, for and about human beings. It's lewd and perverse and poetic and hot-blooded. It's huge yet crafted; its systems are purposeful and it doesn't have a whiff of design by committee. It will last you months, yet not waste your time. Above all, it has a vivid, enduring personality, something that is exceedingly rare among its breed of mega-budget open-world epics (and that will probably be rarer still once Hideo Kojima and Konami part ways later this year). For my money, it's the greatest role-playing game in years.

Spoiler:

Great Leader Sprucenuce wrote:Lol the hardest difficulty " you're truly insane and loving it "

Great Leader Sprucenuce wrote:The random moments in the open world are so awesome, just casually walking through the woods and there's a f***ing bear

Only barely survived.