--- description: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt arrives Tuesday, like a meteor heralding an extinction level event masquerading as a gritty Slavic myth-o-rama. title: 5 Reasons People Love The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt So Much image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt62e4f804b8209809/69884d0ccd1bbaf8d86fb036/the_witcher_3-wild_hunt_skellige_is_a_beautiful_place.png?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Business](/section/business/) ## Business Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [Tech](/tag/time-section-tech/) ## Tech Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # 5 Reasons People Love _The Witcher_ So Much by [Matt Peckham](/author/matt-peckham/) ## Matt Peckham Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close May 18, 2015 6:21 PM CUT  The Witcher 3 Wind Hunt The Witcher 3 Wind HuntCD Projekt by [Matt Peckham](/author/matt-peckham/) ## Matt Peckham Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close May 18, 2015 6:21 PM CUT _The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt_ arrives Tuesday, like a meteor heralding an extinction level event masquerading as a gritty Slavic myth-o-rama. The doomed: all sandbox fantasy roleplaying games prior, forced to measure up and found wanting. Polish developer CD Projekt Red’s tale of a cat-eyed, glam-haired, drug-elevated monster slayer, once as obscure as Bethesda’s hence [primetime-friendly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfPTzcU7RME "undefined") _The Elder Scrolls_ series, now separates money from pockets with ease. Preorders for _The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt_ are past one million, the studio reported last week. That’s more than half as many total copies sold of 2011’s _The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings_, itself both a critical and commercial triumph. _The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt_ thus looks poised to shatter its predecessor’s numbers, buttressed this time by PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions launching simultaneously (_The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings_ was for PC and Xbox 360 only). So what is _The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt_? Only the biggest open-world roleplaying game of the year, one of [the most critically acclaimed](http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt "undefined") _in_ years, and the final act of a trilogy that since the first act arrived in October 2007, has been as keen to upend morally simplistic, male-angled fantasy tropes as [that other epic fiction franchise](http://www.georgerrmartin.com/book-category/?cat=song-of-ice-and-fire "undefined") everyone raves about. If you’re newcomer-curious, here’s a quick review of why people love _The Witcher_ so much. ## It’s based on sophisticated fantasy writing Thank Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski for the _Witche_r-verse and its guttural, morally ambivalent, antihero. Sapkowski, whose first books appeared in the early 1990s and weren’t translated into English until the late 2000s, placed his protagonist Geralt of Rivia in a mimetic fantasy world with enough socio-economic nuance to ground a political science dissertation. Here be racism, sexism, classism, economic inequality and injustice, wrapped in a bleak, often cynical worldview [informed by a nation with a history](http://metaleater.com/video-games/feature/gamethropology-the-economic-history-of-the-witcher "undefined") of repeated occupation and counter-occupation by larger, historically thuggish rival powers. ## Your mileage will definitely vary The original game offered three possible endings, and not just superficial codas where one or the other cutscene plays before the credits roll. Pivotal decisions in _The Witcher_ could upend the narrative course, determining who lived and died, and dictating who might ally with or turn against you when crucial battles arrived. _The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings_, though still restricting players to progressive level-like areas, further developed that organic storytelling formula, boasting 16 possible endings with so much interactive nuance to its narrative pathing that multiple play-throughs could feel like completely different games. _The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt_, which shifts the series to freeform exploration, expands its possible outcome tally to a whopping 36, and the developers claim those windups are born of organic pivot points along the way that add up to hundreds of narrative permutations (that, in a game where a single pass takes upwards of 50 hours). ## The fights are way better than most All roleplaying games are really elaborate fighting games, so the clicky-tappy things you wind up doing over and over–in some cases for hundreds of hours–has to be both novel and progressive. Studio CD Projekt Red’s approach has been both in each of _The Witcher_ games, progressing from a clever rhythm-focused keyboard/mouse model in the original, to deep toolboxes of offensive and defensive maneuvers augmented by secondary tricks and talent trees that unlock ever more nuanced abilities. ## The world looks and feels like nothing else in fantasy gaming Square Enix’s _Final Fantasy_ games are more graphically inventive (they’re certainly more gonzo!), sure, but in a crowded field that’s been tediously riffing on Tolkien for decades, _The Witcher_ games feel like idiosyncratic curios. Inspired by Slavic mythology, its bosky dells, ruin-flanked hills and patchwork fields sound paradoxically elegiac notes, juxtaposing heart-stopping sunsets filtered through wind-whipped trees with war-wracked, blood blackened fields of corpses, sometimes piled like cordwood. And instead of squaring off with trolls, orcs, goblins, dragons and multicolored blobs of dungeon-delving goo, you’re up against folkish, far weirder-sounding Eastern European creatures like striga, necrophages, bruxa and vodyanoi, as well as warped takes on traditional fiends, e.g. noonwraiths, alghouls and dagon worshippers. ## But the most marvelous monsters in the game aren’t mythic at all As I put it when reviewing the original game eight years ago: “For all the wonderfully ‘un-Tolkien-y’ alghouls and echinops and graveirs and bloedzuigers you’ll grapple with, the most hideous monsters in the game aren’t the ones with six or a dozen consonants crowding a single vowel, but other humans, like you.” ### See The 15 Best Video Game Graphics of 2014  Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Activision's futuristic first-person shooter in which players take on a rogue private military company uses a brand new engine built specifically for PCs and new-gen consoles to handle its cutting-edge lighting, animation and physics. Sledgehammer Games/Activision  Far Cry 4\. This pulled back shot of fictional Himalayan region Kyrat is in-game, believe it or not, rendered with an overhauled version of the engine Ubisoft used to design Far Cry 3. Ubisoft  The Last of Us: Remastered. Naughty Dog's meditation on the worst (and best) of humanity is built on technology that reaches back through the studio's pulp-adventure Uncharted series. The graphics are so impressive, TIME recently assigned a conflict photographer to photograph inside the game. Ashley Gilbertson for TIME  Alien: Isolation Built from scratch, the Alien: Isolation engine's outstanding deep space visuals all but replicate the set design of Alien film concept artists H.R. Giger and Ron Cobb's work. The Creative Assembly  Assassin's Creed Unity. Ubisoft says it "basically remade the whole rendering engine" in its AnvilNext design tool to handle the studio's meticulous recreation of Paris during the French Revolution. Ubisoft  Child of Light Inspired by filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki and artist Yoshitaka Amano, Child of Light's hand-drawn artwork puts the lie to presumptions that graphical richness depends on shader support or polygon counts. Ubisoft  Destiny Built from scratch by ex-Halo studio Bungie, Destiny's game engine was designed to scale across the next decade, says the studio. Bungie  Mario Kart 8 Nintendo's kart-racer for Wii U reminds us that raw horsepower is just a facet of crafting a beautiful game world. Nintendo  Infamous Second Son Sucker Punch's freeform Seattle-based superhero adventure models all sorts of minutia, from the intricate wrinkling of an aged character's face to the way eyelids stick, slightly, before separating when characters blink. Sucker Punch Productions  Monument Valley Escher-like at first glance, Ustwo's mind-bending puzzler was also inspired by posters, bonsai plants, arabic calligraphy and filmmaker Tarsem Singh's The Fall. Ustwo  Grand Theft Auto V Rockstar's remastered crime spree opus was crafted from an in-house engine first employed in a game that simulated table tennis. Rockstar  Titanfall Respawn Entertainment  Forza Horizon 2 Turn 10's Euro-racer actually models light refracted through drops of moisture, the render tech plausibly simulating something as intangible but essential as the earth’s atmosphere. Microsoft Studios/Turn 10 Studios  80 Days Inkle's anti-colonialist vamp on Jules Verne's famous novel uses crisp art deco imagery inspired by travel posters to unfurl 80 Days' tale of intrepid globetrotters Monsieur Fogg and his valet Passepartout. Inkle  Tomb Raider Crystal Dynamics' radical reboot of its popular series about an athletic archaeologist uses a modified version of the engine that powered Tomb Raider: Legend in 2006. Square Enix ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3860280/witcher-wild-hunt-hands-on/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3860280/witcher-wild-hunt-hands-on/"},"headline":"5 Reasons People Love The Witcher So Much","datePublished":"2015-05-18T18:21:27.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:44:49.536Z","description":"Wondering why a game called The Witcher keeps popping up in your social media?","url":"https://time.com/3860280/witcher-wild-hunt-hands-on/","keywords":["Tech","Video Games"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt62e4f804b8209809/69884d0ccd1bbaf8d86fb036/the_witcher_3-wild_hunt_skellige_is_a_beautiful_place.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Matt Peckham","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/matt-peckham/"}],"articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt62e4f804b8209809/69884d0ccd1bbaf8d86fb036/the_witcher_3-wild_hunt_skellige_is_a_beautiful_place.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"The_Witcher_3-Wild_Hunt_Skellige_is_a_beautiful_place","caption":"The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt","creditText":"CD Projekt","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3860280/witcher-wild-hunt-hands-on/","name":"5 Reasons People Love The Witcher So Much"}}]}] ```