10 Harsh Realities Of Playing Witcher 3 Again

CD Projekt Red recently announced a complete remake of the first Witcher game and a next-gen update for their reliable bestseller, The Witcher 3. All of this news combined means plenty of gamers are once again going back and revisiting the classic RPG.

Still, after the rose-tinted glasses come off, there are a few things that start to stick out to even hardcore fans of the game. Some iffiness in the story here, a gameplay annoyance there, and now fans want the update to fix a few things in their favorite Witcher game.

The Random Bugs

While not a game killer by any means, bugs are plentiful when playing this 2015 game. The open world and the sheer number of assets within it means that bugs are an inevitability. Issues like missing textures, wonky glyph effects, and wrong enemy types are prevalent in long playthroughs.

RELATED: 10 Best Missions In The Witcher 3, Ranked

For an AAA title, this is disappointing. Fans hope that the next-gen update significantly shaves a lot of the unwanted bugs for all versions of the game. Bad AI and wrong glyphs could very easily break the immersion of even the most hardcore Witcher fans.

Roach’s Behavior

It’s debatable whether fans even want Roach to be fixed at this point, but there are times when the horse’s game-breaking antics aren’t as hilarious. Roach’s movement is extremely clunky as is but add to that her penchant for clipping through the game world, a heartbreaking separation from immersion like Geralt and Yennefer’s breakup.

Roach also doesn’t seem to obey every command that Geralt gives either. While some have jokingly argued this makes Roach a more realistic horse, this is a suspension of disbelief that hinders the gameplay more than it enhances it. Still, few things are funnier than Roach on a roof.

Post-Game Reset

There’s no doubt that The Witcher 3 has a great story full of sad side quests and an epic main questline. After the end credits roll through, the player excitedly hops back into the post-game to see what their actions have done to the world, with a new vigor for their playthrough.

Unfortunately, no such thing exists, as the game simply punts the player back into the pre-endgame world. This is a huge downer, especially after being so invested in the choices made during the game. Whatever happens to Nilfgaard just doesn’t seem that important after all.

Repetitive Combat

While far from actively terrible, the combat of The Witcher 3 starts to feel formulaic after a certain point in the game. Once the player has found the one combo they’re comfortable with, there’s no real incentive for them to mix things up. They even get punished for trying to stray from their meta-gaming.

For a game with as much combat as The Witcher 3, it can be a real immersion killer when the scary boss fight creature arrives and it feels just the same as any of the other dozen boss fights up to that point. Some variety in the combat would do great things for the game’s replayability on harder difficulties.

Bad Leveling

The Witcher 3 once again falls into the same trap that mars pretty much every modern AAA difficulty problem: upscaling damage resistance. Instead of making enemies smarter, they’re just tougher. Instead of outsmarting the enemy, this forces the player to actively cheese their opponents in the same boring fashion.

RELATED: 10 Best Potions To Use In The Witcher 3 (& Their Effects)

It’s just chopping down a very tough tree that occasionally makes a swipe at the player. This also makes for some really poor attempts at padding out the content as enemies simply take longer to kill instead of having interesting stuff to do around them.

Boring Loot

Loot is just a complete non-entity in this game. While there are a few quest-related standouts, there’s no reason to not craft one’s gear. They are objectively better in terms of stats, and also don’t have a boring Witcher quest attached to them. Boring loot is part of what makes the game feel sluggish.

At first, question mark locations seemed interesting, as they could lead to a new monster or perhaps even a sidequest. Sadly, all this offers the player is a bunch of mediocre loot that will never be used by the custom-loot-wearing Geralt. More interesting artifacts or even just cool stories attached would have been cool.

Fear & Padding in Novigrad

The Novigrad section is particularly troublesome for both old and new players alike for its constant padding as well as poor storytelling. Even if Emhyr wins, there’s no real effect on Novigrad either. Everything stays the same, and it gives off this unerring sense of stagnancy.

The guards at Novigrad will still exclaim “Long live Radovid” even though he can’t be long-lived if the player decides to kill him. There’s a lot of promise in Novigrad in terms of atmosphere and character, but it just fails to stick to the landing.

Poor Balancing

In addition to the poor leveling, there are just some broken skills in the game that make cheesing even easier. Cheesing a game that the player knows is just going to throw damage sponges at them is common practice, and sadly, The Witcher 3 tries to solve the problem by making the player overpowered.

It’s also not even overpowered in a fun way, most of it is just “press button to live” skills that could rival the “Vault Over” skill in Shadow of Mordor in terms of ridiculous survivability. The game sorely needs more complexity in its skills as the fast leveling system in The Witcher 3 incentivizes try handing over creativity,

Underdeveloped Villains

Despite the subtlety of The Wild Hunt, the antagonists of the game, the “dreaded” King Eredin, and the calvary of the Wild Hunt are just so bland. There are side quests with far more compelling villains with legitimate depth. King Eredin is just the same dark lord that every RPG player has faced.

The villains being so underdeveloped directly affects the quality of the endgame. The player just doesn’t have as much investment in the titular “Wild Hunt” because they frankly haven’t been given any reason to care about the main story villains. For an otherwise greatly written game, the poor villains stick out.

Yennefer & Ciri’s Relationship

Perhaps the most striking annoyance for fans of the books is the much icier relationship between Yennefer and Ciri in the games. While Yen and Ciri are very much an adoptive family in the books, the game treats them more like squabbling siblings at best, and petty enemies at worst.

Ciri often acts completely aloof at Yen’s attempts to connect with her, and it makes both characters look more foolish than they would otherwise be. It’s a shame because their characterization outside of their relationship is great, but something about them just never clicked in the game’s interpretation.

MORE: 10 Hidden Details In The Witcher 3 Found By Redditors