The Witcher 3

A majestic, earthy open-world adventure with great integrity and personality, this is the best role-playing game in years. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the game that Poland's iconoclastic CD Projekt Red has been threatening to make for a while now, ever since it debuted this dark fantasy series, based on the books by Andrzej Sapkowski, in 2007. Made by a rogue operator with independent funding (the studio's parent company owns the distribution platform GOG.com), it pays little heed to the franch...

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is still one of the best games ever made. This is one of the best role-playing games ever crafted, a titan among giants and the standard-setter for all such games going forward. In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the sacred is always at war with the profane, and beauty is always at war with blood. The series has always contrasted its world's physical glamor with its intrinsic violence, but never has that contrast been this uneasy, this convulsive. That The Witcher 3 depicts t...

Massive in size, and meticulously detailed, The Witcher 3 ends Geralt's story on a high note. Unlike its predecessor, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt doesn't exactly come screaming off the starting line. Compared to The Witcher 2, where you're immediately plunged headlong into a sexy story of intrigue and betrayal, this main quest can seem mundane, even perfunctory at times. But each time I stepped off the well-beaten path to blaze my own trail, it turned into a wild, open, exhilarating fantasy rolepl...

A big, beautiful, sprawling action RPG full of rich stories, and suffused with an oppressive darkness. A powerful daughter figure needs saving from an entourage of black-draped specter horsemen. Dangerous supernatural powers are at risk of falling into their malevolent hands, and I'm meant to stop that catastrophe. There's an overwhelming sense of urgency, but there I am, basically tying off sacks for peasants. It happened like this: early in The Witcher 3 I was tasked with finding a witch. Th...