The great thing about The Witcher 3 is that its developers, CD Projekt Red, knew what they were doing, knew their audience, and knew to give lots of love and passion as they nurtured this GOTY baby into completion.

Most of the Side quests aren't just tacked-on busy work that you only do for XP. Each has a story to tell and oftentimes you're left to deal with a moral dilemma that doesn't quite paint the choices you'll make as black & white. Almost everything here is a shade of gray, and it's more up to the player's own morality to determine whether or not to, say, kill a murderer because it was alleged self-defense or let an accidental sororicide be dealt with very brutal justice. There is no hand-holding in these decisions—you make your own and you deal with it.

Combat has improved since Witcher 1's clunky MMORPG-esque swordplay of 3 interchanging Witcher School combat styles and Witcher 2's quicksave-move-quicksave-move-combat!-defeat-quickload-potions-COMBAT!-victory sort of play. There's even two types of dodges, short and long, which strangely provides more control over combat. I never thought I actually needed another dodge button until this game, too. Button-mashing is detrimental here; mostly you have to play this smart. You need to incorporate dodges, parries, counters, and Signs to survive, especially on harder difficulties, and that's great because it keeps you on the edge of your seat.

The expansion packs, Hearts of Stone & Blood and Wine, bring more story and development to Geralt as a witcher and as a man. This is a guy who'd been through decades in The Path, and along the way, his romantic ideas of grandeur got chipped bit by bit (reading the Witcher books will help you delve deeper into his backstory) and we see more of that tired warrior in the first expansion, especially in the final confrontation (should you choose to go that path, anyway). The second expansion is, in my opinion, the best farewell CDPR can give to Geralt. I won't say more on it, lest I go to very spoilery territory.

Just know that, all in all, this is a great game, a great buy, and a game that outright earned its various Game of the Year Awards in 2015.

10/10

I'll be remembering this game fondly in the years to come...