Quick Look: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Nintendo Switch)

The third best Witcher game is finally portable! Awesome!

(Seriously though this looks nicer than I expected).

Someone will probably say witcher 3 isnt as good as the first 2. If you like witcher 2 more than witcher 3 you may be one of the dumbest people on the planet. The city and the swamp absolutely sucked. The gameplay was bad, the inventory was a nightmare, and the story was all over the place. The first 2 games were a terrible slog.

@steveurkel: Naw

My eyes!

@elite49: anyone who has played all 3 games can tell you how terrible the first 2 games are, so play them first and maybe on a pc or something where you can actually see why witcher 3 is so spectacular. 60 fps at 4k is still one of the best looking games especially with reshade, witcher 1 and 2 are boring and have BAD combat. Some of the worst combat and Theres a reason they didn't make 3 like 1 or 2, because they knew they weren't fun.

Does this have cross-save support?

Ever since I heard about The Witcher 3 coming to switch I've always wondered how it looks and now I know. It was definitely my GOTY for 2015

finally i can play this game at 20 FPS

If anyone seeing this liked the base game but never played the two DLCs, they are easily some of the all-time best DLCs/expansions for a video game.

This looks bad.

Are witchers immortal? I must have missed that detail in the lore

@yapapanda: Witchers aren't immortal, but both they and sorceresses live a very long time 'cause magic. Geralt is in his 90s and Yennefer is over a century old by the time of The Witcher 3.

Pretty cool handheld, but playing this on a TV would make me sad.

This looks bad and simultaneously a lot better than I expected. If someone had told me that they could even get Witcher 3 to run on a Switch, I would have called the men in white coats.

@benpack: You should absolutely play this game (but on a nice PC). I think it'sIt is one of the best things to come out in the last decade. If you don't have 100+ hours, consider playing through just the Hearts of Stone expansion. The game gives you the option of starting a leveled character for just that content. That alone is worth the price of admission.

Ben if you own this on PS4 why the hell would you want to play this blurry mess. PC is the way to go it looks and runs great has a ton of mods to make it even better my favs are realistic nights, realistic weather and no equipment burden. Maybe this looks different on the Switch screen but on my 65" 4k TV this looks so bad I put the PC settings on the lowest and set the res to 720 and it still looks better then this.

If anyone cares why the nose was doing that... It seems like the rig skeleton (which animates the mesh) wasn't perfectly "attached". So a joint that shouldn't influence the nose is causing it to move like that.

P.S. After playing the Witcher 3 for FOUR years I just beat it yesterday. My Gosh that Blood and Wine dlc is FANTASTIC

please don't kill the griffin

I remember Witcher 3 having both a dodge roll and the sidestep dodge you see in this quicklook. I'm not seeing a prompt to do a roll in this port, did they get rid of it? I never understood the point of having two different dodge moves anyway.

had to get that joke in before watching the video, eh?

"Pfft, didn't play it enough? I played at least 50 hours! Also Witchers are immortal." - Brad

Witcher 3 is still my game of the generation, and it is cool for people that have not experienced it for some reason or another that they have this version to jump in!

Wish they QL'ed a later part of the game. I'd like to see how it moves in the busier cities.

I'm glad more people will get to play this, but I'm not sure the severely compromises made to get it running on Switch are really worth it. It looks awful.

Same. Loved 3. Liked 2. Found 1's controls to be too much of a hassle to play more than an hour. My hope is that people try this and play it on a Pro/XBX or PC for the full experience, especially since its always on sale. Unfortunately, most of my friends that have Switches use it as their one and only gaming console.

One of my favourite games ever and probably my favourite of this generation. If the Switch is the only way you can play it, it's worth the visual/performance drawbacks.

Ben, you have a PC, a PS4 and an Xbox? If you're gonna play it, play it on one of those.

Also, 60 bucks may seem like a lot, but those two expansions alone are worth the price of admission.

For those about to Witch, we salute you.

My copy arrives tomorrow. 200-odd hours on PC and I still never finished Blood and Wine

Lol what a lame take.

I don't think I'll actually buy this but it's incredible such a great, massive game is on a portable system.

As much as I love Witcher 3 (Completed it on a decent PC) I just can't deal with this version. The resolution just makes me feel like my eyes are out of focus.

100%/Plat base and all the DLC a few years ago, I don't think I could go through all of it again.

But I did just buy it all on PC for like $15 a few months. Do I need this on portable as well?

This looks bad.

@steveurkel said:

I've played all three on PC in order as they came out. The first one twice, the second one twice, and the Wild Hunt once, but not all of the DLC yet because I got distracted by other things. I did enjoy the gameplay of all three, and the main story of the second one the most. Yes, 3 has a huge amount of content, but it is not inherently better than the others except for its graphics, which not every person has the money to spend on a computer capable of showcasing. I would contend that boating or horsing for countless hours around the gigantic map in 3 is worse than running around the swamp or city in 1.

Not every RPG fan loves open-worlds more than linear/branching railroads.

Witcher 1 has my favourite story from the trilogy, so it's still my favourite of the 3. Witcher 2 felt undercooked, and the console port was pretty horrible. Although Witcher 1 wasn't top down, I don't know what game Brad was thinking of when he said that? Divinity maybe?

@dropkickpikachu: I watched it lol. But even in the first five minutes it's stuttering every few seconds. Lots of frame drops. I can imagine it get's worse in the more graphically intense, endgame areas.

That said it's much better than I expected.

This is definitely 30FPS and up.

switcher 3

Absolutely agree!

Easy there Urkel. All 3 games have their audiences and we wouldn't have 3 without the first two.

IIRC, You could keep the camera zoom pretty far up and it sorta looked like a "classic" PC RPG.

I'll always prioritize playing the best version of the game over portability. 10 out of 10 times. I can't fathom how or why people would play this. It looks awful, and proves the Switch is under preforming hardware from the get go. No one should buy this game if you haven't play it before. This is absolutely not the way to play. Also, holy crap, you can get this game for like $10-15 regularly instead of paying that Switch tax

Can someone help me? I seem to have thrown an entire case of vaseline on my monitor and I cant see anything it's all a blurry mess

This is one of those games that has to be played on a beefy pc. It's so worth it.

That was my feeling. I love the Witcher games and W3 was wonderful, but had a bad case of open world bloat. The best, most memorable moments for me had little to do with the open world. I much preferred the scope and structure of 1 & 2.

Huh, I didn't even know there were people who preferred 1 or 2 over 3. I mean, 1 and 2 were fun for their own reasons, but 3 felt like the final realization of what the devs were aiming for with the series.

@steveurkel: I played all three on PC and Witcher 3 is my least-favourite, easily. The combat is interesting in the first two and it leans into the idea of research and prep, plus the writing is awesome even in those first two games. Witcher 3 feels watered-down in comparison, the inventory is still awful, and the combat lacks any challenge whatsoever and is just so boring. On top of that, I really didn't feel that the open world design helped it at all. Bandit camps and monster nests and other small activities are just a waste of time, and then relative lack of interesting world design is made especially noticeable by Skellige, which is a trillion miles of open water with nothing worth anything in between the islands. It's beautiful, sure, but it lacks focus. They removed all of the interesting bits from the previous games and slotted in generic open-world design.

Witcher 3 is easily the best of the series. But the first two were pretty good in their own right. Also, the entire Witcher series allowed you to import your saves carrying over your decisions - better than Mass Effect did.

I really need to get back to this, turn the difficulty down to the easiest, and just power my way through the story.

Game of the generation.

Now I take Ciri-chan wherever I go.

Yea totally there was an Isometric camera mode in the witcher 1, it was very goofy, one of the strangest playing games ive ever encountered.