It was nice to be back at E3 and see some familiar faces, especially when this year I didn’t think I would make it due to health problems. But how could I not go and see what will become of the last episode in The Witcher series?
After being greeted by a fantastic life-size and extremely life-like statue of Geralt at the door, our demo began with a quick presentation to learn about Witchers and a CGI intro to the third installment of Geralt’s adventures, somewhere referred to as No Man’s Land. A bearded Geralt, looking older, tired and like he has seen too much battle lately, carries a trophy monster head hands it in for money. A group of men sentence a girl to death by hanging. They harass her and prepare the rope, as Geralt collects his reward and rides on.
Shortly after, he hesitates, his companion begging him to be quick. Geralt turns around and casts Aard, knocking the men down, and swiftly using a knife to defeat them, in one of the most impressive combat scenes I’ve seen for the franchise so far.
“Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, it makes no difference. If I have to choose between one evil and another, I’d rather not choose at all.”
The last of the men is left balancing on a stump, with the rope around his neck and the girl 
watches as the Witcher rides away. When Geralt refers to “killing monsters” here he doesn’t necessarily mean supernatural beings and beasts.
You don’t need to have played the previous games to play Wild Hunt, so we are told. With a quick recap of what happened at the end of the second game, as the armies marched on, we move on to see The Wild Hunt attacking a village. A survivor manages to escape, and in the distance we see a floating ghost ship.
Fast forward to two weeks after these events, we see Geralt riding his horse around the island, which just by itself is bigger than the entire world or The Witcher 2. The inhabitants are inspired by Norse mythology. We see him trot up a mountain and gallop through a tunnel, reaching a castle keep. The game will have an open world that is about 35 times bigger than that shown on The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.
It is quite obvious that plenty of detail has been put into the landscapes, but when we look closer we can see the same applies to character facial expressions (faces have over 40 bones), which are a major part of storytelling.
People go about their lives and interact with each other, regardless of Geralt’s presence, making the game world truly alive. Weather also affects how people react and how to go about travelling. For example, you don’t want to go out to the sea in the middle of a storm, risking flipping the boat and ending up drowning. Even for Geralt, it would be an unlikely task to survive the waves, wind and currents.
We watched as he took a little sailboat out into the ocean and saw a whale tail splashing in the distance. The weather turned from nice and calm to windy and stormy, which caused an incredible change in scenery and overall atmosphere of the game.
So aside from on foot, by boat and on horseback, travelling can be achieved through the map. Fast travel is done by choosing a landmark and with minimal loading (just a temporary black screen).
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