Witcher 3 - A believable World

GameSpew praises the world design of the The Witcher 3:

In Praise of The Witcher 3’s World Where You Barely Matter

With the announcement of a Witcher Netflix series, there’s never been a better time to delve into The Witcher 3 and experience a world that could well exist without you.

There’s a line in Christopher Nolan’s Memento, uttered by the movie’s memory-deprived protagonist: “I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still there”. Yet in the case of most games – role-playing games in particular – it’s patently obvious that it’s not. In an age when we’ve come to expect more from video games, many still fall short in this regard.

Take Skyrim which, while still an enjoyable affair, does little to hide its player-centric nature. True, the game has been created with the sole purpose of entertaining you, but the player is so overtly the focus of events that the game ends up resembling a digital version of The Truman Show. Despite the fact that there’s a civil war raging, NPCs exhibit an obsessive interest in the minutiae of your life even before they’re informed that you’re The Chosen One (TM) – news which, apparently, instantly reaches all corners of the land. Join a guild and you’ll ultimately end up running it, the members being bafflingly quick to entrust their ages-old organisation to someone who’s been around for all of three weeks.

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Thanks Farflame!