The Witcher 3 is released.

PCWorld talks about their first impressions with the PC version:

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (PC) review impressions: Smoothly slaying monsters

I was worried.

After months of excitement about The Witcher 3, it seemed like it was falling apart in the run-up to launch. All of the reviews that went up last week were conducted on debug PS4 consoles. PC codes, meanwhile, were pushed back time and time again until finally I was told we’d receive code on launch day, probably. And all this from a PC-friendly developer like CD Projekt.

When a game’s coming in that hot on PC, we’re right to be worried. Mortal Kombat X, Assassin’s Creed Unity—these are just two recent examples where the PC version came at the last minute and featured huge problems not caught on consoles.

So yeah, I was worried about The Witcher 3. For no reason, it turns out.

NOTE: All tests in this article were conducted with Nvidia’s latest Witcher 3 game-ready driver installed, which was provided to us prior to release.

Monster slayer

To be fair, I’m only ten-or-so hours in at the time of writing, which is why you’re getting impressions today instead of a full review. And I plan to experience all The Witcher 3 has to offer, so who even knows when a review will hit?

But from that ten hours, The Witcher 3 seems to be an amazing accomplishment. Much of what I’ve played so far I already covered in my preview of the first four hours—You’ll start in the small town of White Orchard for a massive, three-hour long “tutorial” area and then head to Vizima to meet with His Imperial Excellency Emhyr var Emreis. If you’ve never played a Witcher game you might feel a bit lost, but your companion Vesemir will help you through the worst of it with some subtle flavor text.

Yada yada yada. This is all fodder for a real review. Let’s talk about how it runs. That’s the big concern here, what with people dissecting old E3 demos on YouTube to see whether the game’s graphics have been “downgraded.”

Downgraded or not, the graphics in The Witcher 3 are gorgeous. However, I would say The Witcher 3 certainly isn’t the graphics card-punishing beast that Witcher 2 was. Running at 1080p I was able to max out most of the (extremely granular) settings except Nvidia HairWorks and maintain a steady 60 frames per second…on a single GeForce GTX 970. The only things I dipped were grass density and crowd size, and I left those on High.

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