Witcher 3 - Preview @ PC Gamer

PC Gamer has posted a new preview of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

There’s a creature in the woods slaughtering villagers. The elders want to appease the gods in the hope that it will move on. The leader of the village’s young upstarts disagrees, and wants you – a professional monster slayer – to bring him the beast’s head for a bag of gold. What do you do?

The best fantasy RPGs serve up the juiciest dilemmas, and the Witcher series has form for throwing up quality let’smake- a-cuppa-and-think conundrums. Slaying the monster seems like the obvious option here, but if The Witcher 3 is anything like its predecessors things are going to get complicated fast.

The hands-off demo I saw was being controlled by CD Projekt Red. For the first time in the series, the game lets players potter about an open world full of incidental missions like this. The devs could just as easily steer Geralt elsewhere and go exploring, but they opt to side with the youngster and venture into the woods, using Geralt’s ‘Witcher sense’ to find the monster. A dull red haze highlights important clues in the environment, some scratch marks here, some tracks there. Geralt soon concludes that the boogeyman is a Leshen – a spooky, antlered humanoid of great power.