THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT
For a great many people, The Witcher 3 is not only the best game of its console generation, but its entire genre, and it’s easy to see why that opinion is so commonly held. At a time when fetch quests and meaningless side content were the norm in open world games, CDPR’s masterpiece came along and proved how significantly better an open world experience is when those aspects of the experience are shown as much love from the developers as the critical path. Not only that, it also completely obliterated the widely held belief that open world design, more often than not, just wasn’t conducive to coherent, effective storytelling. The Witcher 3 changed the way we look at storytelling, choices, and open world design in games, and the effects of that will continue to be felt for a long, long time.
