#3. THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT
It wasn’t that long ago that most of us believed open world game design and a focus on effective storytelling to be deeply incompatible. That we no longer feel the two are mutually exclusive can be attributed to one game- CD Projekt RED’s seminal The Witcher 3, a vast, sprawling, epic game that immediately took the industry by storm, and resulted in the Polish studio’s meteoric rise to global fame. There’s so much that The Witcher 3 did that still impacts games and players, whether that its huge and dense open world or its stunning visuals, its grandiose and layered narrative or its excellently written characters, its choice and consequence mechanics or the way it treated even the most insignificant side quests like they were an integral part of its central narrative. It was, in many ways, the first game on the PS4 and Xbox One to truly feel like a “next gen experience”, and the fact that there still aren’t a great many games that feel nearly as impressive and mid-blowing as The Witcher 3 did when it first came out in 2015 – and still does – is a testament to how much of a revelation it was.
