The Witcher III

 If roleplaying games are only as good as their roles, here’s one of the greats

- Alex Wiltshire

Geralt Of Rivera, the White Wolf and Butcher Of Blaviken, comes with a long history. At the outset of The Witcher III, he’s somewhere around 100 years old, his life extended by the physical mutations that marked his becoming a witcher, member of an elite cadre of monster hunters. Also behind him are the thousands of words written by his creator, author Andrzej Sapkowski, as well as the hundreds of hours of play in the two games that came before.

For all that it curtails the RPG ideal of building a character and setting forth with it into a world, it’s refreshing to play someone as specific as Geralt. Out there, across the battlefields, islands, cities, bogs, peaks and beaches of the Northern Kingdoms, are people to meet and events to uncover that are written just for him. There are many choices ahead, but they’re all underscored by being about what Geralt would do, and what the world will do for Geralt.

“Ah, here crawls a witcher!” cries a proselytising priest of the Eternal Fire as you run past. “Look! The corpse-like visage! The beastly eyes! This is magic that’s made a mongrel of a man.” If you choose to face this magic-hating cleric, Geralt has only one thing to say: “Got the courage to repeat that slander to my face?” But the priest is unrepentant. “Readily! You are a mutant. A freak. A useless relic of a bygone age that should’ve been burned like a withered branch.” While our hackles rise, Geralt says cool; from here you can show the crowd the emptiness of the priest’s claim, since he’s never saved anyone from the monsters of the world. As you turn away, it turns on him, and you feel justice has been served.