CD Projekt is a very annoying developer. It's like that kid at school constantly boasting with grandiose gestures, in an attempt to inflate themselves up in-spite of what actual reality might exist.
I recall sometime back, when attempting to pitch the now failed White Wolf gamer, CDP slipped in a message within the trailer, denouncing naysayers of pc gaming, singing it's praises - a reoccurring motif.
Flash forward to present. Upon booting the Witcher 3 up, the first thing that became noticeable was how uninitiative the control scheme was, simple left, right, backward and forward commands creating an involuntary jerk, ice-rink like. Simple navigation ordering the character towards a ladder in the opening tutorial unnecessarily obtuse.
Further in, the opening battle, the very first in the same, a bizarre assortment of key layouts, a targeting system that dictates who and what you will be hitting on a whim, and sluggish, ice rink control system in which skill, but rather madly bashing keys fells enemies.
Contrary to claims, this is not a complex game. It is a simple WASD, with hit and block controls. Many games, none built specifically with pc in mind intuitively work well. Darksiders for example, both I/II have far more complex gameplay mechanics than the Witcher 3, yet quite happily operate on either a gamepad or keyboard.
And that's where the experience ends. Rightly so.
Many gamers and critics alike, appear to have wholly ignored the most basic, fundamental aspects of a game, n favor of praising it's cinematic. It's an unfortunate trend in gaming, cinephiles putting the value of gaming itself as a back-burner, an inconsequential nascence to get to the next cutscene.
Recently playing Phantom Hour Glass helped heighten this impression. While the Witcher 3 ignores the fundamentals with aspirations of maturity, Phantom Hour Glass revels in it's child like nature pinning down it's simple control scheme (1 touch) to create more from less, with less being of a higher caliber than more.
The Witcher 3's graphical praise is also somewhat confusing. A game like Mad Max for example, looks fantastic and can easily run 60fps on modest hardware. Likewise, even a very old game, like Grand Theft Auto 4, makes up for it's lack of pixel power, through sheer amount of detail in the game-world.
Comparatively The Witcher 3 is a demanding game to many open world titles, with a lack of polish. An abundance of clipping, dead eye's NPC's staring into space and poor animations. While certainty not a bad looking game, it's pretty far from being deemed one the best looking and given it's visuals VS performance, it's quite poor in that regard.
Overall, the Witcher 3 is a big pile of crap, and I hope it burns.
