I actually found the side quests’ writing pretty good, and indeed, sometimes even memorable. Unfortunately, most of those quests share a handful of nearly identical tasks, so the good writing started to feel like little more than window dressing after a while.

The map encounters were worse, though: Lots of question marks telling me exactly where to go meant there was nearly no real exploration to do in this open world, and arriving at them led to the same copypasta events over and over again. If you happen to enjoy those events enough that you can’t get enough of them, then that’s great, but I was bored after the first dozen or so.

I remember liking a lot of the main quests, and the characters, and the story, and the world building. It’s just that the bulk of the gameplay felt like a lot of filler content, with forgettable combat and awkward controls. (I swear, Geralt, if you plod forward when I pull back on the stick one more time, or let one more candle get in the way of picking up something useful, I’m gonna smack you.)

I hope Witcher 4 maintains (or even improves on) the writing quality of its predecessor, and adds responsive controls and interesting gameplay between the main plot points.