I got the witcher ending and I consider it to be the best one. I'm kind of glad it worked out that way because I don't think I'd want to play through all the way a second time. The game is excellent but its very linear and unlike the previous games I feel that 3 had by far the least shades of grey options. Everything felt pretty straight forward to me in game as to bad vs good outcome with the exception of a few side quests which have zero impact on the game or the story.
I do wish they would of done a better job with the previous games characters. The companion quests in game left me wanting. They felt rushed, incomplete and in many cases they sucked.
Seriously, getting 3 playing cards, was that the best they could come up with for Zoltan? Roach should of had far more than that one mission to go get Ves. So much potential there for interesting guerrilla warfare stuff to earn his help. Dandylion and his whores and then disappearing to be a good businessman seemed out of place. You think he could of been part of something a bit bigger than that at some point in the game.
Triss and Yennefer were almost non existent outside of their tiny portion of the story and most of that related to the main quest. Triss's part was over way too quickly and Yennefer was a complete and total cunt for 95% of the game. Once you get their very quick portions of the story done they are on complete auto pilot for the rest of the game. In fact you wouldn't' even know you would end up with Triss at the end (or whoever you pick) because she treats you like every other random towns person in game with a single word response if you try and talk to her. With the exception of the 2 or 3 dialogue options you can't even talk to these people. Just felt really odd sending my GF to the fortress, she isn't even there to talk to. Then after saying all the right things, she won't even talk to me. Then we say some more right things and its cool then she won't talk to me for the rest of the game until the end where we live happily ever after. Disjointed.
Why they decided to make Yennefer such a cunt is beyond my understanding. She isn't like that in the books and their portrayal of her was terrible.
They did a good job with Dikystra as a character, even if the assassination quests were pretty bad except for the final portion of the deed which was what? the second quest? The entire sequence felt rushed not fully fleshed out. They could of done a better job of fleshing out that line. I wish they would of explored the underworld a bit more and especially the Holy Fire church stuff. There was so much potential in Novigrad, crime bosses, oppressive radicals, all your friends meet up there, assassination etc and when I left there I felt as though I was an errand boy for 30 of the steps when 3 or 4 of them were actually interesting. I wish they would of picked one of those and stuck with it. Fully exploring it in depth and giving you some actual resolution with some consequences.
Novigrad was the weakest link in the game for me.
Then you get to Skeliage and the games pretty much redeems itself for the rest of the playtime. They did a great job with the island nation and more or less everything after that.
My biggest gripe with the game is how linear it is and how little outside the main quest there was. Sure there were Witcher contracts and some ? to explore. Few of them were actually interesting but most of that content was crap filler. My issue with all of that is regardless of what you're doing its pretty much all the same shit. Great story but how many fucking Drowners do I have to kill? Wraiths? Seriously how many times did the quests say "use your witcher sense to find a trail or red stuff"? Cool concept but then repeated 300 times it kind of loses its appeal. They could of used a bit more variation in what you were doing in these quests. They could of borrowed more from other games instead of taking their two trick bag and trying to reuse them over and over.
Now regardless of all that, the story was excellent. Ciri is an amazing character and I can't wait to see what they do with her in future games. Geralt is one of the best characters in video game history. This is still one of my favorite series and I'm satisfied with how they ended the game and Geralt's story. Should be interesting to see what they have for DLC down the road.
