Wow, do I love Blood and Wine. I think it is a great idea to set it in a true-fantasy like world, with knights, tournaments, castles, etc. It’s a lot of fun. I:
I can easily see this surpassing the main game for me.
Yeah, it’s a blast. If Witcher 3 stands as a great achievement in main game design, Blood and Wine is an equally great achievement in add-on design.
Though you do get spoiled. One reviewer mentioned something along the lines of how much of a shock it can be transitioning back from the sunny open fields of Toussaint to bleak, marshy, corpse-strewn Velen to finish old secondary quests 
. Though I guess in-game it does help emphasize by contrast why everyone thinks Velen is such a worthless shithole.
I can not emphasize how much this game Witcher 3(plus add-ons) feels like everything Ultima wanted to be.
It can not be a coincidence that Blood and Wine is talking about the five virtues they desire in knights, which is kind of the plot of Ultima IV.
Oh, I’m sure it is no coincidence. I believe one of the design team specifically singled out Ultima VII as the game that most made him want to create RPGs.
How is Witcher 2? I have the enhanced, full version. Never even installed it. It was 99 cents a few years ago.
Ultima VII–now that takes me back. I haven’t played that game since the nineties, when it was current, but I can definitely see the point of view that The Witcher 3 is what Ultima VII would have been had the latter been made in the contemporary era of 3d graphics.
Except for the fact that in Witcher 3 you don’t have a party. Whatever happened to parties? Are there any current- or recent-gen RPGs in which you have a party instead of only controlling 1 character?
Well, Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy still do parties. JRPG games tend to do that. Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming out relatively soon and I am guessing you get a party together in that.
Good. Quite good relative to its exact contemporary competition. It is well below Witcher 3’s standard of course, but that’s a high bar indeed.
It uses an older generation of the same basic graphics engine as Witcher 3, so it is a similar-looking if certainly not quite as pretty a game (1 used an entirely different graphics engine). It’s a bit less well developed mechanically, but is at least somewhat similar to 3 (again, 1 is less so). The plots and writing is good, but IMHO there are no romps quite as fun as some in 3, nor nothing quite as compelling as 3’s overarching theme of Geralt’s search for family. The major voice actors are all the same.
It covers far less terrain (though varied locations) and is much, much shorter as a game. Playing it in this order I think it will play very much as a somewhat Blood and Wine-sized prequel to 3.
Too late to edit, but I would certainly recommend 2 if you loved 3 for the characters and world. It plays and looks close enough to 3 it isn’t a great leap.
1 is a harder sell. The plot is good, albeit it is probably the grimmest of the three games. I enjoyed it. But it looks and plays rather different. And it is a little cringey here and there (especially around sex).
I have put about 55-60 hours in and here are some thoughts:
I’m still only partway in to Blood and Wine.
If you’re not planning to replay, then (avoiding spoilers) there is a branch point close to the end of Blood & Wine where one path is mildly interesting and the other path is kind of nutsy cuckoo bonkers, so I would recommend choosing the latter.
I’ve played Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas out of that list, the others are a little outside my limited wheelhouse. Love both, but I think I’d slot Skyrim a little below Witcher 3 and FoNV (with all DLCs) maybe a hair ahead, though it is close. W3 definitely beats Fallout 4 for me, even though I still like that game as well.
I agree it is not the all time greatest. But it would certainly make my top ten, granting that I mostly play some flavor of RPGs and strategy games.
redacted.
I also played Fallout 4 and its DLC stuff this summer and Witcher 3 blew it away. Fallout 4 was disappointing to me, honestly.
I just had the best luck. I went to do a quest called “There Can Be Only One”.
This hermit immediately gave me the sword(after I fought him). Apparently, I hit all the 5 virtues already before meeting him. I looked it up and you have to do certain things to achieve it, but by coincidence, I had already been virtuous enough.
I just found out I missed the Monkey Island reference by choosing to fistfight Mancomb(Guy-brush) instead of insult fighting him.
I had no idea!
Wow, I did not notice that reference at all. (Then again, I haven’t played the Monkey Island games.)
I beat Blood and Wine’s main quest today, getting the happy ending(very lucky).
I think that final moment, where Geralt looks at the camera(at me, the player) was an absolutely perfect way to end the game pre-credits. I ended up with Yenefer back at the winery.
Now, I am just going to go knock off a bunch of fun and interesting secondary quests, even if the XP is very little since some are outdated.
I ended the game level 55.
Did you go through the enchanted fairy tale book? I did the other path the first time and it was definitely less interesting.
Yes. I guess it is obvious, but I hadn’t realized the other path would not take me there. Glad I went for that path.