The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - 6/20 hours

I got to spend the last four hours playing the good part of The Witcher 3. And that is not as backhanded as it sounds. The good part is really damned good. Traipsing around the countryside, slaying monsters, finding treasure, and doing favors for people in open-world ARPG style is a proven formula, and it has yet to let me down.

Which isn't meant to put The Witcher 3 in the same class as Two Worlds, a game whose only real strength was its genre. First of all, The Witcher 3's mechanics are as polished as anything I've ever seen in this sort of game. The combat is fast and fluid enough to make Skyrim's feel like your character is wearing a full-body mitten. The scenery is beautiful, which seems like it should be a superficial detail, but when I crest a hill and look down into a field of golden wheat rustling in the wind, I feel a profound sense of . . . something. (I was going to say "connection to nature," but that is clearly ridiculous, and I am not yet that divorced from reality).

And there are indirect things that contribute to The Witcher 3's amazing feel as well. The scale of the map is probably the closest to reality any of these things have ever been. I'm still in the first area, a small village called White Orchard, and it feels just like a small village. Which is to say that it is larger and more populous than any of the major cities in Skyrim. It's likely not the size such a place would be in real life, but it is giving me something I've been wanting for a long time - an open world fantasy game that does not try to abstract the life of an entire kingdom and just densely packs its story into a small corner of the world. This illusion is not likely to last the entire game, I'm sure, but for now it's very refreshing.

Also, the side quests are uniformly pretty good. Not once have I been asked to deliver a letter to someone's cousin asking to borrow a cup of sugar that I would subsequently have to go to the store and buy myself. The NPCs have thus far respected my time and expertise. They ask me to do things like clear a ghost out of a well or hunt down an arsonist.

Speaking of which, those sidequests I mentioned were pretty neat (there were others that were less memorable, like the time I had to go into a house and retrieve a pot for an old woman, but even that qualified as "respecting my time and expertise" because the house was filled with dead bodies). I had to use my witcher senses to gather clues and follow trails, like some kind of fantasy Sherlock Holmes.

If all the side missions are as good these have been, I may never get around to finding Yennifer (and you know what, I'm cool with that, if it means never again having to see her nude.)