Chief among these obstacles is the eponymous Wild Hunt and its dark lord, Eredin. Preventing Geralt from finishing his quest is any number of monsters, bandits, pirates, and puzzles. (They make it a point to say that a comparable in-world device, the Xenovox, is pretty hard to come by.) Yes, this is a quest that could be solved if they had any sort of mass-communication system available. As royalty and military vie for power, Geralt is busy looking for the whereabouts of his friends and family, who have gone missing on their own adventures. The land is ravaged by a major conflict between Redania in the north and Nilfgaard in the south. In Wild Hunt, Geralt is on a quest in the midst of a war. The rough edges have been sanded off, but with them also a bit of what made the original game stand out a bit. It's the difference between a teenager, doing things just because they can, and an adult, doing things because they're efficient or the right way forward. The focus on faux maturity has lessened from those early days Wild Hunt still retains an open mind when it comes to sex and nudity, but that mind is more subtle and restrained here (most of the time). That unique mix of click and twitch gradually gave way to dodge-and-counter action. The core of the game has remained the same - a commitment to deeper, less pulp-style storytelling - but the shell containing it has changed. If The Witcher was the result of a young studio attempting to carve out a name for itself, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt is the result of an older, more established studio. The world of The Witcher is still beautiful.
You weren't choosing between good and evil in The Witcher you were choosing which evil you could live with. It looked amazing, the game nailed Geralt himself, and the choices available to the player were on the nuanced grey side. Despite these problems, The Witcher was great. Loading times in original non-Enhanced version were bordering on insanity. The story's pacing was odd and disjointed at times. The combat tried to exist in the gulf between RPG strategy and twitch action. It was a rougher game from a rougher studio. The first Witcher was developed using a heavily modified version of Bioware's Aurora Engine. Wild Hunt is also a marker for the growth of the studio since that first release in 2007. The character, who occupies a world based on the works of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, will continue to have other adventures, but they won't be covered in further games. According to CD Projekt RED, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt is the end of Geralt of Rivia's tale.