Witcher 3 - Review @ RPG Codex

The Codex is able to review a mainstream game: Angthoron about the Witcher 3:

What can be said about the writing of Witcher 3, then? Well - simply put, it is one of the best-written games to have come out in well over a decade. Perhaps even the best-written RPG since Torment, tackling serious topics and pulling no punches, placing the player in a position of one of the last sane men in an increasingly insane world and never shying away from showing what insanity actually is while avoiding the pitfalls of cheap shock value. The mundaneness of cruelty; the commonness of greed, treason, cowardice; the quiet acceptance of murder, rape, despair, racism and hate - Witcher 3 is all about that. Witcher 3 is about total war without its typical glamor.
(...)
The atmosphere of Witcher 3 does its best to support the writing - and succeeds to do it almost perfectly. Visual and audio design serve to reinforce the writing and create a sense of place. The world hardly feels like a theme park - instead, it is a fairly logical, if occasionally repetitive.
(...)
Still, the world is realistic and rich with detail - from the finally realistically depicted outskirts of a major medieval-like city (undesireables and underclass living outside the city walls, miles and miles of farmland all around - thank you CDPR, I wanted to see this for nearly two decades) to tiny shrines to a deity or to Eternal Fire seemingly in the middle of nowhere, the minute details are what makes the world stand out and feel lived in. Tiny hamlets full of peasants going about their business, refugee camps full of the sick and the hungry, city squares bursting with activity - the developers spared no expense in making the world of Witcher 3 feel alive - thankfully, remembering that ambient sound is an important part of game's atmosphere, too.
(...)
Witcher 3 does not invent the wheel with its quests or their structure. Just as before in the series, the game's quests divide into main quests that are dedicated to the development of the characters as well as to the major changes in regional politics, and into the side quests and monster hunts, the smaller, more localized affairs. Curiously, the side quests, an item that has drawn my ire for years in the products of AAA industry due to the great levels of half-assedness, are actually very well fleshed out in Witcher 3.
(...)
Choice and consequence are frequent in both the main quest and the side/bounty quests - the options rarely break the limit of being binary, perhaps, but the strength of Witcher 3's C&C is not in per-quest variety or material reward - it's in the writing and acting dedicated to the choices; it's in the frequently interesting morality issues, and it's in the short-term and long-term consequence, and as such, it is a great deal more satisfying than a simple reward of a pile of gold coins a-la BioWare's masterful prose-crafting, or Pillars of Eternity's wondrous infodumps. The game's quests feel like dealing with an actual situation that affects actual people rather than helping a humanoid quest-loot-information dispensers. The quests are also usually logical, though an occasional cultural reference or a bit of silliness (like having to find a goat) do slip through. Still, even such quests are not without a place, providing a bit of a chuckle or a change of pace in an otherwise grim world.
(...)