WhatвЂ™s boggling about this is that quests arenвЂ™t only displayed with little yellow exclamation points hovering over NPCвЂ™s heads. These are question marks that only reveal themselves-as hidden treasures or bandit camps, for example-once you jog over to check them out. The gameвЂ™s mechanic for letting players know about whatвЂ™s available around them is pretty simple: reading the message boards in the various towns and hamlets puts points of interests on the map nearby. The Witcher 3вЂs world, by contrast, crammed with stuff to do, stuff to see, stuff to get lost in. But this feels (pardon me) next level because those worlds are large, but largely empty. The game is being compared to Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. I donвЂ™t know if youвЂ™ve had a similar experience but, several dozen hours in or so, I find myself having these mildly disconcerting dissociative feelings when I realize just how much ground I have left to cover. (In my experience, it doesnвЂ™t.) But the sense of scale in The Witcher is pretty consistently confounding. Developers love to tell journalists вЂњhow much bigger the map is this time around,вЂќ as if map inflation correlated to fun. This is the kind of thing thatвЂ™s often said about a new game, especially of the open-world variety. The conversation took place over email over the period of several days.

This is a lightly edited dialogue between TIMEвЂ™s games critic Matt Peckham and assistant managing editor Matt Vella about playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

The witcher 3 wild hunt