When playing Batman: Arkham Knight shortly after The Witcher 3 (and overlapping to some extent) I felt a huge relief that at no point was I forced to loot the unconscious body of a thug to pick up crappy weapons, money, or ingredients. This was also a major gripe I had with Dragon Age: Inquisition, a game that quickly felt more like a flower-picking simulator than anything else. There are a million different crafting options and components and diagrams and what-have-you, and while CDP continues to patch to make inventory management less daunting, the fact remains that too many RPGs-this one included-feel the need to make crafting and alchemy and the like a major part of gameplay. Old RPG tropes and game design also hold back The Witcher 3. You can loot just about anything and any corpse. The really memorable experiences are too often diluted by the less memorable ones. Even in Skellige, the best designed part of the world, there's often just too much space and too much world to explore, and not enough definition. You may ride into beautiful sunsets with gorgeous views all around, but the roads and villages and monsters are all a blur. Some locations are distinct, but much of the world of The Witcher 3 bleeds together, indistinct and unmemorable. Too much of the game is getting from point A to point B. The foliage remains, after several patches, a bizarre affair of wobbly branches in a weirdly violent wind.

The world itself, while beautifully realized, has problems as well.

The witcher 3 wild hunt cover