The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine
What more praise can be lauded on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that hasn’t already been said? The Witcher 3 marked a coming of age for CD Projekt RED as a studio, a more mature and accomplished project than anything we had seen from them before. Indeed, the developer has earned universal respect among gamers for their honest and dedicated resolve to support the Goliath RPG long after release with plentiful bug fixes, updates and free mini DLC.
Moreover, CD Projekt RED’s directors reiterated their belief that DLC should only be paid for in the case of their lengthiest and most significant campaign additions, and that is a promise they made good on with both Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine; two of the deepest and most rewarding expansions you will find across any video game.
It isn’t often we get both quality and quantity in the same package, but The Witcher 3 is a superlative title that just keeps on giving, with over 150 hours of gameplay in the main quest alone. That theme continues with both campaign DLC released since its launch, but the most recent Blood and Wine is perhaps among the most accomplished DLC ever made.
Blood and Wine is a mammoth expansion, and players could be forgiven for thinking it was an entirely new game. The land of Toussaint is impressive in scale, detailing an entirely new culture of people that feels a world away from the setting of the main game. Toussaint is vibrant and colorful, both in regards to its Mediterranean aesthetic and its chivalrous inhabitants. The game’s narrative is typically brilliant, its characters fascinating and the DLC adds huge depth to gameplay through upgraded mutagen abilities.
Blood and Wine is quite simply brilliant. It isn’t a DLC you can play without getting through most of the main campaign, but considering The Witcher 3 is likely to go down as one of the games of the generation, if you haven’t played it yet then you should probably get on that.