One of the unfortunate side effects of games becoming more and more prevalent over the past few years is that some games will fall by the wayside, left to gather digital dust as do your best to try and cope with the never ending wave of video games. There’s always more to play, and in order to make room, sacrifices have to be made.
Gamers have taken to referring to this phenomenon as The Pile of Shame. Whether a literal pile or a digital collection, shame piles have become a factor in any self-respecting gamer’s life, filled to the brim with titles you insist you’ll get around to at some point. No, honest. Ignore the fact I’ve just pre-ordered five more games.
So, instead of leaving these games out in the cold while I decide to have another marathon SMITE session, I’m tackling my shame pile head-on. I’ll talk about a prominent game I’ve yet to start playing, or a game that I’ve touched for a couple of hours and forgotten all about, talk about why it’s in my pile before playing the game and reporting back the next week. First off, we’ve got The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
Yeah, we’re coming out of the gate strong.
Other than one friend of mine, who’d much rather be playing XCOM until the end of days, I’m yet to hear a bad word against The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It’s often cited as the Best RPG, Best Fantasy Game, Best Game of the Current Generation and “The Game That Single-Handedly Brought About World Peace”. Alright, the last one was hyperbole, but you get my point: people bloody love The Witcher 3.
Players often cite the incredible graphics, the beautiful open world, the fantastic story, intelligent gameplay, witty writing and CD Projekt Red’s fantastic approach to post launch content as reasons why The Witcher 3 gets all the praise it does. Depending on where you go on the internet, they’ll also say it was because there’s shag scene on the back of a unicorn. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
By all accounts, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt should be right up my alley. All those things mentioned above are what I look for in a game, shag scene included. So when the Game of the Year Edition went on sale about a year and a half ago for a very reasonable price, I couldn’t say no. I’ll get round to it eventually, right? Nope. It’s still not been touched after all this time.
As to why it’s been left on my hard drive for so long, I can think of two main reasons. It was originally going to be three, but saying “oh, I don’t have the time, wahhhhh” is such a catch-all excuse that could be applied to any pile of shame game. My reasons for not playing The Witcher 3 yet are a little bit more specific than that.
The first reason is because it’s been so well received. I’m stubborn by nature, and whenever the consensus about something I’ve not experienced is universally good, it gets my back up. I immediately start doubting everything being said. “Oh, well it can’t be that good surely”, all the while waxing lyrical about why Halo 3 is the best first person shooter ever made. It is, by the way. Fight me.
It’s this cultural worship that’s put me off games like Undertale, Uncharted, The Last of Us and many more, because the game itself simply can’t live up to the expectation that’s been built up in my head. Perhaps that’s on me for putting too much stock into the opinions of others, but it’s hard not to feel disappointed when a game your mate has been praising for ages fails to live up to the hype.
The second reason might ruffle a few more feathers: I couldn’t really care for the fantasy genre. Other than one notable exception (Skyrim, obviously), the fantasy genre is inherently boring to me. There’s only so many times you can see a different combination of olde English sounding town names, dragons, trolls, magic and, if you’re feeling spicy, elves, before you get sick of the sight of it.
I’ve always found myself more drawn to the world of sci-fi, because I’ve always felt that there’s more room to be imaginative. Sci-fi could be anything from a space exploration saga, the ethics of human modification or a dystopian future where technology governs all. So real life, essentially. Welcome to Black Mirror. And yes, that does mean I’m more excited for Cyberpunk 2077 than I ever was for The Witcher 3.
Even though those two reasons put me off playing The Witcher 3, I still found myself buying the Game of the Year Edition during a Black Friday sale at an obscenely low price. If anything, I feel like I bought the game to shut everyone up who was telling me to buy the game in the first place, though now they’re telling me to play the game so that didn’t really solve my problems.
But it’s gone on long enough now. I’m sick of checking my games library and seeing Geralt staring at me; judging me almost. It’s time to see if The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is everything it’s cracked up to be, or if I was right to be sceptical about it. Find out next week, though if there’s no article, just assume that the game has swallowed my life whole.
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