Graphics

One of the most beautiful and engaging worlds ever crafted in gaming history

Since I mentioned the lovely curves, I should probably mention all the other lovely visuals in the game. They're to die for. Of course, we've all come to expect great things from the Witcher games in terms of visual appeal.

Again, you get a very specific set of graphics options, most of them unique to Witcher 3. Hairworks is the first one. It's a new feature that makes hair especially realistic. When it's enabled, every thread of hair moves and sways in accordance with the character and the wind. It also knocks about 15-20 FPS, so it's reserved for only the most powerful systems.

Another cool feature is the foliage visibility slider. The world in Witcher 3 is packed with nature. There's a lot of tall grass, bushes, trees etc. Forget any other open world game you've seen, it's not even close this. Normally, a landscape this lush would drain your PCs resources faster than the American economy. Thanks to this little slider, you can control how much of said foliage is visible at any given point.

Possibly the coolest thing I've seen in this game is the wind. It affects everything. Every leaf of every branch of every tree and all the grass too. I've never felt the power of a storm in a video game quite like this. Usually we get all the lightning, thunder and rain, with the whole thing being an annoyance. Here, we can see all the trees bend over as the fierce wind blows at them from the side. It's quite a sight to behold!

Look at those trees sway... Who you callin' a freak?!

To top it all off, other than the very demanding hairworks option, everything else is very well optimized. Though Witcher games are notorious for being demanding, I found it surprising how well this worked on my PC, considering it's actually below the listed minimum requirements. I set most of the options to medium or high and it still ran smooth, which is more than can be said for most modern releases. Extra points for that!