The Witcher vs Laser Beams

I've started playing The Witcher III: Wild Hunt - and quickly stopped playing it -approximately 17 times. Maybe 18 times.

I've lost count really. Which is fitting for a game that requires you to keep track of approximately 17,000 different quests, characters, and locations across multiple massive areas.

Each attempt followed the same depressing pattern: install game, spend twenty minutes in the tutorial area relearning forgotten combat mechanics, get overwhelmed by the sheer scope of everything, play for maybe three hours across several sessions, forget which button opens the magic inventory, abandon game, uninstall weeks later to free up hard drive space...

Repeat cycle whenever the game percolates back up to the surface level of mind again and I convince myself "this time will be different".

The problem isn't that The Witcher III is a bad game.

Everyone knows it's brilliant. I have seen and felt its rich, velvety quality each time I've tried it.

The Older Gamer's Massive Problem

The problem is that it's a game designed for people who have time and mental bandwidth for gaming as a daily lifestyle.

Working days are brutal enough without coming home and trying to remember whether I'm supposed to be tracking down some baron's daughter or hunting a griffin or collecting herbs for a witch.

Big, sprawling RPGs demand the kind of sustained attention I simply don't have anymore.

If I sit down for thirty minutes, bone-tired, mentally drained, and have to spend the first ten minutes trying to remember what I was doing last time, where I was going, and which of my 47 active quests was actually important, that's two-thirds of my gaming session gone before I've accomplished anything.

Then there's the fantasy problem. I'm a sci-fi guy. Hard sci-fi, soft sci-fi, space opera, cyberpunk, dystopian futures, alien contact scenarios – give me robots and starships and I'm happy.

But elves and dwarves and magic systems? Not my scene.

I've never understood why bookstores and game stores bundle sci-fi and fantasy together like they're the same thing. They're absolutely not. One is about technology and possibility and the future. The other is about wizards and dragons and various takes on the medieval past.

When I see sci-fi and fantasy lumped together on bookshelves or in Netflix and Steam categories, I hate everything that exists.

So The Witcher III has always hit me from multiple angles of resistance: too big, too time-consuming, too fantasy, too demanding of sustained attention I don't have.

Perfect recipe for repeated failed attempts to play it.

Until...

They Knew Gwent Is A Real Place, Right?

But now something has shifted. Maybe it was hearing one too many people describe it as genuinely one of the greatest games ever made.

Maybe it was realizing that my stubborn genre purism was keeping me from experiences I might actually enjoy.

Whatever the reason, I found myself installing it again last month.

This time, I made peace with the scope. Instead of feeling guilty about not exploring every question mark on the map, I decided to treat it like a TV show I could dip into whenever I had energy.

No pressure to maintain perfect continuity. No shame about consulting online guides when I forget where I'm going or what I'm doing or what button parries an attack. Just show up when I could and see what happened.

And something remarkable occurred. That psychological barrier – the moment where the complexity typically overwhelmed me – just... wasn't there this time.

Maybe because I wasn't fighting the game's nature anymore, wasn't trying to force it into the quick, digestible chunks that work for my usual gaming diet.

The fantasy thing solved itself too, in a way I wasn't expecting.

The Witcher's world isn't just another generic medieval fantasy. It's grimy and political and morally complicated.

The monsters are metaphors for human cruelty. The magic feels dangerous and costly rather than whimsical. Geralt isn't a noble hero. (Well... he still kind of is, but he really isn't.)

He's a professional monster hunter trying to navigate a world that mostly sees him as another monster. It's fantasy filtered through a more cynical, noir-ish, gloomy Eastern European sensibility. That clicked for me in a way traditional fantasy never has.

But the real revelation: Gwent.

The in-game card game that I'd dismissed as a pointless mini-game distraction.

Gwent is perfect. It's strategic but not overly complex, quick enough for short sessions but deep enough to stay interesting.

I've found myself booting up The Witcher III just to play cards with merchants and innkeepers. I'm not very good yet, but that's what makes Gwent great. I'm still building a good deck, learning opponent patterns, and gradually collecting better cards. It's become my gateway drug to the larger game.

I'm still not the best at remembering controls or keeping track of complex quest chains.

I still sometimes boot up the game and spend five minutes wondering where the hell I am and what I'm supposed to be doing.

But I'm okay with that now. The Witcher III isn't going anywhere, and neither am I. We can take our time getting to know each other.