There is a weight that leaves you once you've beaten the main story for The Witcher III. While the game makes it obvious that Ciri can most definitely take care of herself, it's hard not to feel pressured by some unspoken time restraint, of finding her before her pursuers do. Naturally, this is a AAA RPG video game and there is no real time limit for you to find Ciri and enter the end game, but the narrative colors your actions within the game. Everytime you play a game of Gwent, or dig yourself into a sidequest that has chained with another side quest, or went searching for some rare witcher gear, there is this feeling at the back of your mind that you are shirking your responsibilities, or worse: you're contradicting Geralt's character. If you've read the books you know this isn't true, since Geralt spends an inordinate amount of time doing other things while he pursues Ciri in that story, but there is still this impression that Geralt should be far more focused than he is.
I was leveled to do the Hearts of Stone DLC just before I found Ciri in the main game, largely due to the number of side quests I'd done, and because of the way experience is doled out in heavy doses for main quests. However, this permeance of shirking fatherly duties kept me away from starting it, and this ended up being to the DLC's benefit. Hearts of Stone is an independent story, one that uses the locale of the base game to tell its story, albeit focusing a little heavier on the northern part of the Velen region, where little of the main plot occurred. The post-game freedom of feeling like a simple witcher wandering the world looking for contracts for coin is the fullest The Witcher III ever feels, an odd contradiction considering how much effort and importance was put into the main plot. My experience with Hearts of Stone wasn't just the new questlines added in this thorough and passionately produced DLC, but also with the varying systems and content that I had skipped during my bulk playthrough of the main game. Roughly what this means is that this review is both of the DLC and a continuation of The Witcher III review I wrote before. The same is more than likely to be true of Blood and Wine. This review, then, could more accurately be called The Witcher III - Part 2. If you haven't read my review of the main game, I strongly suggest you do so before reading this one, as they build off of one another.
Hearts of Stone tells a simple story in an interesting way. Essentially, it is a Faustian story taken from a legend of Polish folklore about Pan Twardowski, but obviously with a witcher-esque twist. You find a contract on a bulletin board asking for someone willing to kill a monster to meet a man named Olgierd von Everic in a pretty estate to the north. Once there, Geralt finds the place occupied by a large group of decadent bandits, run by the Olgierd who put out the contract. It seems his cook was eaten by a monster in the sewers of Oxenfurt (a small city in Velen, and home to the Oxenfurt School, the most prestigious in the Northern Kingdoms and an oft referenced place at that, both in the books and the games), and he wants Geralt to get rid of the monster. The monster, it turns out, was once a prince from the far off land of Ofieri who was cursed and turned into a monstrous toad. Geralt, unfortunately, doesn't know the backstory to the monster until after he has already killed the beast and arrested by Ofieri men come to cure the unlucky prince. Geralt is jailed on a ship, set sail to Ofieri with little chance of escaping. A man on the boat, however, seems to speak the common tongue, and most unlikely of all has met the witcher before. Towards the beginning of The Witcher III, a rather eerie man sits in a bar and Geralt must ask him if he's seen Yennifer. The man not only recognizes Geralt, but deduces the woman he looks for is Yennifer before Geralt can tell him. The stranger shrugs off this peculiarity by saying he's heard Dandelion's famous songs about them, a plausible reason as many characters recognize him similarly. Once Geralt meets the man again on the ship to Ofieri, however, it is obvious not all is what it seems with this stranger. The stranger tells the witcher his name is Gaunter O'Dimm, and that if they make a pact, he can get Geralt out of this mess. Geralt, seeing no choice, agrees, and is branded on his face before a storm wrecks the ship on a small island just north of Novigrad, the main city in Velen.
Geralt realizes he is dealing with someone incredibly powerful, but this also means the pact must be fulfilled else there could be trouble even Geralt couldn't get himself out of. O'Dimm's pact is simple: he had a similar pact with Olgierd, and if Geralt would grant the man's last three wishes that O'Dimm owes him, they will both be free of their pacts. Olgierd's "freeing" of his pact comes at the cost of his soul, naturally, but hey them's the shakes. To twist things even further, it turns out Olgierd knew about the prince, because he was the one who cursed him. Geralt, feeling used and realizing his pact with O'Dimm is only going to further that feeling, is rather annoyed to say the least. Regardless, three wishes must be fulfilled, and Geralt is sent on three seemingly impossible quests to finish out his and Olgierd's pacts.
The structuring to Hearts of Stone is a bit like a string of three short stories, all being tethered together by a classic folkore narrative device. Each of the wish quests have an independent feel, each with somewhat original mechanics to them, although in reality they are simply twisted versions of what you've already done in the main game. One of the quests has you interact in a party, and while there is a caveat I won't spoil to the whole thing, technically what you are doing is the same you've done before, albeit with a hilarious bit of dressing to it. Another has you doing a heist, which was easily my least favorite part of the DLC. It isn't that Geralt wouldn't do a heist, but it feels as though the reasons for it begin to stretch the Geralt character a bit too much for my taste. Mechanically, it really has nothing to offer, although it does allow you to go to an auction with some interesting people to talk to and some stuff to buy. Another quest has you doing exactly what I wanted so badly from the main game, which is investigate and cure a haunted house. The particulars of this quest especially I don't want to spoil, as it is a fun bit of storytelling with interesting twists to how you go about curing this haunting, but what I will say is that it was on this quest that I turned around on who I would side with at the end of the Hearts of Stone.
Hearts of Stone's main bit of content is essentially a new story to thread Geralt through, but that isn't all it ends up presenting. A bit of accidental content for me, in particular, was forcing me to face a lot of enemies that were to my level. Since I had focused so hard on side quests during my main playthrough, I was usually substantially over-leveled or over-geared for most of what the game could throw at me. With the first DLC, however, I was suddenly thrown with contemporaries and I began to rethink combat and gear as a result. In particular, my use of Geralts magic ability, called signs, became a little more varied. During the main game, I used primarily Igni, the fire spell, which has a chance of burning enemies and most monsters have a weakness to it. Another spell I used was Yrden, which creates a trap of sorts that slows enemies down or undoes their spells (they are most useful with Nightwraith minibosses, who cannot be hurt unless within the ring of Yrden). For the DLC, I ended up using Agni, a force push of sorts, to break people's block a lot more, and I used Axi, a spell that puts a person into a stupor or otherwise slows them, to do crowd control since the leveled monsters where beginning to swamp me, and dealing with groups in Witcher III is a bit messy.
The Witcher III doesn't have the best combat system, of which I addressed briefly in my main story review. One of the reasons for this is because Geralt has a soft lock, not unlike Batman: Arkham Asylum. This means trying to hit exactly the enemy you want isn't particularly precise, as sometimes Geralt will lock onto someone and won't let go, or will otherwise switch his lock on when you don't want him to. The latter can be fixed with an actual lock on, which exists but adds a bit of messy fumbling on the keyboard (if you play on PC) that makes combat feel ever so slightly cumbersome. Not to mention that The Witcher III's combat feels at its best when you are jumping from one enemy to the next. The real issue is with the former, where sometimes an enemy will have a soft lock on them, and you cannot get Geralt to pivot to another. It makes the fast paced fights feel clunky. Signs help in mitigating this annoyance, but that is less a feature than it is managing a system's various kinks. Signs are still largely unnecessary, even when things are stacked against you, but they can help if you feel like engaging with the combat in a fun way rather than in a necessary way.
The other thing that was brought to the forefront with this DLC for me was gear. You can play all of The Witcher III simply picking up better gear you've looted without much if any difficulty (on the harder difficulties, however, you may find yourself under-equipped). This is quite a shame, because strewn about the world (as quests under the "Treasure Hunt" label) are diagrams for witcher specific gear. There are numerous schools to choose from, but for this playthrough I picked the School of the Cat, primarily because of its Crit-bonuses and because I had made natural headway already through my normal playthrough. Looting the diagrams, crafting the gear, and then upgrading the gear takes a mountain of money to do. Doing so was really rewarding as my Geralt went from looking like some vagrant knight into a true-blue witcher with a substantial stat-boost, but the requirements to get the gear up to masterclass (the highest rank before Blood and Wine) essentially means having to finish the main game in order to be leveled properly for them. With the DLCs, this seems more than fair, but it is a bit strange that such an interesting and important aspect to gear progression in this game would be hedged to the postgame. Although, this isn't totally true. Since the gear can be upgraded through multiple tiers, it is simply the matter of keeping within the tier you can use to keep the gear useful. But the maximum gear ranking is left outside of the main game, aside from perhaps the final battle or so, making the gear rather sparsely used at high rank if you had no inclination to play the DLC. It hardly constitutes as a criticism, but it did have me thinking about how the DLCs feel far more rewarding by allowing for this progression to feel useful. And with the addition of rune words in this DLC (yes, very much like they are in Diablo II, albeit not from drops), gear progression has only intensified. And there is still another rank to get, whenever I finish with Blood and Wine.
Properly geared and with a (somewhat) new appreciation for the combat and how it should be played, Hearts of Stone began to increasingly feel like another Witcher game with an imported save to me, something I can only imagine is expanded with Blood and Wine, since it has a whole province to itself. Where this became more apparent in a negative way was with how Hearts of Stone annoyingly forces you into the Gwent minigame. Gwent, the card game in The Witcher III that acts as minigame and collection side quest, is fun albeit rather intrusive. In the main game of The Witcher III, they only force the game on you a couple of times outright, mostly early on, but there is a consistent pressure throughout that you should really give it some time. There are moments where a card is only available during the current quest you are on, and if you don't get it now then the collection quest fails outright. A lot of times, once you're in this position, you may not even have a deck built up to properly win. Getting cards in The Witcher III requires visiting nearly every vendor to see if they have any, and playing just about every soul in the land, as winning usually nets you a unique card. This is a lot of extra work for a card game that, likely, isn't all that fun until you've amassed a nice set. I've played the stand-a-lone Gwent and I've dabbled a few hours away in The Witcher III playing it, but the sheer amount of games you need to play, and the time sensitive games that can artificially block your progress if you're intent on "collecting them all" make the fun drain away somewhat, unless you are playing with an extremely lax need for progression. As I've said before, this is a really long game, so relegating the Gwent minigame to a secondary playthrough feels almost necissary for you to actually make it all the way through the plot without burning yourself out or forgetting the finer details to what is already a rather complicated story. And that would be fine, if the Hearts of Stone DLC didn't have a handful of occasions where you have, once again, time sensitive (and even one semi-mandatory) games of Gwent. For me, someone who gave up on the minigame around the time I helped Triss out of Novigrad (so: 1/3 through the main game), this felt more like a guilt trip that I wasn't keeping up with what was expected of me. It is a small complaint, but one that reaches the entire game, and is only made worse through this particular DLC.
Minor quibbles aside, Hearts of Stone feels more like a full side-game that builds on what you did in The Witcher III's main experience, the type that inevitably becomes an overlooked gem lusted years after release. "Overlooked" is a proper descriptor for the DLC, as well, because of the unbelievable amount of praise heaped onto Blood and Wine. But don't let that brightly lit star obscure how good Hearts of Stone is. It confidently strides with its own plot and its own characters, feeling far more like a substantial addition to this game than most DLCs ever do past the turn of the millennium. It makes you wonder how many Witcher stories CDProjekt Red have in the vault, because surely the love and attention needed to make this DLC had to have taken years of off and on again work. While I don't hold my breath for a Witcher 4, I can't help but hope that they take note of what a side-story can do, because as great as saving the world and all that is, I'd much rather just be a witcher in over my head.
9.5
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