9 Reasons Why The Witcher 3 Is Better Than Skyrim

Ever since the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in 2015, debates have raged as to whether it's the superior game to Bethesda's iconic fantasy RPG, Skyrim.

With the rose-tinted glasses being applied to CD Projekt Red's new release and Bethesda's RPG well and truly in the dust, back in 2015 many fans claimed that it was a bit unfair to dethrone Skyrim just because everyone was caught up in a hot new property.

But now that they've been out for more considerable amounts of time and the dust has settled, it's finally time to admit that yes, The Witcher 3 is the new king of open world fantasy RPGs.

Where the developers at CD Projekt Red were striving to improve on everything their previous games did wrong, Bethesda have become complacent in recent years, still putting out good releases but increasingly resting on their laurels.

Wild Hunt trumps Skyrim in almost every category, and going forward, Bethesda needs to study the competition to see how they might claw back what was once a surefire position at the top of the open world fantasy genre.

While Skyrim is technically a role-playing game, you wouldn't know it just by completing a few missions. Sure, the same structure of taking quests and tackling them at your leisure is a classic staple of the genre, but the actual missions often rely on players just killing a bunch of guys or collecting a few items.

The Witcher 3 on the other hand constantly shakes up the focus of its quests, making sure there are actual role-playing options for players to tackle in every quest. Some might not include any conventional gameplay at all, with one particularly memorable extended sequence focusing on Geralt partaking in a theatre production while staking out a person of interest.

It was this imagination when it came to mission design rather than the cut-and-paste objectives of Skyrim that made CD Projekt Red's game stand out, keeping it enjoyable even after countless playthroughs.