The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has the best DLC

 I'm killing monsters.

Are you ready for one of the most unapologetically redundant hot takes on the internet to be espoused right through your window? You ready? Good, cause 'The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt' has really good DLC! I know right, lock me up I'm clearly insane... No, obviously everyone and their elderly grand-aunt who's been banished to the ice sheets of Siberia for the past thirty years knows well the merits of The Witcher games and their respective DLC's which are so good they feel like thievery even at full price. From back in the age when CD Projekt Red evolved from the little studio who could into a powerhouse indie masterpiece maker, capable of no wrong and beloved by the masses. A reign cut brutally short, even when compared to other industry weekend heroes, by their own hubris in their very next release. (What a tragedy; I should write a play.) But I want to throw you in the blue Police Box for a second so we can rewind to those first few days during the release of The Witcher 3's first DLC; 'Hearts of Stone'.

You see, everyone always goes on about ''Blood and Wine'. "Oh, it's like a whole new game tacked onto my game" and "Oh, isn't it's breadth of freedom just so refreshing against the deluge of typically over-priced overhyped repackaged content stolen out of the original build garbage?" And yes, obviously it is all that and more, but 'Hearts of Stone' is not without its merits. In fact, it was exactly for the incredible time I had playing 'Hearts of Stone' that I was so hyped for their next DLC expecting it to be just a little bit more of the same calibre only to be totally blown away- but I'm getting ahead of myself as everyone always does when they bring up this topic. We'll get there, we will; but first I need to remind everyone that every bit of The Witcher's DLC was great!

Even the content which released before the expansions. Remember that? They were little free pieces of micro-DLC that could be picked up totally without strings attached and they each gave tiny little boons, such as alternate outfits for Yennefer, Ciri and Triss. (I'd complain that my main man Dandelion didn't get any new threads but that default outfit is pretty impeccable as it is) A couple of short missions, a new face for some of the Gwent cards, a bunch of new facial hair options, a Nilfgaard armour set, some new more powerful crossbows (Still not powerful enough to be remotely useful in any context, though.) New finisher moves, a Temerian armour set, a scavenger hunt for Wolf School Witcher gear and a new game plus mode. That's all the free stuff, remember. Just CD Projekt Red saying "Thanks for paying for the game and not pirating it or something." The stuff you get for actually giving them extra money puts that lot to shame.

'Hearts of Stone' is an entirely standalone story which takes place in some of places on the existing map that were underexplored with in the vanilla mission spread, namely the to-the-side region of Oxenfurt. The place has it's own little town and everything; but the makeup of content means that in the usual state of play you'll blow right past the place and right onto Skellige, and by the time you've shown back up at Oxenfurt you've overpowered to godhood against the embarrassing wretches that waste your time in this meagre plane. Which makes it an ideal space to stick an entire dedicated expansion that presents a small self-contained adventure with a simply fantastic narrative arc to it all. 'Hearts of Stone' depicts a man cursed with the inability to die and seeking a Witcher to unfurl his bad fortunes. It sweeps the player into an intimate narrative with a small cast of superbly written and acted characters, squeezes in new monsters, locations, abilities and gearsto play around with and presents a finale bout totally unique from anything the game had done before. It was a triumph on it's own.

And then there was Blood and Wine. An expansion that was said to be a little more ambitious, was going to take a little more time to work on, got some people excited and then launched and shocked even the most excitable out there. Much as I claimed earlier, Blood and Wine contains enough content to be a small scale sequel; providing a hefty and epic main questline with a couple of fully branching quest choices, a huge gorgeous new world space that some even prefer over the main game's map, dozens upon dozens of sidequest hewn to the same high quality that every Witcher 3 Side quest is, countless great characters, a brand new home management system, more new monsters and armour sets than the first expansion had and, of course, a deeply personal finale scene for fans who had followed Geralt's story all this way.

But the ultimate triumph here I think steps beyond the undeniable quality of the DLC itself, and it's unassailable successes; the context paints a broad brush too. Note that CDPR were already riding high from the sudden fame of the being the big developers on the block after the whirlwind success of Wild Hunt. They were getting all humble, sending out thanks and receiving congratulations for all their hard work, kissing babies, the whole nine yards. Then they turn around and surpass even themselves by showing up the industry which had exploited and abused DLC practices for so very long. We always like to talk about Oblivion's Horse Armour, but slightly more relevant to the moment of The Witcher 3's heyday; people were still seething over the way that the 'From Ashes' DLC for Bioware's Mass Effect 3, contained a plot important companion and was exorcized from the main game to be sold as DLC on day 1 of release! I think that they even tried to lie about having made the entire companion, from scratch, in the space between the game going gold and launch. And that was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to DLC practises.

It seems almost quaint to imagine a time when the biggest gripes about gaming microtransactions were tied around this DLC feeling rushed, that DLC having it's content split into several chapters, this other DLC literally containing the game's ending (Asura's Wrath and Prince of Persia Remake) and the classic: every Fallout 4 DLC being $10 too expensive. (Including the 5$ ones. They should have paid me to play that godawful non-functional 'Wasteland Workshop' trash.) Yet here was a game which already overdelivered in it's base product, offering a steal of a price for a whole other's games worth of content. It was unreal. And the adulation that fell upon that meagre studio might very well be what inflated their egos enough to think they could brag their way into Cyberpunk 2077 being the game they sold it as, rather than the one it ultimately is. (Ah it always comes back around to Cyberpunk, doesn't it? What a world.)

Most have settled on the reality that just as the Wild Hunt raised the bar of expectation when it came to RPG games, 'Blood and Wine' raised the bar when it came to expansions; but I think that something of the opposite is true. I think that the example set by 'Blood and Wine' has proven to be so galling it might have sunk the DLC sub-industry altogether. I mean think about titles since then that have dropped big DLCs and then consider how many have even attempted to come close to what 'Blood and Wine' did. Outside of MMO content expansions or Live Service overhauls; there really hasn't been a successor. The only one who is trying to match that hill of excellence, who almost seemed doomed to crash into it at this point, is CDPR themselves. So celebrate the success of 'Blood and Wine' by drinking its bounties deeply- it might just be the greatest and last of it's kind.