Lately I've been playing Blood and Wine for The Witcher 3, and if there is one thing that can't be stressed enough about the expansion its that its fucking breathtaking. I'm not using that word lightly. I do not fuck about when I play games, I am a hard story/hard action player. Not happy unless I'm learning something relevant or killing something interesting. On at least three occasions in as many days I have stopped dead whatever quest or personal slaughter quota I was engaged in, lined up a specific view, and just had Geralt meditate until the moment when the light would be best to really experience a particular vista. The Witcher is a pretty fucking glorious game just generally, and the whole game is beautiful, but Toussaint is heartbreakingly gorgeous. To the point that just riding along a random coast road is a moving experience worthy of comment.
With the expansion they added a goddamn plethora of tiny UI and graphical improvements, cleaned up the crafting system by adding a badly needed buy option for materials that you don't have but the smith does. Though sadly it appears they didn't carry that into the alchemist shops, which given the the fact that you can do that yourself I can sort of understand. They also added an homage to the mutagen systems in the previous games by opening up the option to modify Geralt's mutation with some skills that almost make me alright with the fact that this is the third game in a contiguous series and you start at level fucking one.
So far Blood and Wine lives up to the hype entirely as far as I'm concerned. It's funny, engaging, vast, and displays an emotional landscape that takes the already vibrant and sympathetic characters that the series does so well and elevates them about as near as you can and still have them be fictional. There are games that I've had more fun playing, there are games that have scratched similar itches better, But I think B&W takes The Witcher 3 pretty handily to the #1 spot on my favorites list. Like ever.
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