Good morning!

Geralt of Rivia didn’t just show up in 2015 - he showed up, tossed his hair, and made Bethesda look like they were still designing quests on a flip phone. The Witcher 3 wasn’t just a win; it was a public execution, and Fallout 4 was holding the wrong end of the sword.

In this edition, we’ve got:

• The Witcher 3’s beautiful destruction of Bethesda’s RPG crown

• Why coffee fetch quests are killing Starfield’s street cred

• A roundup of the biggest gaming news, from union wins to billion-dollar betas

Here’s everything you need to know this week in the world of gaming.

TOP STORY

How The Witcher 3 KO’d Bethesda

Back in 2015, Bethesda was still gaming royalty. Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, bangers. Nobody touched their open-world RPG throne. Then along came Geralt of Rivia, swinging two swords and a truckload of narrative ambition.

Bethesda dropped Fallout 4 the same year. Fans played it, shrugged, then booted up The Witcher 3 and went, “Oh… so THIS is what an RPG can be.”

Why Witcher 3 hit harder:

• Side quests that slapped – Not “fetch me 15 wolf pelts” filler. We’re talking full-blown stories with twists, moral choices, and consequences hours later. Quests like “Fike Isle” or the Bloody Baron arc made Fallout 4’s radiant quests look like errands for toddlers.

• Characters with layers – Not just “Bandit #3” with two voice lines. Every character, from side NPCs to major companions, had depth, motives, and messy human flaws.

• World that lives without you – Novigrad bustled like a real city. Meanwhile, Diamond City felt like a strip mall with a baseball fetish.

• Choice that actually mattered – Witcher gave you 36 possible endings. Bethesda gave you four ways to say “Yes” to the same thing.

• Cinematic ambition – Over nine hours of motion-captured cutscenes in a massive open world. Bethesda stuck with the stiff-face stare-downs of Skyrim.

The result? Players realised you could have both scale and quality. After that, fetch-quests for coffee in Starfield or bare-bones NPC towns didn’t cut it anymore.

Bethesda’s problem: they never adapted. Other devs, Larian, Rockstar, Warhorse, learned Witcher’s lessons and levelled up. Bethesda kept making 2011-style RPGs with bigger jeans and fancier watches.

Now, with The Witcher 4 and Elder Scrolls 6 on the horizon, the real question is: can Bethesda learn… or will Todd keep handing us cappuccino delivery quests while Geralt’s successors hand us moral gut-punches?

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