The Witcher 3 is a game in a painfully long list of games that give you the ability to activate a special vision that allows the player to see the important objects and details in the environment. In the rise of more detailed and varied environments in the later years of 3D graphics game designers had to figure out a way to let the player know where to go and what to do next. One of the earliest games I can think on that used this special vision is the original Assassin's Creed, in which "eagle vision" is used to view enemies in red and the objects and specific targets that the player had to get to are in gold. This game uses eagle vision to give the less observant player a way to keep an eye on the target in a crowd from very far away. Then Batman: Arkham Asylum used its "detective vision" to allow the player to see breakable walls, see when enemies have guns, see through walls, and see nearly every intractable object in the environment. Arkham Asylum nearly felt like it was built around the use of detective vision, it was the players largest foothold against the criminals of Gotham. Then The Witcher 3 came along and gave you its own twist on the old super eyes, witcher sense. Witcher sense lets you see everything, footprints, usable objects, enemies, dead enemies, fake walls, real walls, levers, switches, and even lootable chest. I don't really consider this a bad thing, the game has to have a way to parse its complex environments so that a human that doesn't have 200 hours to become a true detective can have a compete experience. Not that anyone with less than 100 hours would be completing it otherwise.

There is one point in the game that the witcher sense doesn't help the player like it usually does, a quest that requires you to kill an immortal werewolf. The only way to remove the werewolf permanently is to give it a certain item after defeating it in battle. The only problem is the game requires you to read one of the books given to you to figure this out. Now don't get me wrong, the problem isn't that the game wanted me to delve a little deeper into the its systems to solve the problem, it's that this is the only instance that make you do this. For every hunt that the player goes on the monster has a set of weaknesses that make the hunt much easier when exploited. This is always fun because this system is explained to the player early on and from that point on it makes sense to always use these weaknesses against the monsters. The game is breaking rules it didn't even mean to create. I looked up the solution for this quest and felt like an idiot when someone said the solution was simple the game was just "handholding" less. I later thought more on how the game isn't really holding your hand at all with the witcher sense but merely providing a shortcut into seeing what truly is part of the game and what is window dressing. If there was no witcher sense the player would be constantly running around hoping for "take item" prompts appearing above every box and crate, it would be madness. Witcher sense allows for people without a 1080p or higher screen to easily see the small footprints spread across the vast fields of wheat and rock. The game isn't holding your hand, its just letting you feel like a witcher.

The Last Of Us had another super vision ability that allows the player to see enemies making noise through walls. I went back to The Last Of Us recently on grounded mode which removes the ability to "listen", but instead of just using my television's speakers, I used a high quality pair of earmuff headphones to hear absorb the sound around me. This led to a large amount of palm sweat and eyelid peeling while I was creeping past the zombies and raiders. I was able to make it though without the listen ability because the headphones allowed for real life listening. That sounds a little ridiculous when I type it out but that's how it felt. The listen ability in The Last of Us is to sound, the Witcher 3's witcher sense is to vision.

Some games work without any sort of "handholding" or extended tutorials, like Spelunky. Spelunky teaches you the basic controls and forces you to complete the tutorial and then it throws you into the deep end. There is an entire secret set of levels that is only accessible after completing a pretty abstract set of objectives that in the end really make sense when you think about them. Explaining those objectives in Spelunky sounds like something you would do in a video game that Uncle Joey would be playing on Fullhouse. But I'm getting off of the topic at hand. These triple A games need to have assistant systems to give the mass market they need to reach to be successful the ability to complete the them and see the huge swath of content they have created. Besides, all the systems are technically optional anyway, right?