So, I'm playing Witcher 3 right now, and it is good.
It even has Horseraces in GTA car race style.
Anyways, I think we could use a thread which actually has "Witcher 3" in the title, so people know what it's about.
I finished the first area, thought "who the fuck said game was bigger than Skyrim", then looked at the second map and ... well, game is bigger than Skyrim. There are like two Skyrim sized Maps.
Other than that: My horse got stuck in a shopkeepers tent after I meditated. It was funny to look at. Also BLOOM.
I'm counting down the days until I get it still. Loving everything I hear about it so far, even the supposed "negative" stuff is stuff which suits my particular tastes (I.e. That it's more story driven than open world)
So the Witcher and Witcher 2 were on sale for 6 bucks together on Steam last week. I am currently trying to figure out Witcher enhanced edition. The only thing that kind of confuses me is the quest system. It's all over the fucking place, and combat is sparse. It feels so much more like a detective RPG except instead of getting better at being a detective I get better at stabbing innocent people.
Having lots of fun with it right now, though I'm kinda stuck looking for a key to help a Merchant in Distress. The only big problem so far I have is with Gwent. It's another card game within the actual game that I cannot understand.
So far I only have two issues. 1. I don't like equipment degredation in any game. Some people do and that is fine but I get no enjoyment from having to repair my gear. 2. I simply can't be fucked with Gwent.
I'm actually trying to get into Gwent, after hating every single other cardgame in every game evr. Seriously Pazaak was the worst (from KotoR).
I'm surprised how much depth it has, and how it can change, even though it is basically a Best of 3 10 Cards lay down game.
But I can't blame anyone for not enjoying a card game.
Only managed to play an hour so far so I'm only just slightly past the tutorial. Combat seems like a more refined version of the Witcher 2's combat which I like. The game looks amazing to boot. Sadly thanks to work and family stuff I won't get to properly sink my teeth into it until the weekend.
Some nitpicks, the cutscenes are locked to 30 fps which makes the transitions between cutscenes and gameplay a bit jarring. I've also noticed that in some places the dialogue seems unusually quiet.
1. Game is an absolute system crippler. I do not have a slow PC by any means, but I hate having to turn off stuff like the fancy hair.
2. Falling damage is way too high.
3. Combat can be a bit of a slop show.
4. Equipment degrades REALLY fast, and earning money isn't exactly easy.
5. Suffers a bit from RPG disease...too many things to loot, each with a bit of crap in them. Fewer loot nodes, more stuff in each!
6. Geralt's voice acting is still pretty wooden.
Praise:
Graphics downgrade notwithstanding, it is a phenomenally gorgeous game, even with a few sacrifices made for frame rate. The facial animations/emotes are fantastic, game is stuffed with content, every side quest feels considered and involving (none of this DAI MMO Lite crap). Too early to really say "Great game", but I'm VERY pleased with it so far. Fantastic first impression.
So far I have been having fun with it. I will echo some of Guppy's nitpicks, and some of my own:
1: The equipment degrades so fast it just feels like a nuisance, it's a gold sink in a game that really doesn't even give you a lot of gold to begin with, it's really painful if you do a lot of exploring as your equipment degrades a lot faster than you make money. It hurts even more when you get good weapons and armor, and the time between equipment upgrades gets longer.
2: The crafting system is just unnecessarily bloated, I've collected so much crap that applies to none of my recipes, dozens of different types of herbs just to make ingredients for ingredients to other items, a lot of times I'll find a lootable object that just has some junk item in it that I can sell for 2 gold or spend 2 gold to dismantle it into crafting items and then dismantle those crafting ingredients into other crafting ingredients. A lot of recipes aren't even worth it, vendors sell weapon and armor schematics for things you'll find a dozen copies of within the first hour. I've picked up a dozen recipes for decoctions that require mutagens from creatures I haven't even run into, and a lot of them have effects that aren't even close to worth the effort to going out of my way to collect.
3: Weird weather glitches can mess up cutscenes, especially rain. I did a mission that took place deep in an underground ruin, but because it was raining above ground, it seemed to start raining whenever a cutscene or conversation took place, which was a little jarring.
4: the limit to quick buttons for consumables seems to exist solely for the benefit of console controllers, and comes off as artificial and lame when using a keyboard and mouse, this especially sucks when you consider witcher potions give you leeway to stack them with the toxicity limit, but its hard to stack more than two potion effects, and many only last 20-30 seconds anyway.
As for that the game does right:
1: the main story is a little disjointed, but the areas are joined together with some fun side quests that manage to avoid feeling like MMO fodder like in many open world RPG games, even the small short quests involve things like investigating a ghost in a well, instead of being asked to gather X amount of items for an NPC.
2: the game is graphically gorgeous, pumping everything up to ultra makes the game incredible looking. Sailing on the roiling waves during a light rain in the evening with the sun shining through the clouds and the wind visibly bending the trees along the shoreline is striking. The game can easily compete with the like of GTA V on PC graphics wise, and has some of the best rain and weather effects I've ever seen.
3: The item and armor design is an interesting mix of realistic and fantasy, with design that is both colorful and detailed. The monster design is interesting, and the lore behind them gives the series a distinct look that differentiated it from the pack, the enemies are also very well animated, with wraiths spinning and twirling in the air, wolves dodging and weaving around sword attacks, and bears lumbering with very real looking weight and power.
4: the combat can get to be a clusterfuck, and the swordplay a little basic, but once you get a good staple of items and get used to switching signs in combat the combat starts flowing, especially once you have a strategy that works, considering that 90% of witcher 2 could be completed just spamming Quen, it is nice to see the signs being good, fast tools to use and switch between in a fight.
Overall, I could go on about everything from Gwent, to various glitches I've run into, to the horseback combat and riding, but I will leave it at this: Witcher 3 is definately shaping up to be a superb experience so far, it is a pretty damn good game, it could very well be a contender for my personal GoTY if the experience holds up throughout, right now Bloodborne holds the spot for 2015, but Witcher 3 is giving it a run for its money. Usually the first half of the year is kind of sparse, but the first half of 2015 has had some great releases so far.
Yeah, but somehow it feels leaps and bounds better than it was in 2. or maybe it's just that the NPCs have gotten a major upgrade in voice acting quality.
OT: I'm surprised myself that I actually quite like this game, since I couldn't stand to get through even 4 hours of The Witcher 2. I don't know exactly what clicked, whether it's the open world or the better voice acting, but I'm finding it very enjoyable.
The combat is still not too satisfying, but atleast it's not complete shit anymore. Though I can see it becoming very monotonous the more I play.
Money is hard to come by, but this does put you more in the role of a traveling rogue trying to scrape by what he can. It's a nice change of pace from games that just shower you with so much cash, that after the first 10 hours you have more money than you know what to do with.
The grapics are great (playing it on the PS4), but it's the faces that really wowed me. The animation, the textures, the design, it's absolutely incredible. NPC faces already look great, and Yennifer and Ciri's faces are just gorgeous! It also doesn't suffer from the Bioware 'one size fits all' mo-cap acting, or the dreaded Bioware emoticons.
Traversal across the open world can work a bit fidgety though, but that's open-world for you.
All in all, well done CDPR! You may actually have won me over.
Awww man, why did they have to make weapons degradable? Stop it! Stop copying Skyrim! Devs need to realize that SKYRIM WAS WANK. A good RPG doesn't need chore elements.
The first genuinely downbeat feeling I've had for TW3. Fucks sake
Awww man, why did they have to make weapons degradable? Stop it! Stop copying Skyrim! Devs need to realize that SKYRIM WAS WANK. A good RPG doesn't need chore elements.
The first genuinely downbeat feeling I've had for TW3. Fucks sake
My total playtime so far is around 4 hours. I'm still in the first area (White Orchard), so take my points for what you will.
Nitpicks:
1) The game froze twice during my playtime so far. Both times in fairly un-demanding situations (once walking around an inn, once on the inventory screen). That's more than I ever got from the previous two games. Hopefully it's something the first patch will purge out.
2) The game feels like it's been designed for a gamepad. The keyboard & mouse combination feels awkward at times.
3) Similar to some previous posts. I don't like equipment degradation and it was a bad idea to include it.
4) The change to the alchemy system is annoying. They've switched from the previous games' mix'n'match of elements to a classical crafting system, with specific ingredients required for specific potions. It's frustrating to have to run around the map trying to hunt down that one missing celandine to make a swallow, even with a sack full of other ingredients on my back.
5) The falling damage is too high. Especially since in the wilderness you can't always see that you're going towards a drop. Falling two meters shouldn't cost me half my health.
Praise:
1) Young Ciri is way better than Alvin. I don't even know if the brat comes back later, or if only her adult self makes an appearance after the tutorial, but she's better written and less annoying.
2) The facial expressions are amazing. Maybe they only seem that way because I've just finished DA:I, but Geralt's subtle little looks are so much more effective than that game's "THIS IS MY SAD FACE" ever was.
3) Even the tiniest fetch quest feels very rewarding with the dialogue and backstory that go into them. There's one quest early in the game which consists entirely of brewing a potion and giving it to a herbalist. You don't even have to move if you have the reagents. But it gets a little introduction where the herbalist tells you the tale of what happened to her patient, and that's enough to distinguish it from Radiant AI-type quests. Weird that I'd praise the game for something that used to be routine in RPGs...
4) All the quests so far are very satisfying. You always get a little backstory behind the questgiver, a little fleshing-out of the gameworld - and the quests themselves feel quite varied, even if a good amount of them is the usual "go somewhere and kill something". So far my favourite is the resolution to one of the first quests where you help a smith find an arsonist (spoilers ahoy).
Mechanically, the quest is little more than an introduction to the "Witcher-vision" they've added. You follow the trail of the arsonist around the village and find him easily. But if you bring him to the smith, he calls some soldiers who declare that disrupting the smithy is an act of sabotage and take the guy away to be hanged. The smith is satisfied and Geralt doesn't react. It was a bit of a surprise - I was expecting something of a "spare the guy if he promises to never be bad again" option, but no. This is how the world works. That's the kind of tiny detail that tells you a lot about the game world.
General comments:
1) Combat is still very much "all-or-nothing", in that if you prepare well, you'll make short work of most enemies, but if you just stumble in, swords blazing, you'll likely get steamrolled. Especially if you get into a perpetual stunlock fighting a group.
2) Swimming is a bit awkward and at least for now, it feels like it's mostly been added for some sunken treasures and a little bit of underwater exploration. I'll wait with a verdict whether they do anything interesting with it.
3) For the open world aspect, the game reminds me most of Red Dead Redemption.
Overall, if you look at the Witcher series and Dragon Age, it looks like they both went a similar path:
1) The first game was a tribute to 90s-style RPGs, a bit rough around the edges, but good enough for a cult following.
2) The second game was a bit "consolified" to catch up with the current audience, focusing heavily on those elements which were most praised in the first game and streamlining as much as possible.
3) The third game went open world - possibly in an attempt to AssCreed it?
And, so far The Wild Hunt is shaping up to be a better experience than DA:I. And that game got showered with GOTYs, so I hope TW3 gets some love as well.
4: the limit to quick buttons for consumables seems to exist solely for the benefit of console controllers, and comes off as artificial and lame when using a keyboard and mouse, this especially sucks when you consider witcher potions give you leeway to stack them with the toxicity limit, but its hard to stack more than two potion effects, and many only last 20-30 seconds anyway.
Early reports (that I did not want to believe) suggested that the game played better with a controller. Unfortunately, that is still the case. I do however believe that CDPR will fix it, as they have with previous games. Not much consolation (harhar) right now, but it's something to look forward to.
4: the combat can get to be a clusterfuck, and the swordplay a little basic, but once you get a good staple of items and get used to switching signs in combat the combat starts flowing, especially once you have a strategy that works, considering that 90% of witcher 2 could be completed just spamming Quen, it is nice to see the signs being good, fast tools to use and switch between in a fight.
This is fixed with a high quality mouse or keyboard. Get a Razer, Logitech, or Corsair, with macro support, and rebind the TW3 profile keys to 1+Q, 2+Q, ... That way you will activate the signs immediately. Better yet, now you can use Q for something like dedicated bomb throwing and save Mouse 3 for crossbow.
A lot of the nitpicks have already been brought up.
1. I dislike that alchemy is now a generic "potion" system rather than the longterm mutagenics of previous games. It was fresh and different, but now the effects are very short term and the toxicity recession is so fast that you might as well replace it with an arbitrary cooldown.
2. When you dodge and lunge, you don't always lunge in the right direction. This is annoying, and it often breaks those rather cinematic combat sequences where you feel like Neo with a sword.
3. The fact that you get brain trauma from blocking a charge attack (i.e. probably the first attack you will ever experience) is not explained in the tutorial, which is a faux pas in my book. Likewise, the fact that you can only counter/riposte non-beast/non-magical opponents is omitted as well.
4. Freezing. Happens about every 15 minutes for me now, and no longer constrained to the inventory screen. This will hopefully get fixed soon.
5. Control scheme. Why did it have to be ported from consoles?! This is the opposite of good!
6. Geralt puts his sword away whenever enemies disengage. This is very impractical for hit and run tactics, such as horse combat and skirmishing.
Good stuff.
1. Holy crap combat is fantastic. The feel when you get things right is amazing, dashing around, lunging, blocking, evading. It's just fast enough, the signs are great, the inclusion of bombs/crossbow also helps keep it fluid and flexible. Opponents feel very tactically different, and it's all about knowing your opponent (which meshes perfectly with the lore). The difference between knowing your shit and charging in blind is tremendous, and I absolutely love it.
2. Horse combat. While primitive and fairly hard to aim with, damage is very satisfying, and the charge itself is exhilarating. Specially big opponents. Charging a bear and bleeding it dry is awesome, unless you get caught in a copse.
3. Boobs! I haven't seen any yet But now I have a motivation apart from roleplaying to resuce fair damsels in distress!
4. Enemies. They are varied and cooperate in different ways. Wolves and ghouls will attempt to flank you while your target slinks away (just like Velociraptors). Deserters aren't teamplayers at all, and will work on their own, either with bows or bardiches. Drowners are aggressive and dumb, charging you head and hoping to stun you from the blow. Wraiths will teleport around, relying on speed and surprise for nasty backstabs. This variety adds a rewarding layer to both lore and combat, and ensures that gear is only a minor factor in success rate.
5. Visuals. Stuff is looking good, and flows pretty well on my medium rig (770 with 4770K).
6. Gwent. I'm liking it, reminds me of Magic, and it's not random like the dice games of TW2.
All in all, this game really deserves the praise it's been getting. Very, very satisfying. Let's hope it maintains the same quality all the way through.
Is it me or has Geralt and Solid Snake become the same person? Even his voice sounds David Haytery quite often, while his armour colour and the leap dodge roll just become the icing on the cake. Once I noticed, I could not unnotice
The game is brilliant of course. We are here for nitpicks however, and pick the nits I shall! One minor consistant niggle is that the action button for looting, horse mounting etc, feels a bit temperamental. Most often it wont register the first or second press of the button, possibly due to the camera restrictions for recognising the prompt. It has a sticky gamey feel to it.
Second, I am unsure if this is a console only problem (ps4 here), but assets like shrubs, trees and other outdoor objects disappear when the camera closes in on them. As if the very camera is disintergrating each one as it touches them. The game is indeed pretty and it is a little shame that such things can break the wonderful illusion of being in its world.
There is a typo on the description of the griffin, they use "higher" instead of "hire" but to be honest, it doesnt make a difference to the game.
Load times are indiscriminate it seems, so stuck in a,small room, dying multiple times? 80% of that time spent will be loading what I assume is the game world for just the room. That one is subjective to just me probably, hehe.
All in all, amazing game. Will continue to play and enjoy. Oh lastly, one thing I noticed was that while the game wears its appreciating of the female and male form on its sleeve, showing plenty of female forms, it only ever seems to appreciate Geralt's male form. No other male is allowed hairy nipple sweat screen time. Perhaps Geralt has some low self esteem issues around other guys? A little insecurity can go a long way.
Edit: The sidestep maneuver has triggered my bloodborne muscle memory more than once and ive found myself pressing bloodborne buttons at times most unwanted in battle. It will fade, as does all things in time.
I don't think the game is very good as a sandbox because at time of writing, I am in Velen and I don't foresee a lot of interest in revisiting these locations in lieu of the 2nd game's more linear structure. A lack of variety in locales might make it a bit more of a chore to play through, but I am only 9 hours in, so things could pick up. Perhaps if they go for a more "dynamic world" approach where decisions at key points drastically change the landscape, then I would be very pleased. So far however, I'm a bit iffy.
What's good about it? Combat is reasonably difficult and far better than certain other games *cough* Inquisition *cough*. Writing is solid as always, quest design is equally impressive, especially since now there's an investigative element to everything and that almost everything comes with a choice, however minor, which helps roleplaying.
Graphics are also beautiful. The tree swaying, the lighting and the ambient occlusion build a great sense of atmosphere and for me, they transport me right back into Lithuania, to the point where I can smell pine trees.
Levelling is a bit more of a chore now, but with places of power, that gap is helped somewhat. I am still a bit miffed that you don't get xp from killing anymore but with respawning enemies, it kind of makes sense(so as to prevent grinding). I like the changes to the economy so that now Geralt doesn't end up hoarding orens throughout the game and has to regularly stock up on food items(for when potions fail and on Hard difficulty), repair his equipment on top of buying schematics and crafting materials.
A point of disappointment is that you don't have to read books anymore to find out about monsters. Now you just have to kill them, which helps for more impatient players, but I did like that you had to deduce for yourself how to deal with certain foes by buying tomes, which in turn, also fleshed out the world. The Bestiary is fine as is, and I do like that they added obvious tips, but I don't know. It feels a bit different to 2, which I liked.
On that note, monster hunting has improved. The Griffin fight is pretty fun, especially so since you have to gather ingredients and investigate the area to find out how to attract it. The AI is pretty damn aggressive(if sometimes a bit too prone to cheesing) so fights are intense and you end up using all of your signs now instead of just going for Igni/Quen/Aard like in 2.
The changes to potions are a bit of an annoyance, but since you have to meditate to refill them(with strong alcohol in your inventory) and that the ingredients are now way more specific, this gets countered somewhat.
The crossbow and bombs seem a bit vestigial though. With the added delay and the required aiming, they don't seem like reliable tools in combat, especially so for bombs. Now that Igni has been buffed, crowd control is a lot easier with using that in lieu of samum or dancing star. That said however, I haven't encountered many flying enemies yet, so this could all change.
But overall, love the game. Glad I got hyped for it and that I preordered it on GOG
Yeah, I wouldn't describe it as sandbox open world, you have a loose order of quests, which make the game more story-driven than really sandbox. Open-World it still is in my opinion, just of a different type than most other games we see.
I'm actually very pleased with that, I like story more, and how they managed to still have a reasonable open world while being story-driven is impressive.
I think you do get XP from killing, just super little. When focusing on the level progression bar when killing something I couldn't see any change, but when comparing the hard numbers on the menu before and after there definately seems to be an increase in XP.
Another small criticism for me is that dismantling items and equipment costs money. Which, I don't know... Dismantling stuff for crafting material alone seems like the proper trade-off as opposed to selling it off. Putting a currency penalty ontop of that feels a bit unfair, eventhough it obviously does make sense for a smith to ask for compensation for dismantling something, but still...
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But now I have a motivation apart from roleplaying to resuce fair damsels in distress!
