The Witcher 3 discussion and nitpicking, and praise

[Aetrion]

My biggest nitpick is how unruly the menu system is on PC, it's never just clean in and out, you press back or escape and it dumps you in another screen, or you have to awkwardly scroll around between different screens by clicking tiny buttons.

The other thing that really grinds my gears about the game is that it just throws a thousand items at you without any indication of which ones you need and which ones you don't. If you're worried about not having the right crafting materials when you need them you will very quickly have an absurdly cluttered inventory.

The fact that you can't just walk up to a fire and cook meat before eating it is a bit wonky.

Not being able to get your health back by resting on hard difficulties is just stupid. I wanted harder fights, not lose half the functionality of meditating.

The crossbow is IMO absurd. On land it does what? 20 damage? Underwater it does 800. I mean I get why it's weak on land, there are tons of monsters in the game that won't leave their spawn area and you can kill them with the crossbow very easily if you're willing to take the time, but

Lastly, the invisible map edge is a pain when monsters are hiding in the out of bounds zone.



Those are all pretty minor things though compared to all the stuff the game does well. I'm having a blast with it.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

My biggest nitpick is how unruly the menu system is on PC, it's never just clean in and out, you press back or escape and it dumps you in another screen, or you have to awkwardly scroll around between different screens by clicking tiny buttons.

Odd...I always manage to back out of menus by hitting ESC.

If you're finding scrolling awkward make sure to turn on hardware cursor. It's (weirdly) under video options.

 

[Silence]

The fact that you can't just walk up to a fire and cook meat before eating it is a bit wonky.

CAN you cook meat? I ate all my raw meat and raw livers, but I don't know if it was that healthy (well it did nothing, but maybe cooked meat gives more? If it exists).

 

[Aetrion]

No, you can't cook meat, which is why I'm saying it's weird. That should just be a basic alchemy recipe or something.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Mostly, I am digging the game but there are a few things that bothers me, so in no particular order:

1. Graphics. Overall it looks great, but foliage looks like garbage on my computer (sporting a GTX 780) with constantly flat textures, as if the game never loads the proper hi-res textures as I get closer to the bushes/trees/flowers. It is alright as long as I move, but if I ever stop and look around every piece of vegetation looks, in the words of my wife, like paper cut outs. This is with most graphic options maxed and foliage distance set to high by the way.

2. Equipment degradation. In some games it works (ie. Fallout, due to thematic reasons). In the Witcher 3 it made me spend 10 minutes to get to a quick travel point, travelling to a town, getting to a blacksmith, repairing my swords, getting back to the quick travel point and resuming my exploration/question. It isn't a good feature and all it served to do so far is to pull me out of my immersion due to the god awful MASSIVE icon that shows up on the entire left side of my screen to indicate that my sword ain't feeling too good and forcing me to do something about it. I've taken up just carrying my previous set of weapons around and swapping over to them when my swords get too damaged, to minimize the time getting too and from blacksmiths.

3. Map layout. The maps themselves are fine, a little empty on stuff to find between PoIs maybe but fine. What's not fine is the ridiculous decision to intermingle level 7 bandits with a level 27(!) griffin, level 14 deserters and level 23 ghouls. More often than not I go from facing off some pathetic level 4 drowners to walking into some ruined village where I get jumped by level 20+ enemies. I was literally riding the shortest route between two places that hand out quests that are below level 10 when I ran into level 23 ghouls ON THE ROAD.

4. The odd and inexplicable difference in level between similar enemies. So the first major Witcher contract is for a Griffin. That Griffin is level 5. The next Griffin I encountered was level 20-something. The first was fairly easy to fight, the second one shotted me through Quen sign and blocking. I've encountered level 6 ghouls and level 23 ghouls. My suspension of disbelief is sorely tested when I tear up half a dozen ghouls in one village then proceed 200 meters down the road to the next and get curb stomped in 2 seconds flat by a single ghoul that is 4 times their level and is double my level. This ties into 3, in that it feels as if the map has just been randomly sprinkled with enemies of various strengths, with no real thought being put into creating "zones" for different levels. That ghouls can go from "gibbed by 3 light attacks" to "can't be hurt even with maxed out damage buffs" without even area transitioning or moving across the map is just silly.

On the upside, no crashes for me, the game is really fun and Gwent is as good as mini-games are like to get.

 

[Silence]

You can carry Repairkits also, by the way.
I never had a problem.

 

[Kwak]

Is there a weight limit to manage?

 

[Elfgore]

Is there a weight limit to manage?

Seems to be. I had a "you are overburdened" message pop up. I think it just prevents you from running, I'm not sure if it effects horseback speed. My game locked up shortly after the message appeared, so I didn't have time to experiment. But the weight limit is pretty high. Geralt was holding about twenty swords and a dozen pieces of armor as well as all of my alchemy and misc. items.

Personally, I'm enjoying the game. It does fall victim to the Inquisition trap though. We get a decent size world with really nothing to do in it. Quests are fantastic though, as each is its own little story and some may make the world a better place if you just skip them. Combat is a little meh at the moment, most likely my fault though. The main story has yet to pull me in completely, but I will continue playing it for now.

 

[Pr0]

This is probably one of the most finely crafted games of the modern era. There is literally no comparison.

All other game development companies that call themselves RPG developers need to get on this level or get out.

I honestly don't think I could accept another Bethesda bug fest after this, or a BioWare game either for that matter, unless they can get on this level they are now pretty much pretenders to the throne that CDPR has quite confidently usurped.

 

[Silence]

Two words:

Bloody Baron.

Spoiler: Major Bloody Baron spoilers here

How did that particular story line end for you? For me... Not so good. I felt pretty fucking depressed after I finished it. He was a bastard, but a poor bastard.

I already read what happens if you don't kill the tree (after I chose), but I did kill the tree. So here is my ending:

Spoiler

Baron and Tamara meet in the Swamp, we fight together versus some monsters the crones send against us. Anna gets found, is completely nuts and not talkative. ... Because the children got eaten or at least taken from her (see tree spirit kill).

Only hope to save her is some weird healer. Baron takes Anna there, Tamara has to fulfill her duties to the Eternal Flame. But Baron is not there and therefore the henchmen can pillage some folk ...
At least these were my choices, there were some to make (like saying to Tamara that her father hasn't changed (I did say it) or that this healer probably won't do anything (I did say it's worth a try).

So not that much of an emotional impact at the end, but when I found out I doomed these children ...

Perfect? No. Best damn triple A single player title released in the last 5 years? Can't even think of any other game that comes close to challenging TW3 for that award. If anyones interested I might go through the trouble of writing a review in the User Reviews section on this site.

It's not even really triple A. It's major independent studio (Indie is probably not the right definition) with government funds.

And yes. It's so much better than Skyrim, and anything else I played for that matter. Most parts of the game set the new gold standard for RPGs for me. Not all, game is not perfect, but most. Especially writing/quests.
Helps that these people take some fairy tales, bible stories and some other stuff and rewrite it into this game. Always funny. I met some students of a Friedrich ... (Nietzsche) who blabbered about "the gods are dead". I beat them up.

 

[aozgolo]

I'm really enjoying the game so far, overall I like it though there are some nitpicks of my own:

-Killed a rabbit and Geralt made an overly aggressive comment about "Die you piece of filth", I just wanted the meat dude, I don't hate the rabbit.

-If you skip ahead to areas before the main quest leads you there (I went to Novigrad the second it let me) then the load-in cutscenes presume you've already got there in the story. It makes me worry they didn't spend enough time testing out how to break their own questlines.

-While I like having the crafting system there, I'm ending up keeping TONS of what will probably be junk because I don't know if I'll need it down the line instead of selling it for very much needed gold.

-Gold: I need more of it!

-I can't play Geralt as the womanizing seducer from the first game. That Herbalist in White Orchard would have totally given it up but never was given my chance... 16 Free DLC don't let me down on this one!

-Enemies and gatherable plants spawning outside the limits of the map that I can't get to? C'mon now!

-Gwent is a bit confusing, I see no incentive to not go all out in the first hand (every time I don't I lose?)

-No First Person view: I don't want to play in 1st person, but some of these breathtaking vistas beg to be taken in first hand.

-Underwater movement is a bit clunky and hard to get the hang of.

-The "interrogation" where you fill in the events of The Witcher 2 is incredibly vague if you haven't fully played the game, leaving newer players unsure if their choices coincide with how they are playing the character.

I really enjoy the game, I've had some surprising experiences, things I wasn't expecting. The size of Novigrad was a nice one, I love how it feels like the size of an actual city. I like how you use signs to interact with the world, blowing doors open with Aard, collecting beeswax by hitting hives with Igni, or riding wild horses by casting Axii on them.

 

[Milata]

Lotta people complaining bout the fall damage, which for the most part can be negating by rolling as you land.

 

[Danbo Jambo]

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

Your irrational hatred against Skyrim is unsettling.

Not only it did not do that, but even if it had, it would have been far from being the first game to do it.

Lol, to be honest i don't hate it, it's a 7/10 game for me. I had fun with it, but to me it's in no way an RPG. And yeah, like I say I was just thinking of Oblivion & Fallout.

The frustration I was venting was more at the fact that so many RPGs are detirmined to try and be Skyrim now, and - as an RPG - it's wank.

Weapon degridation in general is chore-esq to me. I'd be happy with a balance, say where normal weapons degrade and magical ones don't, but constantly having to maintain stuff is very work-like and boring IMO.

 

[Nimzabaat]

I may have missed these but I have a couple nitpicks myself:
1. Plants give random plant loot. Why? Why can't they do the Bethesda/Bioware thing of knowing what a plant looks like to get that resource?
2. If you're playing on console with a big screen TV the font is too small. I've looked through the options but there doesn't seem to be a way to make it bigger. Most of the time I can't tell what i'm picking up.
3. The map is bigger than Skyrim but has much less to do. So far all i'm seeing is more travel time between points of interest. The POI are really interesting but it's still just filler terrain.
4. Hair physics... why is Geralt affected the most and why does it get all crazy when you're in a building with no wind?

I'd mention that we're still playing Geralt but that's not a nitpick and it's much sadder now that I know the original plan for the series was to create your own Witcher. That would have been awesome.

I am really liking the game (as most are) even with its flaws though. Easily the best RPG this year so far. It also makes me really excited for Cyberpunk.

 

[Silence]

Patch to address the font size issue is on the way, btw.

I don't feel like it is less than Skyrim. In Skyrim I ran to the next POI, if it was a dungeon or sth, run through it, and NEVER found any loot that was worthwile.
And there was no story to the POI, most of the time. It had no depth at all.

Witcher on the other hand: There may be not as many POI, but the "worst" kind are the monster nests. In most of the rest you at least find new formulas, often a short book/notice which tells you a story. Sometimes it even starts a miniquest, or a quest for an item set. Or it starts a complete quest/Witcher contract.
Let me tell you what happened at the last PoI (coming to think of it, it maybe wasn't even on the map, aside from a marker..) It was the ruin of the castle. I nearly rode away, but then decided to investigate it.
Blood marks, weird other marks, a dead body, which was not killed on the spot it lay, but got dragged down. There were footrpints from the person to this place.
I did go after the footprints (backwards), found a campfire with 3 other dead bodies, all pale.
Geralt concluded this had to be the work of a ghost. But without enough information I got the quest:
Go look at a notice board if someone has infos about it.

And all because I just happened to stop at a vista.

---

Now I am in Novigrad. I hate the church of the Eternal Fire. Well, did it before, because of TW1, but ... fuck them.

 

[lowhat]

Did they fix the combat from Witcher 2? I'm really interested in this game from the RPG standpoint, but not if they left that horrible tedious combat system in.

 

[Yokillernick]

I'm liking the game but after 34 hours I can safely say that horse riding is complete wank. The amount of times that my horse decided to just stop dead in its tracks in the middle of a flat road for no reason is amazing. Also while I do appreciate the hold button to follow the road function, trying to get your horse to go off road is an exercise in frustration as that thing becomes glued to the road. As such any and all activities that even remotely involve the horse riding engine have been soured for me.

Secondly, I'm not sure if this is because I spent the first 20 or so hours doing every Point of Interest quest and not giving a shit about the main story, thus doing the level 5 main story quests at level 10, but finding a good blacksmith to make myself a proper sword has become impossible, which brings me to the crafting system. I don't mind the fact that I can pick up everything and then break it down. What I do mind is not knowing if I really need 20 Drowner brains or if I can sell 15 of them and hope that the next potion needs only 5 instead of 6 brains to make. I'm pretty sure at this point my crafting supplies take up to 25% of my inventory.

Thirdly, the bugs. I haven't seen many mentions of them but I have fallen through roofs, unable to interact with quests characters and vendors for quite a bit. A quick reload or doing another quest seems to reset most of them but they have been a bit of an annoyance. Like when I was fighting a water hag and Geralt did a beautiful tumble into a waist deep pool. I was not able to climb out of the pool since combat controls only allowed Geralt to either hop at it or smash his forehead against it. So for that entire fight I was flaying at and chucking bombs at the hag while she was laughing and throwing dirt at me. Managed to get out after the fight but by god it as annoying.

Lastly, and linking with the above. I wish the game would have a dedicated flee button. The kind which when you press switches from the combat actions to the normal actions so that I can run away properly without Geralt turning back every 2 seconds to see who's chasing him.

Apart from these "nitpicks" I will say that the Witcher 3 is the first game since Dragon Age Inquisition that has managed to keep me playing a computer game for more than an hour or two at the time so it must be doing something right. As a sidenote to all these comparisons with Skyrim, while I understand how people (myself included) find the miniquests in TW3 to be much better than Skyrim's, I for one found exploration in Skyrim to be much more interesting. Against this might change when I get out of the swamp lands but for now I would not say that I prefer the Witcher over Skyrim when it comes to exploration or character interaction.

 

[aozgolo]

Did they fix the combat from Witcher 2? I'm really interested in this game from the RPG standpoint, but not if they left that horrible tedious combat system in.

Combat feels a bit closer to the Batman Arkham games, albeit a bit more clunky. You have a fast attack/strong attack, a button to cast signs, a button to use your secondary weapons (bombs or crossbow), you can parry, counterattack, dodge, and roll around as you fight. There's also a lock-on button which can get you in trouble if you're fighting multiple enemies and not locked onto the one closest to you.

It's definitely not the best combat I've seen but it's more than passable for the game, and is fun and challenging without the challenge being all in the controls. There are times where the controls get frustrating such as trying to fight on horseback or perform a counterattack successfully (timing is too sensitive here). Overall I think it works well. The signs are pretty easy to get the hang of using as are the secondary weapons, which you can either do a quick attack that just locks on and goes or do a manual aim for more precise damage. Parrying and countering are where it gets the most frustrating but the dodge works well and is usually enough to keep you alive.

 

[mad825]

Aaaand I've hit a game breaking bug that causes me to CTD every time I fast travel. No issues when I try it on a new game but my save file that has 60+ hours is now completely and utterly bricked. Fuck this game.

That's my nickpick of the day.

 

[RagingTiger]

Did anyone else feel the choices from Witcher 2 have almost no real impact on the world at large; just who is pissed at you and who isn't?