What did you all think of the Witcher 3?

[dscross]

I'm a bit late to the party here, but I finally got around to playing Witcher 3 many years later (waited until the game of the year edition was really cheap). I'm currently on the Blood and Wine DLC having completed the base game and first expansion pack.

I have to say, I found it a bit boring at the beginning in White Orchard, but then something suddenly twigged when the world opened up and I became a bit addicted. Not sure if it's the choices, world, characters, weapon upgrades or what but I ended up thinking it was amazing like many people said. In terms of just being an RPG (if you can call it that), it's not as good as games like Kingdom Come Deliverance for that element of it (KCD is probably my favourite rpg now - man I got hooked on that). But for what it is it's great.

Point is, I started off not really digging it and by the time I'd finished, I'd probably agree with the consensus that it's up there with the all time greats.

It's not without its flaws, it's ridiculously easy for one and there's too much hand-holding when it comes to exploration (I ended up turning the mini-map off to make it more difficult for myself). I also think the combat is crap and a bit dull - there's too much rolling around the floor shit you get in a lot of modern AAA console games.

But still, there's something really addictive about it.

So what did you all think?

 

[bluegate]

I ended up really liking the game, although it took me roughly two years to get through the game. I had a bit of a fear of missing stuff so I used to read up on quests, how they would influence the world and how they could bug out on me; this led to me getting fatigued quite often.

One quest that bugged me immensely was the one where you had to collect all Gwent cards in the base game, because some chain quests where you had to play 4 people would trigger as "Completed" after having only played 2 NPCs.

My favorite area of the base game is Skellige, mainly because of its colorful flora and its relaxing BGMs. Going back to Novigrad after having cleared out Skellige was a bit of a downer.

 

[laggyteabag]

Im not a big fan of open world games, because I find that for the most part, the world only serves to pad out the experience with slow travel times, uninsteresting landscapes, and dull sidequests.

The Witcher 3 certainly combats the last two, very, very well.

Sure, the combat may not have much depth to it once you have figured out the basics, but the story, world, and characters more than make up for the combat's shortcomings.

I must say that it is quite difficult to get into, though. For some reason it took me about 3 or 4 attempts to get any further than White Orchard, but once I did, I suddenly found myself a hundred hours in.

 

[B-Cell_v1legacy]

Probably most overrated game released this gen.

yeah it has nice lore and nice universe but its another boring open world game with terrible combat and controls.

now im so glad Cyberpunk is First person. it wont have bad controls like witcher 3 and probably be a successor of original Deus Ex. and thats why it looks like best CDPR game.

 

[meiam]

I feel like this topic show up every 6 months.

Great character and writing, boring everything else. Calling the combat shallow is overpraising it, you can get trough every encounter by just doing "attack, attack, dodge", 100% of the time it works 100% of the time. I killed enemy that were so over leveled compared to me that they had a skull instead of level indicator on the highest difficulty this way. I did that because the enemy distribution is complete crap in the game and you'll have high level stuff right next to low level for no reason whatsoever. Side quest are insanely repetitive, most of them follow the exact same pattern where you just follow red mist around, plus you always end up fighting a color variant of the same 4 enemy, the game even makes fun of that, taunting you at one point with a dragon fight before, nope color variant of an enemy you fought 20 time already. Looting/skill is pointless, no matter how you develop Gerald you have to use the sword, on higher difficulty you can use literally every grenade you have on an enemy and it'll just tickle them. Environment lack variety, hope you like forest cause that's like 70% of the game.

And while the writing is great, the main story is awful, it's just a poorly reasoned justification to stitch a bunch of unrelated side quest together, 2/3 of it is useless like the entire bloody baron portion which literally serves no purpose other than having you randomly encounter a character that will be useful later on. I keep hearing people praise the consequence in the game, but I freaking killed the king and nothing changed.

 

[happyninja42]

Never played it. I tried playing the first Witcher game many years ago, found the voice acting, plot and combat incredibly dull and frustrating. Uninstalled it and never bothered with the series again. The amount of dislike I had for Geralt in just the introduction content was so massive that I had zero interest in ever experiencing his story.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Greatest game of all time. If you crave a more skill based game, then for added challenge (basically Dark Souls on steroids) and insanely more immersive gameplay and exploration, I present: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/3522

You can even tweak the difficulty and hundreds of other settings to your personal preference.

 

[Casual Shinji]

It's really fucking good, there's just way too much of it.

I liked the combat well enough and put it on par with pretty much every other action-RPG that isn't Dragon's Dogma.

Great writing, great characterisation, great visual design, side quests and witcher contracts feel like their own little stories, the gameworld feels organic and goopy, and it's got some pretty nice music too.

 

[Abomination]

It set the bar for open world RPGs. The main quest was engaging, but the side quests is where the game really really drew you in. Each one felt like a proper fleshed out adventure.

 

[B-Cell_v1legacy]

Greatest game of all time.

But game in your avatar is better Mr Jensen.

infact Original Deus Ex is greatest game of all time.

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

I couldn't get into it and quit after 5-6 hours. The controls and general sluggishness were too big a barrier for me to get around, and I really can't stand hack and slash games that push animation fidelity over input responsiveness, least of all when they don't seem to have the best hitboxes in the world.

That said, I loved the basic game play loop of investigating to figure out what you're up against, learning that thing's weaknesses and strengths, and preparing accordingly. I do feel it was a bit too hand-holdy, and didn't like the game basically told you what was up once you discovered arbitrary number of clues; that would have been much better left for players to deduce for themselves.

 

[dscross]

Spoiler

I'm a bit late to the party here, but I finally got around to playing Witcher 3 many years later (waited until the game of the year edition was really cheap). I'm currently on the Blood and Wine DLC having completed the base game and first expansion pack.

I have to say, I found it a bit boring at the beginning in White Orchard, but then something suddenly twigged when the world opened up and I became a bit addicted. Not sure if it's the choices, world, characters, weapon upgrades or what but I ended up thinking it was amazing like many people said. In terms of just being an RPG (if you can call it that), it's not as good as games like Kingdom Come Deliverance for that element of it (KCD is probably my favourite rpg now - man I got hooked on that). But for what it is it's great.

Point is, I started off not really digging it and by the time I'd finished, I'd probably agree with the consensus that it's up there with the all time greats.

It's not without its flaws, it's ridiculously easy for one and there's too much hand-holding when it comes to exploration (I ended up turning the mini-map off to make it more difficult for myself). I also think the combat is crap and a bit dull - there's too much rolling around the floor shit you get in a lot of modern AAA console games.

But still, there's something really addictive about it.

So what did you all think?

The original is still one of my favorite games of all time even considering its many deep flaws. It knows how to dangle the carrot and crafts an amazingly detailed, atmospheric world to explore. TW3 cranks this from a 5 up to 11. It might be too much, but for the 50 or so hours I?ve clocked so far I?ve enjoyed just about all of it.

It plays well enough in an arcade-y kind of way, so I was never bothered by the lack of depth. It needs more complex mechanics if it was to be much deeper, and this is a series that started with a hybrid quick time / rhythm-based combat system. The bread n butter for me is exploring, looting and going on interesting quests.


It?s also good to hear someone else really likes Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Never hear it talked about much anymore and it?s a shame. I?ve put about as much time into this as TW3, and they actually make great counterparts. KCD is one of the most immersive games I?ve played, and though the questing isn?t quite as good, the deliberate nature of its game mechanics and the fact that most of them are so well done make everything feel so much more significant. Having to physically brew potions and sharpen your sword could?ve been horrible in the wrong developer?s hands, but Warhorse made it feel like a natural extension of the main gameplay elements.

During combat, every enemy encounter is taken seriously and as simple as it could be it ends up feeling more thrilling because of how detailed it is. Even the horse riding feels right, where you get a sense of weight transfer and inertia during jumps. The loot system also seems to cut out much of the filler content that can be found in TW3. It?s a big deal to discover a buried treasure, and the contents usually fetch some good coin even if nothing?s worth keeping.

All in all they are both excellent in their own way.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Loved it to death. It was a bit too easy so I had to do the enemy upscaling thing and also raise the difficulty to the highest level but outside of that there's really no complaints. The world is open but feels handcrafted despite its size with a lot of personality to even the most minor quest. I also love how a Wrpg actually has a pre-defined character for you to play as and doesn't do the self-insert blank slate thing so many other games do. It's mainly cause I like Jrpgs which are mostly like that but I found it refreshing to play a Wrpg setting with a character that had a very strong personality to him and not trying to come up with what his personality was.

I also like how the choices work, since you can make all the right or "good" choices and still end up with a bad result through unforeseen factors working behind the scenes. It requires deep understanding of the world and context of the characters to come up with what you want to go for and that feels very rewarding in the end.

As for combat, I love all those contextual dismemberment animations vs humans and all the tricks you get to do vs monsters (stuff like shooting down the harpies and putting out the fire elemental flames with the force push spell) and the potions open up a whole lot of variety to gameplay (like the one that makes your strong moves use up your stamina for a base damage buff) but if you don't really dig deep and make use of those systems and just mash fast attack you can probably beat everything anyhow (as long as you gear up properly) which lends itself to abuse by the lazier playerbase, which in turn will make the combat feel repetitive or shallow.

 

[Erttheking]

I think "I should probably actually play it someday."

Maybe when I've been at my new job long enough to get vacation hours.

 

[Worgen]

One of those games I wish I could get into but never did. I've got all the Witcher games and just haven't gotten into any of them, but I think they are fantastic games.

 

[Baffle]

Couldn't get into it. I liked it in theory, but found it a bit samey. I only just got to the next act or zone or whatever they're called in the game. It's one of those games I intend to come back to but probably won't.

 

[stroopwafel]

Really liked it. Though, this is as story driven as story driven games can get. Sometimes overwhelmingly so. Still, there is an undeniable quality to the quest design and writing. I absolutely love the Witcher lore and the 'slavish' take on folk and fairytales but most of the story in Witcher 3 seems to be about Geralt and his relationships. The more or less unrelated stories with the Novigrad vampire or the evil spirit tree or the watchtower ghosts; these were all so incredible if TW3 had nothing but these the game would have been one of my most favorite of all time. But for each of those there were like ten that felt more like serialized drama. Really don't care much for it but for the most part it still held my attention. Don't think that would have been the case with any other game.

As for gameplay yeah the combat isn't the greatest. Very unresponsive and it's not a game to be played on 'hard' b/c of the ridiculously long load times. The game also seems to have an obsession making you collect junk, junk and more junk with no use whatsoever. The music isn't bad but for such a long game the battle music in particular gets very repetitive to the point of irritating. And the maps are big but for whatever reason I never felt I was actually exploring; it's all just too scripted like you're constantly guided by an invisible hand so no 20 minutes pass without a cutscene.

I have the DLC but don't think I'll ever play it. I heard it's pretty good but when I tried playing it I realized I had more than my fill of The Witcher. There is no denying CDPR are some of the most talented developers. My dream would be a TW3 RPG but set in the Legacy of Kain world *drool* Really looking forward to Cyberpunk though.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

It's easily among the best games ever made.

 

[DeliveryGodNoah_v1legacy]

I've come back to it so many times and I'm still just as impressed as the last time.

I've been immersed in RPG's before, but this was the first time I was engrossed in a game and it's world.

Everything about it hit the right notes with me. It's visuals, it's characters, it's progression, combat, sound, voice acting, I can't say there's very much I didn't like about it.

It also happened to be the basis of my first real cosplay ever, as Geralt, so it has that going for it too.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I couldn't get into it.

The dialogue is good, but it takes too long for the actual story to get going (how long exactly, I don't know. I got bored after about 15-20 hours and apparently hadn't hit the "good part"), and the quest structure itself is pretty boring. Follow some red tracks, do a fight, rinse and repeat.

The giant monster fights were cool, but there's too few of them. There are too many humanoid monsters, and the combat didn't hold my interest, it's just too clunky.

I can absolutely see why so many people enjoy this game, but it was a game that just didn't pan out for me.