Lets talk about Witcher 3. I know I'm late...

I think side quests in the main game are better than the actual main story. They tend to be very memorable smaller stories. I felt a lot of heart in many of them.

They do distract from the main story, but I don't know any open world games that found a completely working fix for that. Except, like mentioned in OP, Morrowind.

Yes. It's definitely better than the original release.

At the absolute least, the final nail has been put in Mass Effect 3's coffin
Nobody will ever be able to defend it again now that we have proof that writing a game like that can be done, and done well

I don't know how some Polish dudes were able to beat pretty much all RPGs since Black Isle era in writing. In English.

This game is alright

Fuck off.

It's not bad. The writing's solid, especially in the first part of the game - the Bloody Baron's probably one of the best written characters in recent years. Then it kinda goes meh.

The open world, despite being big as shit, has little to do in it besides running around and watching the sights. That gets especially bad when you reach those not-Viking islands, where there's absolutely jack shit to do - only a couple of side quests and some plotline about succession which gets resolved fast.

The writing (and side quests) also vary in quality. Some are fun and have some cool ideas behind them. Others are just boring time wasters - which wouldn't be so bad if the other, interesting quests, weren't around. Compare that quest where you have to throw a baby in the fucking oven to some shit like exploring a cave to kill a harpy. Maybe if the entire game was kept low level and contained in smaller areas instead of a giant empty world - Geralt goes around doing witcher jobs, instead of being involved with the fate of the whole world and several other dimensions, and every king knows who he is. It ends up almost entering the edgy wish fulfillment territory at times.

Also, fuck Gwent, it has nothing to do with the game and is only there because every other game on the market had to have similar shit.

When did gaming development went this shit, not even polaks can't do it right.

You have no idea what you're talking about

How much are they paying you? Because it's obviously not enough.

You really have no idea what the fuck you're talking about

You're fucking adorable. Do you also donate to some color-haired freak's Patreon? Because you argue like you do.

Fucking loved the music in The Witcher 3.

You only named one round of examples, none of which were even recent, let alone indicative of the industry as a whole, and claimed they were "every other game on the market"
You're immediately jumping to this defense because you don't have any more examples, let alone even a single relevant one

Regarding the first image, where did CD Project Red promise Metal Gear Rising Style sword controls?

Also, the cut chapter 3 of W2? Is there a source for this?

As to the first, no idea where he got it from. But a chapter from W2 was indeed cut where you'd go to the elven state of Dol Blathanna (aka Valley of Old Farts) and meet Francesca Findabair. The guy presumes the money for that went to fund the 360 port, even though Polish currency (zloty) is utterly devalued.

I'd wager a certain amount of money was given to them by Microsoft to release on xbox so legally they couldn't just drop work on that and funnel the money into extending the game. Who knows, maybe without Microsoft's money the game would have been even shorter.

I've played the whole shit, seriously the expansions are far better than whatever shit the Main story was.

Geralt works better in his own self contained stories anyway without any massiv epolitical intrigue and end of world events
Blood and Wine is far more interesting than the shitty main setting, and Hearts of Stone has the best story of any game I've played recently and blows the shitty main plot out of the water

A lot of my criticisms of the game have already been mentioned in the thread

and more, but it's probably been thoroughly analyzed hundreds of time by now. The writing overall was probably the best that we got in years (especially looking at the RPG genre).

Animation quality was insane too. It just boggles my mind. Sure, there are a few cutscenes were motions look kinda janky and characters faze in and out of the screen, but Jesus Christ, comparing it to the likes of Dragon Age Inquisition, the newest Assasins Creed or the current Call of Duty I can't believe what they did. The usual triple A shite doesn't even come close to this level of quality, how much money did they have? Is it just love poured into the product? Is this what a labour of love looks like?

And just to reiterate, holy fuck that Hearts of Stone questline. Beautiful doesn't begin to describe it.

One of my biggest gripes (apart from the lacking gameplay) was the toned down nudity though. You still got tits shoved in your face quite regularly, but these new detailed panties and lingerie just clashed with the overall design. The Witcher 1 just had nymphs walking around completely nude, bush and everything, The Witcher 2 still hinted at it, 3 just put underwear on everyone.

Despicable.

It depends on your tolerance for roughness around the edges and old some unusual design decisions. It is a diamond in the rough, and rhythm based combat seems to be the biggest barrier. It has the best alchemy system and atmosphere out of the three, and it handles choice and consequences far better than the 2nd game.

One of the reasons is that unlike many games, they already had an established world and characters that they just needed to adapt to games.

Other reason is that people writing are not movie industry rejects and they know previous installments and books very well, to the point where characters they write would not seem out of place in books. CDPR doesn't experience as much SJW pressure and infestation as other major studios do.

They did mention they are planning make combat similar to MGR's in early TW3 interviews they did with polygamia.pl and gryonline.pl. Reading up on monsters, medicine, and smithing would let you aim for weak spots on opponents and perform special attacks or slice enemies to pieces.

Well, Ciri was bashful when it came to nudity in the books too. Even at her edgy teen "I am a bandit who gives no fuck" phase, she would not get tattoo on her inner thigh, without getting drunk and having her girlfriend hold her hand. When she was in sauna in the books, sorceresses teased her about being the only one wrapped in towels. Same thing happened at the magic academy.

It's actually worse with book knowledge since they rewrote a fuck ton of stuff to make the quest "epic"

Witcher 3 tbh fam
Velen feels slavic as fuck, moreso than W1. Skellige was Skyrim we never got.

...

(hello satan)

Pretty good criticism. Although I will say that combat can be diverse and epic if you master it, the problem is that the game doesn't force you to do it, even on harder difficulties.
I guess when it comes to rpgs it really depends on your personal preferences. I personally value immersion, atmosphere and side quest quality above all else. And at that, this game delivers very well, soundtrack is top tier as well (i'm probably biased here because i'm slav).
Main story was indeed mediocre though, I was hoping for more shocking twists and Skellige feels rushed.

Also, you can get rich too easily and too fast, in late game I spent money almost solely on gear repair, there should be a hardcore mode similar to fallout 3.

That being said, I would recommend this game to every RPG fan, it's packed with content and expansions are top quality, especially the story in HoS.

The DLC gear and services are such a ridiculous money sink that I have a hard time believing this
Making a single piece of grandmaster gear in particular is an expensive ordeal, thanks to the nearly minecraft mod-tier microcrafting that has you spending just as much cash as you would have by just buying the pieces directly, not to mention the fact that you have to get the mastercrafted version first

That's true, I wasn't talking about stuff being cheap, if you loot everything you see (especially weapons from bandits) and complete a decent amount of treasure hunts -> Skellige is the best for that, you are swimming in gold in no time.
In Blood and Wine I actually crafted all grandmaster gear except for griffin armour, augmented the whole gear I was having equipped with stones and I still had ~32k at the end of the game. You can pretty much afford everything with not much effort imo.
That being said, it's not that big of a problem, better than having to do a grindfest every time you want something good.

(different ID because I was posting from phone earlier)

Really?

I've just started playing the game and am fucking around Velen atm but I never seem to be able to get any cash. Merchants are so fucking jewish that I can only sell products at like…5% the buying price to them.

You can get wealthy later in the main quest or by fishing caches in Skellige.

Usually by midgame you're swimming in more money than you can spend

The biggest beef I had with the grandmaster stuff was that not only is it expensive, but the way drops work in the game, you could find better gear almost immediately after building grandmaster shit

If you do a lot of exploring and side content, you won't have problems with money, just by exploring the White Orchard was enough for me to not have any problems regarding gold when coming to Velen. That being said, don't sell shit that's meant for crafting, you'll get through much cheaper when crafting gear.

pro tip: turn mini map off, it's worth it.

With swords yes, but armour was usually top shit with a few exceptions as much as I can remember.

The big deal with grandmaster stuff is the extra bonuses
Which they still fucked up because the manticore set is easily comparable to the rest while at the same time ten times easier to make, as well as being stylish as fuck and well suited to the blood and wine questline

What is the best grandmaster set? I never bothered with any of the Witcher gear. I would have thought that the Bear armour is best for the free Quen recast.

List of armour and bonuses
archive.is/WkInl

I'm also curious how you guys skilled. I went all in on signs and by the end of the game I was just casting Igni once and watching people burn to death slowly. It felt pretty fucked up. Being able to heal with the active Quen seemed pretty bullshit as well. I would use enemies as a source of healing.

Seeing how the game doesn't really demand from you to specialise in a particular skill tree, I skilled my char with a little bit of everything to make combat more fun.

Combat:
- muscle memory
- precise blows
- arrow deflection
- fleet footed

Signs:
- exploding shield
- active shield
- delusion
- melt armor
- fire stream

Alchemy:
- frenzy
- tolerance
- refreshment

I was using mainly Wolven gear and in Blood and Wine I used mostly Manticore.

This build is in no way optimized, it's just so you can fuck around with everything when in combat.

Whoops, forgot to add 'whirl' and 'griffin school techniques'

I wish alchemy was a bigger deal, those trees are practically worthless with how little you actually do with it

What difficulty did you play on?

This. I still feel only the first game has nailed the alchemy system. Its particularly baffling because sword and weapon buffs get to last for 30 minutes but potions only last 30 seconds.

Yeah they could've done so much more, like discovering your own formulae or some shit like that.
I was mostly disappointed that you can use them in combat like its fucking nothing, if you're stacked with white honey and have refreshment skill + manticore gear, you can literally run around like a crazy junkie and not giving a fuck. Witcher 1 alchemy was best alchemy system.

At first, blood and broken bones in the beginning, when I got used to the combat system, I switched to deathmarch. If you have fleet footed skill to the max, you can handle almost infinite amount of enemies by spamming alt + movement key + getting high with potions + exploding shield.

This is almost always the case.

is death march fun for first playthrough?

You'll probably just hide behind quen all the time and roll around like a retard. I suggest blood and broken bones at first, so you can learn how to dodge, parry and time attacks properly.

The weird thing is that I liked a bit more of the fluff quests than any of the combat quests. Like that one quest where you have to dress up geralt and make him "presentable" to the emperor of nilfgaard, for some reason I really liked that quest. It was just a really fun detail that I don't see at all in RPGs where you meet inlore royalities.

The base game isn't unreasonable on that difficulty (though you still need to git gud), but the DLC can be a fucking nightmare. Fighting the bosses that have healing gimmicks in Hearts of Stone with anything other than a straight melee damage-focused build is infuriating on Death March, at least in NG+.

My biggest issues with the game are the open world design and the gutting of the character system. Former is unfortunate but not a deal-breaker, considering that while it is an open world game and this harms the overall product, it is easily the best open world we've ever seen in modern times. The character system really undermines everything. MMO-style "+1% to something you never do" bonuses everywhere. Alchemy ruined. Random level restrictions placed on every item. It's a total fuckfest of design fail. I don't understand how games that are designed for singleplayer from the start keep doing this. Why do you care about "balance"? Balance is not fun in a singleplayer game you chucklefucks.

Witcher 2 was the best "cinematics and action" game of the series, and the first game was the best "authentic RPG" game of the series. 3 is the result of them pandering to the console audience and $$$ at the expense of their product. It's only going to get worse from here.

Why do people always do this? They've been doing it with the new Zelda as well.

I already turned it off first chance I got. Which probably explains why I'm not full of cash coming out of Whit Orchard but no problem, the game is funner that way.

The real question is why does the grass in Witcher 3 look the same as the shit you paint in NWN2's editor in 2007.

If I finish on second hardest, can I play my new game + on death march?

Man, people claim not to care about graphics and are all about "focus budget and effort on gameplay" and then get hella mad when the graphics aren't as good as the original plan several years before release…..

Hmm.

It's almost like games that are marketed purely on graphical glitz and glamour with no other appealing characteristics are held to a higher standard than more niche titles.

If you promise something, you better deliver.

If you come out from the beginning and state the game is focused on gameplay over graphics, then people will be more forgiving.

I started it up & took a 4K screenshot.
I fail to see what's wrong with the foliage.

Costs change, or magnify. It's impsosible to 100% accurately predict the cost of a huge project at the start. You estimate, and sometimes have leftover budget or not enough and have to decide where your priorities are.

Please tell me I'm not the first person to tell you this.

It's mass-produced speedtree and grass painting tools. Witcher 2 is much, much worse technically, but the overall effect is to approximate nature better because it used small areas with lots of designer attention & tons of bespoke models.

Come on user, don't be such a faggot, you're blowing this "issues" out of proportion. W3 is obviously an overall improvement of both W1 and W2, it has its issues, yes, any game has it, but it's still easily a masterpiece among RPGs and deserves a lot of the praise it is getting.
Not to mention how much content you get for a relatively cheap price. They could sell as much copies with half that content at the same price and it still wouldn't be considered a rip off in comparison to what other companies are doing.

you can still see every point of interest if you open up the world map

I would recommend Immersive HUD mod, it shows the minimap when you activate witcher senses.

Kek, play however you want man, I was just suggesting that you start with broken bones difficulty so you can learn the combat system faster, besides, you can change the difficulty anytime you want in game.

I don't work for CDProjekt so their financial solvency is none of my business. Terrible gameplay and design decisions are not minor issues for me, but that's fine, if you loved the game more power to you, I was just expressing my personal experiences based on having played all their games in the order they came out.

Nice, me too, the only thing that really disappointed me in W3 was its alchemy system.
Never heard of anyone who played previous games to say the whole gameplay in W3 is terrible though. I personally consider W2 the worst of the series, and when they announced W3 I was actually afraid they will fuck it up like W2 lol
it would be great if they'd let you collect romance cards like in W1, shit was enjoyable as fuck

Well, character systems are core to the gameplay in my estimation in an RPG. W2 had a much more satisfying skill tree, and of course the alchemy changes like you mentioned. And item acquisition and how items are handled is another massively important aspect of a game where items are your main reward for a lot of activities. Arbitrarily restricting them to certain levels, levels which are often far, far ahead of when you would be expected to get the item, is an absurd design choice in my opinion.

I liked the fact they managed to create a fairly interesting world despite being an open world game. The writing was good, the art top notch, usual CDPR production values. Those are all pluses, but don't come close to outweighing the minuses for me. Seems like most people who liked it just don't care very much about the gameplay, and are there for the exploration & glitz.

Showing off a playable area 1 year before release and then downgrading it is not being thrown off by costs.

It's simply running a game on hardware that's out of reach of 99.99% of PCs to get bullshots.

Oh shit! I thought you meant turn off the POI on the world map. That's what I did.

The minimap I still have on. It's not that big of a deal but I like the idea of that mod.

Yeah, skill tree was showing better improvement and faster results in W2 because the whole game was much shorter and thus your character progression needed to be faster, not to say that the skill tree in W3 is perfect.
I enjoyed the gameplay, combat system is imo an improvement over W2 combat, and I didn't really care about level restricted items since there was a fuck load of shit that got you rewarded.
W2 was pretty good though, it just broke the immersion of roleplaying as a witcher for me with that bullshit political story and lack of side content, mainly contracts.

I just removed the minimap so I got more immersed in the world after I realised I'm watching the minimap more than at what's actually happening before me. Removing POI is a good idea though, will probably do it if I decide to replay the game in the future.

Toussaint can suck a dick

0/10

Yeah, I remember there being this discussion about the endings to the original game, too.

Basically, every ending except the one where he just continues on as a monster killer is probably not very canon at all. Geralt shacking up is fan fiction.

Exactly, you need to play the game like a witcher, not like a knight who wants to save the world.

Shit, was meant for

The main thing I dislike about games that have these "consequences" is you sometimes have so little control over what is going to happen. Which is fine for third parties–but when obscure choices in the plotline determine what your player-insert main character is going to do in the ending, it's fucking annoying.

Those choices should be explicit, even if it annoys the clever, clever writers.

I mostly didn't have a problem with it in this game, except for when you disagree with Keira and actually kill her in the end while the dialog implies that you're just going to teach her some manners for being a bad girl

I don't mind when the world serves up bitter or unexpected consequences, it's just an inherent and jarring flaw in all these modern "cinematic" games where you play as a character you're supposed to identify with who will inexplicably suddenly make choices you weren't expecting at all, or even, hilariously, say things that were not at all hinted at in the "line" of dialogue you chose.

I quite liked the open world in W3. It let me feel like an actual Witcher doing Witcher shit. You can wander into some shithole village and get a contract for a monster and go kick the shit out of it in exchange for a handful of gold from people who hate you. It was great. I loved it.

Compare it to W1 where each chapter hub had like one big contract monster to kill and then you had to go chase the story. I liked having choices instead of being shoved into a tightly corralled playpen. I also liked that big, bad spooky shit could jump you if you wandered off the beaten track. I ended up fighting a Leshen about 20 levels higher than I was and it was fucking ridiculous. It was also great fun. I wish there were more challenging fights like that.

I just really liked being able to wander off in a random direction and do Witcher shit. Gave me a better feeling of what being on the Path would be like compared to W1 and W2.

You forgot: "If the village is the right level for you."

The silly level requirements and leveled monsters they threw haphazardly around the map means there is a pretty linear path through the game on a certain level. The linear and hub-based approach never bothered me because I understood that a game has to be an abstraction of the books and the setting. That hasn't changed in W3–there are still gamey things like the level zones that mean you cannot truly wander around and take monster contracts as Geralt really would.

I agree, Witcher 1 handled some of these consequences better and was actually the first game and the only franchise (that I know of) in which it felt like your choices really bear weight. Witcher 3 did a great job too though.

Yeah, that's what makes W3 the best of the franchise imo as well.

The thing with multiple endings is that even if it is a completely original story the endless debate on which ending is canon is rather pointless. Even developers usually have to pick a single ending when they want to write a sequel to the disappointment of whoever didn't pick said ending or make the endings or the beginning of the next game ambiguous enough to make the ending the player chose irrelevant, also often leading to disappointment of the fans and continuing the endless debate of which ending is the canon one. Moral of the story, roll with whatever ending you want, that's the point of a game having multiple endings.

From the books perspective, it stays loyal to the books: geralt and ciri see each other in dreams, all old characters well written, and geralt was in character for once. The other games, specially 2, portrayed him as what they call him, a mindless, insensitive mutant when he actually has some wit, sometimes. The whole witcher jobs fit just perfectly on the story

However, why is nilfgaard pushing even further the frontier? Why are the north realms fighting back when they are territorially outnumbered 3 to 1? Why there isn't a single elf unit on the nilfgaardian side? Actually why there's not a single elf on the game, some racial slums or something

Not to mention the most obvious issues: Geralt and company weren't supposed to return to their world, and because its a game, geralt makes all the world's major decisions

About the open world, its been made better than any other open world game yet. I still prefer 2's style, big hubs where you can focus on making it look big, while its not that large, and you can focus on improving every little space on it. But, 3's world is huge, beautiful and filled with stuff as well. Generic bandits/monsters/ruins with treasure, but content nonetheless. Plus some scattered secondary quests and witcher gear

Animations are great, they don't use the same 20 items for the entire world, and the expansions, deserving of the name, are much better than the original campaign. And I'm sure they had a smaller budget than fo4.
So yeah, once you've played at least the previous games to have some knowledge of what's going on, its the best RPG made on the last few years. The books are only for the deepest lore lovers

Anyone else feel like Anrietta has to be majorly bipolar or something? The woman is so fickle and emotional to a point I disliked her as a character even though her subjects keep talking about how just she is.

That ungrateful cunt stepped on my nerves when she started bitching about how I achieved nothing despite finding and bringing back her equally annoying sister.

The books aren't all the way translated into English yet mate.

it matters little, the books go to shit after volume 2 anyway.

There is literally exactly that just outside of Novigrad, did you even play the game?
There definitely aren't a whole lot of elves (as it should be), but there are still a few of them scattered around.

The only reason I got the yennefer ending is because I missed the single seemingly inconsequential dialog choice that fucking triss is based on

And fuck you user getting paid without having to kill things is way better, especially if said thing is a bullshit immortal creature that you can't directly kill and could easily kill you several times over in direct combat

There are fan translations.

The problem with the books is that initially they can't quite decide if the protagonist will be Geralt or Ciri, and once they settle on Ciri they throw everything good and endearing about her to the wind and turn her into a scarfaced turboslut who gets fingered by elves.

Has there ever been an expansion that didn't improve upon the main game? Every expansion pack, especially RTS and RPG expansions, blew the main one out.

Gothic 3 expansions
Blue Shift
Diablo Hellfire
MW Tribunal

there's plenty more for sure, just some prominent examples

That's bullshit. Tribunal is great.

i realy dont have anything to add.

how is gothic not open world though? in gohic 1 you can go basicly anywhere at any time if you manage to survive.
i can kind of see the point in gothic 2, since there is one big area cut off, but thats true for witcher 3 as well and youre still counting it.

That's exactly what I was referring to, though. In a game as long as The Witcher 3, you need to be really careful about telegraphing your endings. If a player gets an ending they didn't expect or didn't want, are they really going to replay through your 100+ hr game? Ultimately it doesn't bother me that much, but it is a structural issue. I mean, look at Age of Decadence. It has a bajillion endings but the game only takes a few hours to play through once you understand it, so that's not that bad.

Also, at the end of the day, I guess I just fucking hate Yennefer. These are games where you are constantly changing Geralt to do shit he would never do in the books. Why can't we just tell Yen to fuck off?

not better than the main game that's for sure.