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So, which one is your favourite Witcher game?

Which Witcher does Witchering the Best?

  • Witcher 1 (the NWN mod)

    Votes: 149 45.8%
  • Witcher 2 (the cutscene simulator)

    Votes: 20 6.2%
  • Witcher 3 (the downgraded port)

    Votes: 126 38.8%
  • KC (Skyrim)

    Votes: 30 9.2%

  • Total voters
    325

Paul_cz

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I like Witcher 2 more than Witcher 1, because it has significantly better writing, it feels like proper sequel to books and not half-fanfiction like TW1 did.
But Witcher 3 takes the cake since it combines very enjoyable exploration with high quality writing and does it at a scale not seen before. The amount of enjoyable quests is just astounding to me, considering its mere 3.5 years of development.
 

KazikluBey

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BTW: I reinstalled TW2 to try and make a FULL Iorveth playtrough. I only finished that game with Roche, because my hatred for Iorveth prevented me from playing the game
after getting to Aedirn and realizing that Iorveth is fucking friendzoned by Saskia, a fucking human peasant girl, no less. So much for his "elven pride!" bullshit
Hah, sounds like you should finish that Iorveth path...
 

Vibalist

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Iorveth is fighting for freedom. I find that very easy to sympathize with. That he's a bastard comes with the territory.

The Scoia'tael vs. humans conflict in Witcher's universe always seemed very clear cut to me. Of course the elves and dwarves are in the right, hence Iorveth over Roche.
 

Deleted member 7219

Guest
Iorveth is fighting for freedom. I find that very easy to sympathize with. That he's a bastard comes with the territory.

The Scoia'tael vs. humans conflict in Witcher's universe always seemed very clear cut to me. Of course the elves and dwarves are in the right, hence Iorveth over Roche.

Fighting for freedom by killing people? How's that working for the Scoia'tael?

I only met one group of them in Witcher 3 and they attacked me because I refused to hand my weapons over to them. A similar thing happened in Witcher 1 and I had to run from them in order to stay neutral. They are batshit insane.

A more realistic goal would be to move out of the north and settle somewhere else.
 

Vibalist

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Fighting for freedom by killing people?

Well... Yes?

How's that working for the Scoia'tael?

Poorly, but that isn't really anything that indicates that they're in the wrong morally.

I only met one group of them in Witcher 3 and they attacked me because I refused to hand my weapons over to them. A similar thing happened in Witcher 1 and I had to run from them in order to stay neutral. They are batshit insane.

No, just fighting back against their oppressors.

A more realistic goal would be to move out of the north and settle somewhere else.

I'm pretty sure no one would ever do that if someone else took their land.
 

Carrion

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The Scoia'tael vs. humans conflict in Witcher's universe always seemed very clear cut to me. Of course the elves and dwarves are in the right, hence Iorveth over Roche.
The original Scoia'tael were puppets of Nilfgaard, many of them are deluded or just plain hypocrites who like to slaughter human peasants simply because they're too proud to even consider the thought of living side by side with them, and even many elves and dwarves oppose them (although some just pretend to). To say that they're fighting for freedom and are morally in the right is a really gross simplification, as elves are guilty of almost everything that they blame humans for, except that they happened to be on the losing side in conflicts that happened ages ago. Even in TW2 it's mentioned that Iorveth is one of the few half-decent Scoia'tael guys left who still follow some kind of an ideal instead of being in it just for some misguided revenge. There's also stuff like the legend of Lara Dorren and Cragen of Lod, which supposedly tells how the hostility between the elves and humans started — and of course both the elves and the humans have a different version of the story that absolves them of all the blame.
 

Deleted member 7219

Guest
Well... Yes?



Poorly, but that isn't really anything that indicates that they're in the wrong morally.



No, just fighting back against their oppressors.



I'm pretty sure no one would ever do that if someone else took their land.

Witchers are well known oppressors of elves and dwarves. My point about them being batshit insane has been well and truly refuted.
 
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Ludo Lense

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Witcher 1 has by far the most "soul" out of the whole franchise and from a development perspective it is a miracle it got released. Also the Alchemy system is a real highlight.

Witcher 2 starts out alright but it holds the players hand much too much. Also you can see how they ran out of money by the end (Understandable since they almost tanked by trying to make a Witcher 1 console port). Also the mishmash of concepts that they tried to stitch together into an action combat system is mediocre at best and boring at worst.

Witcher 3 is basically a formulaic modern open world game, if it was released by the Ubisoft I wouldn't be surprised. Its merit lies with the production values and presentation. From any other perspective (quest design, itemization, combat etc.) it is either mediocre or subpar. It seems CDprojekt Red was trying to create gameplay that was digestible for a 100 hour adventure rather than rewarding.
 

Jools

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BTW, I finally made my mind up.

W1 remains the all-round best of the lot. The atmosphere, the story, the writing are just unmatched. And it's merely a bloody NWN mod. It also greatly benefits from being the first in the series. It is one game whose ending was not disappointing, for once.

W2 was a half-assed attempt at making, I dunno, something. It's a railroaded ride with one fork (Iorveth/Roche) and a very meh unwinding/ending bit. Its last act is, simply, a joke. After letting the player "smell" grand things, namely act 1 (Flotsam and surroundings: great world building, great atmosphere, great quests, characters, etc), it takes it all away and kicks the player forward, yard after yard, until that sorry excuse for and ending. It starts giving off some "Gothic 2" vibes but ends up just being Dragon's Lair with secks.

W3 starts off in a way not dissimalr from W2's. There is a lot of good stuff to be enjoyed during the first part of the game (Velen/Bloody Baron), both in terms of world, atmosphere, quests and writing. Novigrad is a mapping achievement, I wish every single RPG out there features a city so well rendered and crafted, and yet vastly underplayed. To be honest they could have easily set the whole game in Novigrad, and I wouldn't have grown tired of it. I was initially hopeful that it'd turn out to be like Vizima in W1, but was soon disappointed. As someone mentioned, all that happens in Novigrad is a wild goose's chase that's more functional to showcasing the city than it is to the plot advancement. Skellige brings some atmosphere back, but it doesn't feature as much content as Velen did, and is way more dispersive. There is a bit of a step back once the player reaches Skellige, and the game (meaning the story) seems to lose steam/drive. And yet overall it delivers a fairly enjoyable gaming experience, players are sort of free to take their own pace and pursue their own paths (contracts? crafting? helping every single lost kitten in the countryside? becoming a travelling Gwent champion? doing a mix of it all? just doing main quests and enjoying the sights?), the writing is quite good and the quests aplenty.

So, yeah, W1>W3>Skyrim>W2. :smug:
 

Eyestabber

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Guys, I'm doing a W1 run for my Witcher Saga Full Playtrough and I gotta say: though the mechanics are undeniably "more RPG-esque", you guys seem to be forgetting the infuriating amount of back and forth that W1 had. Outskirts are CRIMINAL in that regard. And the FEDEX quests. Deliver a letter to Vivaldi -> deliver his response. You can't get any more "delivery boy" than that. And the piss-poor balance of Aard instakills. And the 14 y/o view of sex/relationships. AND the unkillable bounty hunter that spawns if you murder guards for teh lulz. AND, never forget the fact that your final boss is basically Fantasy Al Gore. W1 is about climate change, and that's not even a joke. Don't get me wrong, I love W1, but you people are clearly being nostalgic in your comparisons.

If you think I'm exaggerating, then that's simply because "your mother sucks dwarf cock", lel.
 

Jools

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Guys, I'm doing a W1 run for my Witcher Saga Full Playtrough and I gotta say: though the mechanics are undeniably "more RPG-esque", you guys seem to be forgetting the infuriating amount of back and forth that W1 had. Outskirts are CRIMINAL in that regard. And the FEDEX quests. Deliver a letter to Vivaldi -> deliver his response. You can't get any more "delivery boy" than that. And the piss-poor balance of Aard instakills. And the 14 y/o view of sex/relationships. AND the unkillable bounty hunter that spawns if you murder guards for teh lulz. AND, never forget the fact that your final boss is basically Fantasy Al Gore. W1 is about climate change, and that's not even a joke. Don't get me wrong, I love W1, but you people are clearly being nostalgic in your comparisons.

If you think I'm exaggerating, then that's simply because "your mother sucks dwarf cock", lel.

You're right, all of it. But the game's still better than the 17 hours-long cutscene that is TW2 and than the 100-hours purposeless openworld that is TW3. Both sequels also feature many of the same flaws the original game did, to different degrees (fedex quests, skill balance, relationships), and they don't even have the excuse of being first in the series. The final boss in TW2 is both uninteresting in character and un-engrossing in design, and the same is true about TW3's ending sequence too: after the KM showdown, the game just drifts off like a piece of wood in the sea, eventually casually landing to a final point (which is, if we ignore the overly-epic-wannabe DA:O-esque pew pew shit that leads to it, also quite underwhelming).

Thus the preference for TW1, which at least has had the benefit of novelty and from being developed in fairly dire conditions.
 

Eyestabber

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Okay, I will re-read your post after I finish TW3. I avoided reading your arguments on TW3 because they seemed spoilery. I abandoned my TW3 playtrough in favor of a trilogy playtrough (played until the start of the Dandelion-Ciri arc in Novigrad). That way I can FULLY enjoy the story, have a fresh memory to evaluate all three games AND wait for more TW3 patches/mods/expansions.

I sincerely believe TW3 has the potential to be one of THE BEST RPGs of all time, if ONLY they were to fix a couple of nuisances, a modder should fix the combat and shitty MMO-like level scaling and the ending doesn't suck that much. I'm laying all my chips on the fact that TW3 is BOUND to have a strong modder community and if modders managed to improve a bland boring crap like Skyrim, imagine what would happen if talented modders started working on TW3. So I'm holding out a little on finishing TW3, fuck, I might even restart it, since I'm going for a trilogy sign-based Geralt. Currently having fun Aard-instakilling stuff in TW1 (and noticing that random animations were part of the series SINCE THE VERY BEGGINING!!! :argh::argh::argh:).
 
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Ludo Lense

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Guys, I'm doing a W1 run for my Witcher Saga Full Playtrough and I gotta say: though the mechanics are undeniably "more RPG-esque", you guys seem to be forgetting the infuriating amount of back and forth that W1 had. Outskirts are CRIMINAL in that regard. And the FEDEX quests. Deliver a letter to Vivaldi -> deliver his response. You can't get any more "delivery boy" than that. And the piss-poor balance of Aard instakills. And the 14 y/o view of sex/relationships. AND the unkillable bounty hunter that spawns if you murder guards for teh lulz. AND, never forget the fact that your final boss is basically Fantasy Al Gore. W1 is about climate change, and that's not even a joke. Don't get me wrong, I love W1, but you people are clearly being nostalgic in your comparisons.

If you think I'm exaggerating, then that's simply because "your mother sucks dwarf cock", lel.

-Jacques seems far more interesting than either Letho or Eredin, I mean he has personality and isn't a Disney chaotic evil idiot. I fail to see how he is Al Gore really, the white frost isn't man made, it is an inevitable phenomenon , the story is more about surviving the apocalypse than preventing it.
-While I do agree that there are too many FEDEX quest they are usually as a way of delivering background narrative (Yaevin's letter to Vivaldi becomes much more relevant in the context of the bank robbery).
-Sign builds are broken in all 3 games really, shame.
-At least witcher 1 allows guard killing before summoning the bounty hunter. In witcher 3 they have severe overleveling resulting in level 45+ guards in cities which are insanely tedious to kill and super gamey.
-Yeah, the sex bits are always stupid. In all games really.
 

Starwars

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Is anyone else here of a really split opinion on basically all of the games? I mean, I've basically enjoyed all of them (currently going through Witcher 3) but it is almost solely due to rather vague stuff like "atmosphere". I guess I also like some parts of the stories and choices, but if I strip the games down and focus on each component it's like... no, these games fucking suck.
They're pretty much the textbook definition of "more than the sum of its parts" for me.

While I'm only in Novigrad in W3 so far, running around doing the main quest there, I think W1 is my favorite. It's really rough, the translation is pretty shitty, gameplay is kinda terrible (but with some awesome aspects like the alchemy system and reading up on monsters)... But yeah, it just has a certain something. Again, the atmosphere is fucking spectacular. Vizima is still king of 3d cities in RPGs, what a great location that is. Both the slums and the more rich parts. Fantastic.
W2 was enjoyable and it was nice to see the improvements to the translation, and the politics stuff was nice. But I think they also lost a lot of that rather unique "folklore" feel that W1 had, and that made it so memorable.
I'm quite enjoying W3 so far, it's a spectacular world to just walk around and hitchhike in. Yet, I don't think the "big open world" adds anything to the gameplay. In fact I rather think it fucks up the feel of leveling and introduces an uncomfortable MMORPG feel to the game. I mean, it succeeds to be enjoyable because of the visuals and (again) atmosphere, but yeah... Would've much rather have seen smaller areas if it had allowed for better and more dynamic quests and such. There is a lot of fat that could be cut I think in this game.
 

Beastro

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Iorveth is fighting for freedom. I find that very easy to sympathize with. That he's a bastard comes with the territory.

The Scoia'tael vs. humans conflict in Witcher's universe always seemed very clear cut to me. Of course the elves and dwarves are in the right, hence Iorveth over Roche.

Yeah, sorry, a side that harkens back to an idealized past where everything was A-OK untill scummy Mankind came into it and ruined everything, that they pile all their blame on is the not the side that's going to get my sympathy.

Wither's Elves are like Tolkien's only without their aged world wiriness and sad acknowledgement that their time has passed and it's now Man's world, not theirs. While Tolkien's had some other place to faff off to, the Witcher's Elves have to get used to living a different world, but instead that faction decides to go off causing trouble for a cobbled bunch of reasons that make them come off having Communist Revolutionary, Nazi and Islamist tendencies.

That and I'm fucking tired of Mankind being the bad guy in fiction like Fantasy, the Witcher all the more so when their history essentially begins by them being dumped on the shores of the world the stories are set in with no way of getting back to where they came from. It forced them and everyone else into a zero sum game of dominance and they won.

I'm pretty sure no one would ever do that if someone else took their land.

Then you don't know much about history, like the Barbarian migrations being them fleeing conquest by the Huns or the past 200 years of Circassian history and where most of them live now, or, I dunno, all the "insert ethnic group here" Diaspora's throughout history.

. AND, never forget the fact that your final boss is basically Fantasy Al Gore. W1 is about climate change, and that's not even a joke. Don't get me wrong, I love W1, but you people are clearly being nostalgic in your comparisons.

That's a very exaggerated take on the ending. The danger the enemy foresaw was 10,000 years off and was essentially just the coming of an Ice Age, something we can all agree comes and goes through history, not something like Gore pushes where we have to de-industrialize NOW to prevent the end of the world in 50 years.

One could even get introspective and imagine the first games plot revolving around what it might be like for fantasy people to face the idea of something we all know like an Ice Age, where we understand them and that they're natural, while he goes nuts and starts using magic and other fantastic bullshit to try to prepare for it.

And I wouldn't call him the real antagonist of the first game, the events you're directly facing are a fabric for the deeper conflict to work on, namely Geralt's return to life and the Wild Hunt's involvement behind it, especially their King's opinion on what Geralt's purpose in life is and it's impact on his Witcher ethics.
 
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IHaveHugeNick

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How can you not even mention that game has the most fucked up leveling structure ever made in history of human race?

There's no way not to completely overlevel the main plot in this game, while being barely half into the game. Even if you strictly follow the intended llevels for locations, by the time you go to Skelige the main plot has 11-12 quests ,while you're 16. Combine that with level being the most important stat, and MMO-style mobs with levels, and the whole thing becomes a movie. The entire second half of the game combat becomes so trivial, I could press attack with my left foot toe, while juggling medieval axes that are on fire, and I would still smoothly win most of the fights.

They really shot themselves in the foot having completely open-world with no level scaling of any sort. They should've story-block the access to Skelige and Nowigrad and upsacle the everything once upon entry, based on your level.

And don't get me started about itemization, either. Why have hundreds of items, when the only things worth using are witcher-sets?

I like Witcher 3 overall, but the whole thing is carried by superior world-building and decent writing, and the rest of it is painfully average.
 

Storyfag

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TW1 > TW3 > TW2, with the difference between TW1 and TW3 being minimal, and both outpacing TW2 by a significant margin. But all three games are unique gems.

Guys, I'm doing a W1 run for my Witcher Saga Full Playtrough and I gotta say: though the mechanics are undeniably "more RPG-esque", you guys seem to be forgetting the infuriating amount of back and forth that W1 had. Outskirts are CRIMINAL in that regard. And the FEDEX quests. Deliver a letter to Vivaldi -> deliver his response. You can't get any more "delivery boy" than that.

Ever thought that the purpose of these quests might be... giving you an opportunity to read those letters? :smug:
 

Eyestabber

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I read. Yaevin -> bla bla bla, we need your gold for our CAUSE. Vivaldi -> lel, I don't have any more gold and I wouldn't give to you even if I had, lel. Not much to see, tbh...
 
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Excidium II

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3 > 1 > 2

Things 1 does better:
Sex
Alchemy
Learning about monsters

Things 3 does better:
Itemization
Writing
Combat
Character Development
General technical stuff (grafics, etc)

Things 2 does better:
Branching content (Iorverth/Roche paths)
 
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Lhynn

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Just started playing witcher 1, but i already feel it may be the best of the 3, in terms of gameplay at least.
 

Lhynn

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Just started playing witcher 1, but i already feel it may be the best of the 3, in terms of gameplay at least.
How so?
For one i dont want to murder geralt every time i fall off a place (mostly becae it doesnt happen, and even if it did, i have better control over his movement. And i feel that if the game had collision damage my character would have died thousands of times after smacking his head against a wall or a piece of furniture in W3. The character system is a lot better in the first one, the entire thing simply feels less tacked on and has an impact on things other than combat.

Also the open world with no emergent gameplay in witcher 3 is fucking pointless, the itemization makes exploration usually utter shit and you never really have to struggle for money.
I do like alchemy better in witcher 3, but all the shit materials and ingredients you had to carry around that were completely useless also left a bad taste in my mouth. By the end of the game i had over 1000+ items in my backpack, "just in case".
Also bloody lvl 45 guards? the fuck? why arent they saving this shitty world? they can probably oneshot most creatures in the game.

If this game didnt have such superb characterization and writing in general i swear to god...
 

Zed

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Wtitcher 3 is the only game that does anything for me. Pretty shitty combat but it's the only game in the series that has kept me interested enough to finish it.
 

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