Started playing Witcher 3... obviously I now need 200 mods to make it less popamole, more RPG.

[Kitchen Utensil]

That hit hard.
I don't care what shit declined games you waste your time with.

 

[fantadomat]

It's a great game [...]

lol

It's a complete shit game. A million swords, which all look and handle the same (but one is a steel and the other a silver sword! And they have different stats, and some have different handles! Wow, ingenious!), completely retarded "skill tree", witcher-sense bullshit you have to follow around every other quest, terrible movement on foot as well as on horse, trash loot everywhere, a handful of copy-pasted enemy types all over a map cluttered with a million copy-pasted, utterly irrelevant and uninteresting POIs, and a mediocre story. Even if you like the story, it doesn't make the game part any less retarded.

I don't even want to think about what could have been had they put all the work that went into that huge empty world and hours and hours of cutscenes into compelling systems and gameplay instead.

Find yourself some taste.

 

[AwesomeButton]

That hit hard.

I've got something that can hit you hard, but it's for the ladies only.

 

[fantadomat]

That hit hard.

I've got something that can hit you hard, but it's for the ladies only.

:russiastronk:

 

[ilitarist]

I can vouch for this mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/2788

It's compiled by a senior gameplay designer for The Witcher 3.

Have fun playing the game, it's amazing

This is the mod you should use.

The problem with other mods is the usual kitchensink mentality. Here dev just tweaks some things for a more balanced experience not trying to reinvent the game. He removes stupid buff to overleveled enemies (vanilla game makes it so that enemies that are much higher level than you get additional inexplicable armor for some reason) and makes some skills more useful. Doesn't try to give you a real complex game where you have to use every system available; just gives you a less irritating padding around the story.

Also some quality of life mods would be OK. Like automatic use of oils: those things are infinite so there's no reason not to use them, just saves you couple of clicks every 3 minutes.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I've always subscribed to the same view, that a mod should be small in size and in number of changes. I'd still not give up any one of the mods on my list though Even if it cost me some time configuring them.

 

[aweigh]

Yeah, I'm playing with

Ghost Mode
Whetstone/Workbench Ease
Super Lighting Mod (honestly I can't even tell the difference)
a durability mod that sets item degradation two 0.5x (they degrade half as fast)
HD Reworked Textures (800mb set)
No more Stair Rolling
No Toxicity Screen FX
Rend/Whirl enabled from the start mod (however they are half as effective until I put points into them, then they increase to vanilla values)

Ghost Mode settings are all default, except I removed Quest Levels.

EDIT: As far as my playthrough goes I've finished killing the moonwraith at the well, I found some dude's brother's shield, I found some guarded treasure and finally hit level 2. Been putting my ability points into making strong attacks better and increasing HP.

I have a sinking feeling those Strong Attack points were a waste though, as I'm finding myself rarely using them.

 

[aweigh]

reshade only using Lumasharper (default values), and Levels shader tweaked for slightly darker blacks. Originally I was using like 10 shaders but my fps got rekt so I concentrated only on the things I most want: sharpening and color levels.

 

[Shadenuat]

Play as pure alchemist, it's at least fun larping an actual witcher with all of them oils and potions and shit. And it's fun to turn yourself in the endgame and last DLC into monstrous mutant machine with seventy seven potion effects stacking on top of each other. At least it creates an illusion of character building and you achieve something.

Treat most of the gameplay as window dressing. It's a storyfag game. Very little exceptions, even on hardest difficulty.

 

[PulsatingBrain]

It's a storyfag game. Very little exceptions, even on hardest difficulty.

Come on now. On Death March difficulty it's very easy to find yourself getting skullfucked by crowds of enemies a few levels higher than yourself. If you're careful about it, the game can be fairly simple, but you can find challenges all over the map if you want to

 

[AwesomeButton]

It's a storyfag game. Very little exceptions, even on hardest difficulty.

Come on now. On Death March difficulty it's very easy to find yourself getting skullfucked by crowds of enemies a few levels higher than yourself. If you're careful about it, the game can be fairly simple, but you can find challenges all over the map if you want to

True, but the challenge comes only from upscaled damage and downscaled health, theirs and yours respectively. IMO higher difficulties just made the game more frustrating, not more challenging.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I have a sinking feeling those Strong Attack points were a waste though, as I'm finding myself rarely using them.

Ghost mode actually makes them important vs armored enemies as far as I recall.

 

[PulsatingBrain]

more frustrating, not more challenging

Having to land more hits and take fewer isn't an interesting way to increase challenge, but it does increase the challenge regardless. I do agree that it is kind of needlessly frustrating at times on Death March. I thought the next one down from that was a nice balance. Blood and Broken Bones I think it was called

 

[ilitarist]

True, but the challenge comes only from upscaled damage and downscaled health, theirs and yours respectively. IMO higher difficulties just made the game more frustrating, not more challenging.

And it quickly fades. By the mid game it's hard to notice what difficulty it is as long as it's higher than autoregeneration one.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I'm looking for a good way to describe it -- it's like you have to repeat the same or nearly the same sequence of actions more times, and one or two failiures to react to an attack will kill you, whereas you have to land more attacks of your own. Given that both defending and attacking are done in the same way - same animations as on lower difficulties - it's not the right kind of "more challenging" for me.

 

[PulsatingBrain]

I agree. It's an issue with difficulty in almost every game with difficulty options. There's nothing particularly interesting about the numbers just shifting around when you change the difficulty setting.

It is more challenging though, just in a rather uninspired and often frustrating way

 

[aweigh]

I spent like two hours making a custom controller layout for Witcher 3. This ini file will make:

RightBumper/R1 = Sprint
RightThumbstickButton = Quick Item Use

And the real showstopper, I went and looked at some of the scripts made for "Instant Sign Casting" and I managed to make a layout that doesn't need a 3rd-party mapping program by abusing the D-Pad's holding functions (which they coded in a patch):

If you press once:

Left D-Pad=Quen
Up=Igni
Right=Telekinesis one
Down=Trap one
LeftThumbButton=Mind Control one

If you keep D-Pad held down:

Up (held down) = Consume whatever is in there
Down (held down) = consume food/potion
Left (held) = Steel Swd
Right (held) = Silver Swd

Targeting is now:

RightBumper/R1= Enemy Target Lock-on.
Reading a scroll, tracking a quest pop-up notice are also = RightBumper/R1.

Essentially I switched the functionality of Rightbumper/R1 with RightThumbstickButton, and additionally moved Sprinting over to RightBumper/R1, lastly Sign Selection is mapped to the D-Pad and the mind control sign to the LeftThumbstick.

FILE: https://www.dropbox.com/s/n6fn522g8cfdd79/input.zip?dl=0

Unzip that into your Documents\The Witcher 3 folder and replace the existing input.ini with the modified one.

 

[aweigh]

Sadly calling the horse (double-pressing LeftThumbButton) will switch you to the SIGN that I mapped there, but considering the huge advantage of instant-sign switching I think that's fair enough.

With that layout you can run and look around simultaenously, instantly switch to a sign without bringing up a menu. I played around with using a Dark Souls layout of having attacks on the right bumper/trigger but I didn't feel it, I guess I got too accostumed to having atks on face buttons from playing Nier Automata and stuff.

EDIT: Oh, also holding down START brings up Map instantly.

 

[aweigh]

Which one looks better?

or this one:

 

[Ninjerk]

I tend to err on the side of contrast.

 

[Quillon]

Looks very similar but the middle one is better by far!

 

[Doktor Best]

Depends a bit on the lighting-context of the scene but i prefer the first one

 

[AwesomeButton]

In this scene, I'd say the second looks better, but it can vary a lot with this game.

BTW, after hundreds of hours with M&Kb, I tried controller for a while, but couldn't get used to it

 

[aweigh]

I ended up deleting the ReShade and the Turbo Lighting mod, as I just kept fiddling with them and after I realized I'd just spent 1+ hour tweaking a shader I said fuck this. I may add ReShade sharpening again, but just leave it at that. AdaptiveSharpen shader is god-like.

 

[ilitarist]

Don't mess with all of those graphic mods, the base game is fine and has good natural looking lightning.

Few games benefit from that crap in my opinion, maybe something like Skyrim works better when there's less ambient lighting in dungeons and light sources are stronger, but even those things are moded by changing game values instead of adding additional shading and postprocessing.