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The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone Expansion

Nryn

Cipher
Patron
Joined
Jun 15, 2013
Messages
255
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Finished it and liked it on the whole. It's more of the same, but that's by no means a bad thing and it's a no-brainer for those who liked the base game.

I felt the antagonist here was far more menacing than the Wild Hunt despite the Wild Hunt achieving victories against Geralt and his group. Helps that the villain here actually occupies some screen time and remains an enigma. Olgierd's character arc wasn't as much of a gut punch as Bloody Baron's was, but then again, the Baron's story is one of my favorite narrative arcs. Despite this, I was still invested in figuring out Olgierd's backstory. I liked how his seemingly unrelated wishes are all interconnected as part of the overall narrative and help flesh out his character. On the topic of characters, I loved Vlodimir and his antics, including the ridiculous chest puffed out walk animation; the wedding sequence matches the highs found in the main game and it is up there with the Kaer Morhen Witcher drinking sequence. I liked Shani during the wedding sequence, but her character sort of just fades away either side of that sequence. But she plays Gwent and one can win a card off her, so all is forgiven.

Perhaps it was due to rustiness or the patches balancing out the overpowered abilities, but the boss fights were far more challenging this time around. I played on Death March, and the Iris's Greatest Fear boss fight was particularly challenging and required numerous retries. The boss fights have had far more effort put into them in order to differentiate them from one other this time around: the caretaker and the Iris fear fight being notable examples. On the topic of gameplay changes, the runesword mechanic was a disappointment; unless there are some crazy combos I've not thought of, they never felt that useful. They offer some nice quality of life effects, but they hardly change the gameplay mechanics much.

Overall, Hearts of Stone captured the feel of the self-contained Witcher short stories, and that's the best compliment I can give it. It has raised my expectations for Blood and Wine.
 

Carrion

Arcane
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Joined
Jun 30, 2011
Messages
3,648
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Lost in Necropolis
Finished it. It started out as alright, but I ended up loving it. It's a short story that contains a few smaller short stories, all of them well-written and interesting. The series has always been the strongest when it comes to small, personal stories, and it's pretty much perfect for expansions like this. TW3 felt like it went with a bit too high a pace at times when it came to some individual scenes, probably because of the sheer amount of stuff in the game, but this time it feels like they wanted to go that extra mile with all of the scenes to make them really memorable, reaching the level of some of the best scenes from TW1 but going even a bit further in parts. For instance,

I expected the whole Vlodimir quest to be about summoning a ghost and then just drinking or playing Gwent with it or something like that. Instead you got the huge wedding scene which lasted like two hours and continued even after you got the whole Vlodimir business done. You got all that little "unnecessary" stuff at the auction house, the whole painted dream world sequence after what had already been a really cool quest at the manor... Thankfully the Oblivion influence stopped at the "jumping into a painting" part, and it might be my favorite sequence in the expansion overall.

The only part I wasn't a huge fan of was

the heist, which felt a bit underwhelming after all the great build-up, especially with the twist at the end. I had hoped for the Stranger to play some part in the main quest, becoming the third mysterious figure alongside Master Mirror and Olgierd, but the whole thing just fell kind of flat. Didn't particularly like how railroaded the actual heist was either, as even though you went with the subtle safecracker instead of the mentally unstable demolitions expert, you'd still end up with alarms going off and everything going to hell. I also feel a bit more could've been done with Geralt's character in that scene, as he didn't seem to be that much affected by the whole thing. It wasn't particularly bad or anything, pretty much on par with most stuff in TW3, but by that point I was waiting for a bit more.

As for the characters,

I ended up sympathizing with Olgierd, even though he was a bit of an unlikeable prick at times. He didn't seem like he was such a bad guy initially, and you could clearly tell he was unhappy and jaded from the start. Gaunter O'Dimm was cool, and the voice-acting, facial expressions and other mannerisms made him a pretty intimidating character and a worthy antagonist, something that the main game seriously lacked. Shani was kind of underused after the wedding and could've maybe used one or two more scenes, but I have no real complaints about her aside from that.

I also liked that the amount of combat was much lower than in the main game, and they instead focused on fewer fights that were more interesting. There was notably more HP bloat than in the main game, but at least the fights were slightly more interesting this time. None of the fights was particularly hard (the "nightmare" boss took me a couple of tries before I figured out how not to be shit in it, the others I pretty much won on the first try on Death March), but at least it took a bit more than the same usual tactics to beat some of the enemies, which was an improvement. There were some other changes I, too, liked about the game, like toning down the witcher sense stuff a bit (including at least one quest that can be failed), making the points of interest generally much more interesting (there were three or four PoI's that could've easily been made into "real" quests), and only introducing a few new pieces of equipment that were all potentially useful and some even pretty unique.

The whole runewright thing felt a bit tacked-on, though, and I've still to test how any of the enchantments work in practice. I only enchanted the armor from new witcher gear set, except that I never got to use it (started the expansion at level 35 and finished it at level 38 despite doing everything, the level requirement for the gear being 39, wonder if it's a bug). Most of the enchantments just didn't sound all that exciting, and I preferred to fill my swords with critical effect runes rather than any of the enchantments. Oh well, there's always the next expansion.

If Blood and Wine is this good, I'm fine with them churning out expansions into the foreseeable future.
 

Carrion

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jun 30, 2011
Messages
3,648
Location
Lost in Necropolis
Yeah,
Lucifer
is a pretty worthy antagonist.
They did manage to write him in a way that still made him interesting when he made an appearance, though. Writing main villains has never really been CDPR's strength, with supporting characters often stealing the show, but this time they managed to do a good job with it despite dealing with something that has been done multiple times before. Eredin was supposedly a pretty dangerous guy too, but he was also a non-character and had less depth than Vimme Vivaldi.
 

bonescraper

Guest
But it's just another Polish legend adapted to Sapkowski's world. Half of the quests in W3 are slight adaptations of well known potato legends and classic literature, therefore they had most of the work laid out for them. And they can keep on doing that until they run out of source material.
 

Carrion

Arcane
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Joined
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Messages
3,648
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Lost in Necropolis
But it's just another Polish legend adapted to Sapkowski's world. Half of the quests in W3 are slight adaptations of well known potato legends and classic literature, therefore they had most of the work laid out for them. And they can keep on doing that until they run out of source material.
I don't know what the issue is, Sapkowski has been doing that stuff since day one. It's not just Polish or Slavic mythology either unlike many people seem to claim (or maybe Mephistopheles was Polish, what do I know), as aside from classic literature he's also borrowed a lot from Germanic, Norse and Greek mythology and folklore, fairy tales from both Europe and the Middle East, religious texts, modern-day social and political movements, historic events... like pretty much all fantasy literature does to some extent. It doesn't mean that it's easy to do it in a convincing manner, as writers regularly fail in it, especially when it comes to computer games. In the end the story of Hearts of Stone is about Olgierd, with Gaunter O'Dimm being just one part of it. Blood and Wine will probably be about vampires, but it doesn't mean you should dismiss it as a rip-off right away either.
 

bonescraper

Guest
Dude, like i said on page 1...
Seems like the story of this expansion takes a lot of inspirations from the legend of Pan Twardowski.
Now, after finishing it i can say it's the same fucking story, pretty much 1:1 :roll:

Pan_Twardowski_19th_century_woodcut.jpg
 
Last edited by a moderator:

His Majesty

Augur
Patron
Joined
Aug 31, 2013
Messages
199
Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
Finished it. It started out as alright, but I ended up loving it. It's a short story that contains a few smaller short stories, all of them well-written and interesting. The series has always been the strongest when it comes to small, personal stories, and it's pretty much perfect for expansions like this. TW3 felt like it went with a bit too high a pace at times when it came to some individual scenes, probably because of the sheer amount of stuff in the game, but this time it feels like they wanted to go that extra mile with all of the scenes to make them really memorable, reaching the level of some of the best scenes from TW1 but going even a bit further in parts. For instance,

I expected the whole Vlodimir quest to be about summoning a ghost and then just drinking or playing Gwent with it or something like that. Instead you got the huge wedding scene which lasted like two hours and continued even after you got the whole Vlodimir business done. You got all that little "unnecessary" stuff at the auction house, the whole painted dream world sequence after what had already been a really cool quest at the manor... Thankfully the Oblivion influence stopped at the "jumping into a painting" part, and it might be my favorite sequence in the expansion overall.

The only part I wasn't a huge fan of was

the heist, which felt a bit underwhelming after all the great build-up, especially with the twist at the end. I had hoped for the Stranger to play some part in the main quest, becoming the third mysterious figure alongside Master Mirror and Olgierd, but the whole thing just fell kind of flat. Didn't particularly like how railroaded the actual heist was either, as even though you went with the subtle safecracker instead of the mentally unstable demolitions expert, you'd still end up with alarms going off and everything going to hell. I also feel a bit more could've been done with Geralt's character in that scene, as he didn't seem to be that much affected by the whole thing. It wasn't particularly bad or anything, pretty much on par with most stuff in TW3, but by that point I was waiting for a bit more.

As for the characters,

I ended up sympathizing with Olgierd, even though he was a bit of an unlikeable prick at times. He didn't seem like he was such a bad guy initially, and you could clearly tell he was unhappy and jaded from the start. Gaunter O'Dimm was cool, and the voice-acting, facial expressions and other mannerisms made him a pretty intimidating character and a worthy antagonist, something that the main game seriously lacked. Shani was kind of underused after the wedding and could've maybe used one or two more scenes, but I have no real complaints about her aside from that.

I also liked that the amount of combat was much lower than in the main game, and they instead focused on fewer fights that were more interesting. There was notably more HP bloat than in the main game, but at least the fights were slightly more interesting this time. None of the fights was particularly hard (the "nightmare" boss took me a couple of tries before I figured out how not to be shit in it, the others I pretty much won on the first try on Death March), but at least it took a bit more than the same usual tactics to beat some of the enemies, which was an improvement. There were some other changes I, too, liked about the game, like toning down the witcher sense stuff a bit (including at least one quest that can be failed), making the points of interest generally much more interesting (there were three or four PoI's that could've easily been made into "real" quests), and only introducing a few new pieces of equipment that were all potentially useful and some even pretty unique.

The whole runewright thing felt a bit tacked-on, though, and I've still to test how any of the enchantments work in practice. I only enchanted the armor from new witcher gear set, except that I never got to use it (started the expansion at level 35 and finished it at level 38 despite doing everything, the level requirement for the gear being 39, wonder if it's a bug). Most of the enchantments just didn't sound all that exciting, and I preferred to fill my swords with critical effect runes rather than any of the enchantments. Oh well, there's always the next expansion.

If Blood and Wine is this good, I'm fine with them churning out expansions into the foreseeable future.

Pretty much, yeah. Also agreed about the heist, felt a bit out of place and underdeveloped. All in all a great expansion.
 

AetherVagrant

Arbiter
Patron
Joined
Apr 12, 2015
Messages
519
just after i uninstalled it thinking i was done. i think ill wait a year till all the dlc comes out and theres another crpg lull, then pirate the goty edition or whatever they come out with.
 

Tytus

Arcane
Joined
Jul 9, 2011
Messages
3,596
Location
Mazovia
Now, after finishing it i can say it's the same fucking story, pretty much 1:1 :roll:

And this is bad, how?

Witche short stories were all basically Sapkowki's retalling of old fairy tales and legends. This fits in quite nicely with that convention.
 

Wolfe

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 21, 2015
Messages
432
Took my time and wrote a review for this, here's a shameless link to it: http://thegameslashers.blogspot.ro/2015/10/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-hearts-of-stone.html

To sum it all up, CDPR proved with Hearts of Stone that less can be more, delivering a new set of memorable characters involved in a story that is more focused and is filled with sinister, emotional and also joyful moments. The expansion manages to improve on certain aspects of the base game by having a better antagonist, multiple challenging boss fights and overall better quality and diversity of quests. All my complaints feel minor when compared to the experience that Hearts of Stone provides and I can't find a reason not to recommend it, considering the great value you get for such a small price. Naturally, I can't wait to see what CDPR does with the next expansion. Blood and Wine will be set in Toussaint, a duchy already featured in the books that I feel will provide the perfect playground for more witchering. Bring it on!

All feedback is welcome, be in the form of insults/constructive criticism.
 

Puukko

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2015
Messages
3,862
Location
The Khanate
The DLC seemed pretty crash prone to me. Both the Caretaker and Iris' Worst Nightmare bosses crashed on me after I finally beat them. Besides that, I'd say the DLC was very enjoyable. Went with the cash with the next expansion in mind.
 

Tytus

Arcane
Joined
Jul 9, 2011
Messages
3,596
Location
Mazovia
Witcher 3 is crapshow when it comes to crashing on my end. Game crashed every 30-40 minutes and I get this annotation that kernel graphics driver stopped working or shit like that. I tried everything. (Beside reinstalling the system). I changed Nvidia drives, read advice on internet. I disabled Windows Aero or what it's called. I tiknered with Nvidia control panel. I reinstalled the game. I tried to play on variety of graphic settings. I tried to play on a different system account. I tried to play the game with GoG galaxy and Nvidia panel turned off. No luck. Every time I play the game it crashes. And it's the only game that does this. This is fucking unbearable.

I spent almost 400$ on GTX 770 and I can't even use it properly. Fuck.
 

made

Arcane
Joined
Dec 18, 2006
Messages
5,130
Location
Germany
I spent almost 400$ on GTX 770 and I can't even use it properly. Fuck.
That was a common problem with the card when the game came out. Think it was solved with a driver update eventually. I also seem to remember something about the game not playing nice with OCed nvidia cards; might wanna look into that.
 

Gerrard

Arcane
Joined
Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,925
10% off on GOG. Which is the same as buying the expansion pass.
:keepmymoney:

Also they have the fucking steelbook available on cdp.pl again even though they did not when I wanted to order back in May, fuck you
 

Deleted member 7219

Guest
Finished the expansion.

Hated all the characters except for Geralt (obvs), Shani and Gaunter O'Dimm. Letting Gaunter take that guy's soul at the end was so immensely satisfying, I almost masturbated. Man, the way he burned away his body and kept the skull was pretty damn good.

If I was meant to sympathise with the main guy and his brother, the game did a piss poor job of it. I thought they were both excruciatingly annoying, arrogant, boorish and psychotic.

Auction House heist was the best quest of the lot, and I let the main guy live because he seemed like a bro despite him being a bit of a cunt at the end.
 

Paul_cz

Arcane
Joined
Jan 26, 2014
Messages
1,996
next time buy AMD instead. my 7970 is most stable card i ever had.
While I do not dispute this (I had 280X which is 7970 and it was fine), my current GTX 970 was perfectly fine too - not a single crash over the entire HoS.
 

Starwars

Arcane
Joined
Jan 31, 2007
Messages
2,829
Location
Sweden
Just did the wedding scene, felt it was... well, way too fucking long.

As amusing as the setup is, it just doesn't fit in very well. Perhaps it flows better when you play the expansion stand-alone but when doing it in the middle of the campaign (at the appropiate level) it just feels completely out of whack with the rest of the game. Not to mention that there's no dialogue option with Shani to say "hey, I'm kinda together with this other chick y'know? Nope, instead you gotta go through all that flirting bullshit all for nothing.

Not impressed with that bit.
 

Azarkon

Arcane
Joined
Oct 7, 2005
Messages
2,989
I'm pretty pleased with the expansion so far. They've fleshed out most of the maps NE well. The bandit camps aren't so generic that they're dull thanks to the minor quest attached to that particular set of enemies. The only thing I don't care for is the diversity squad. That kind of orientalist portrayal of Middle Easterners went out of style in the 40s. I mean, I like Thief of Baghdad as much as the next Powell/Pressburger fag, but I would have enjoyed CD Projeckt making them out to be awful slavers and thieves just to troll the gaming press.

Frank Miller already did that.

In any case, it ought to be obvious to all now that CD Projeckt is not especially subversive when it comes to political themes. Their potrayal of minorities, women, etc. are quite sympathetic and mainstream in the modern Western sense. They just happen to not pander to the SJW tumblr league that Bioware and a few other companies have fallen prey to, in which anything that could "trigger" any group however slightly has to be censored and denounced.

And yeah, the "Orientals" in this expansion are portrayed quite positively and I'd disagree with even the Ofrier soldiers being dicks.
You just killed their prince, that they swore on their ancestors to bring home safely. Of course they'd be fucking pissed and want to murder you.
One of the speeches made by the runewright early on about the "one God" was especially poignant, and I love how they portray the "Europeans" as the heathens in this game.
 

Carrion

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jun 30, 2011
Messages
3,648
Location
Lost in Necropolis
Just did the wedding scene, felt it was... well, way too fucking long.
The expansion is clearly meant to be played after the main quest, as the premise doesn't make that much sense otherwise. Personally I loved the fact that they went for a slow-paced, at times light-hearted adventure feel with the expansion, putting a ton of effort into individual scenes rather than just making you rush through the plot. Brought me nice TW1 vibes.

Why the level requirement is already at 30 is beyond me, but you won't get overleveled even if you jump into it at 35.
 

Frozen

Arcane
Joined
Jan 1, 2014
Messages
8,303
Middle Easterners part was so bad, it was like some sort of PR "damage control" inception of feeling guilty because there was no blacks&minorities in 12.c Potatoland.
Cliché to the core..."oh look they talk with Arab accents and they are noble and wise people, we love Arabs as do all the other blacks/latinos/homos etc. not present" lol
Its that thing when you try so hard to suck it up to a certain demographics that you portray them in such a stereotypical cartoonish way that it comes out more like an insult and ignorance.
Something that Bioware does on a daily basis but is too stupid to figure out.
Too bad. Zerrikania sounded cool before they put it as "we love Arabs as blacks" stamp.Now I hope they never revisit it.
 

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