The Witcher 3 Pre-Expansion Thread

I really think it's mainly Witcher 2 nekker cave situation all over again except it now applies to group encounters in general. And keep in mind they're level 3-4 as far as I remember and when you start off you're, well, level 1 with starter gear. Human enemies like deserters are level 1-2 and a much fairer match when you start playing because you can survive without instinctively going for 1v1. From my experience, at least.

 

Yeah, they are level 3 and 4. I was just surprised that they annihilated me so quickly, because I remembered drowners being pushovers.

 

Watching this video and read about the other ai short-comings in combat and out of combat I think npc ai is actually the weakest part in the game (second is being a console port) downgrading it A LOT and very disappointing. The ai of a community patched G3 is a lot better than this. I''m actually happy I haven't paid full price for the game. My expectations aren't really high anymore considering the amount of money they invested into the game. Let's see how good or bad it will turn out when I'm finished with the other two.

 

No, it's not hard on Blood or the difficulty a step higher either.

Learn to pattern recognition m8, I know it's tough but it's the fundamental thing differentiating you from an invertebrate, so I think you can manage.

 

I like Worth a Buy content, get a chuckle out of a lot of his videos and he has some pretty good points, i.e. stealing everything from every peasant's house (íf you do it in front of a Nilfgaardian guard you're fucked though) and how scripted the game feels, even though he is trying a little bit too hard complaining about the first big boss scripted fight of the game; he might as well have talked about the well wraith which was a 10x better designed encounter/quest, which can be done out of order by the way, you can still kill the named wraith even if you don't do the full quest.

However, his complaints about the combat and the video itself (he's taking no damage) lead me to believe he's playing on the lower difficulty levels; on hardest, you definitely can't spam roll because enemies dodge and aggressively pursue you and are in your face all the time, plus similar-level enemies take off half your healthbar in one hit. Against pack of enemies, rolling once often means you're dead. So although combat isn't difficult per se, it's not braindead either; he didn't even mention the dodge, which is crucial.

I do agree with complains about the imprecise nature of the controls, and sometimes it really pisses me off because the canned animations are so long and there's no animation cancelling.

There are a lot of flaws with the game, I would never deny them, but I am really liking the good parts; the filler content (basically the open-world shit) is repetitive and quite boring for the most part, but the main quest and actual sidequests (the stuff you get from notice boards) are actually surprisingly good - even the writing.

Legit complaints about the game would be the weak skill tree and incremental bonuses like 2%, 4%. This "balance!" shit really has got to go, devs need to assume that people are going to find broken shit in single-player games regardless, trying to overbalance everything just makes potentially fun aspects of character building really boring.

 

Yeah, p. much. Granted, I've only just arrived in Velen, but so far sidestepping has been a hard counter for, well, everything, don't even need to learn any patterns. I even killed the griffin on first try by just side-stepping like it was Grimrock, and I think it only managed to hit me three or so times during the whole fight (and with quen around, those single hits are not exactly a problem of any kind).

 

"Ride" it, sure.

You wanted to plough the druidess, didn't you.

 

If you're using Quen you might as well be playing on easy.

By the way, you know they put a lot of work into the PC version when the key that is supposed to "Display item stats" when you have a schematic selected in a store window closes said window.

 

I think there are a few enemies (endrega warriors for example) where you have to roll backwards to get out of their rage after slicing them a bit. Everything else is just sidestepping and for large groups of mobs just take care that every mob is always in your face and not sideways or behind you. If the camera perspective were better you would see something behind you but as it is I got killed a few times because I did not notice the peasant behind me. Also annoying are archers which you dont see but which still hit you.

 

There's a few unique enemy types that have some bullshit moves that are harder to avoid, but because of quen it again doesn't matter. That said, there are a few moments in the Ciri questline that are really annoying because she lacks that Quen buffer, so the high damage moves (and poison debuffs) are pretty annoying.

Then again, when "pretty annoying" is the closest I feel to challenged on the hardest difficulty, we've got a problem in the whole other direction.

You'd have a point if the other signs weren't utter shit, but they are. Damage signs never compare to good swords, only Axii is occasionally useful for monsters that have scripted interaction with it like mounted soldiers and alghouls. What else are you going to spend your stamina on?

(Actually, Axii may be the most OP sign in the game at high levels, but you are arguing that's quen, so I shan't go into discussing Domination.)

It's kind of funny they redesigned stamina to prevent sign-spamming, when even if you could spam it Igni is simply not worth using.

 

Playing it myself now. Like the writing for the quests and characters - eg, bloody baron. But yeah, I hate how nerfed the potions have become since witcher 1. Combat is ok at times, but boring at others and the constant pirouettes can be ridiculous. Like most action RPGs, I just set the difficulty to minimum so I can get it over with and move on to the story. Camera pisses me off. I really want to zoom out or zoom in to first person sometimes, but I cant.

Good game on the whole though. Lots of C&C - tho a lot of biowarfake style fake choices too - If this had come out in 2000, you'd all be crapping yourselves with delight. As it stands, there are too many jaded, bitter old sods and far too many wannabes who want to score some kool kredits.

12/10 goty

 

He's an elf what do you expect. Elves are like Swedish people

 

Random depressing thought: are all AAA games from now on going to be "open world games" that crib from Ubisoft Game Formula? It really seems like it. It's hard to think of a big-budget game in the last year or in development that isn't being shaped into this new hybrid genre. I never thought I'd miss the old linear, cinematic railroad track games of yore, but they are starting to look pretty appealing compared to open world games festooned with pointless things to do that have a linear cinematic railroad track main quest shoved into areas that are ugly and not very designed because they had to make a big world.

Comparing Witcher 3 to Witcher 2 doesn't give me much hope for the future. 2 wasn't remarkable at the time but I came to see its merits, and 3 is even worse in pretty much every regard.

 

At least this one don't have "tower mechanics"

 

Finally some REAL Professional Review done by Professionals.

 

Only amusing part was the Bojack Horseman reference.

 

I see where you're coming from but when all is said and done I think you're wrong. W3 is definitely NOT just a strong W2 main plot with a load of pointless side quests sprinkled around a bland world. That would be DAI. Minus the strong main plot.

Are there some side activities that won't exactly blow your mind with their depth, complexity and reactivity? Sure. But they're not overdone and they do serve a purpose - they're small pieces of lore and atmosphere enriching the bigger picture. If you wanna play this game MMO style, running numbly form quest giver to quest giver and mechanically checking the boxes noone can stop you but W3 is the one game I don't recommend it. This one is entirely about immershun. It's one of those extremelly rare game worlds interesting and mature enough to be worth larping in.

Oh and to one of your earlier points about difficulty - playing on the hardest diff is NOT easy. You made it sound like you can just lightly sidestep everything, swing your little sword a few times and boom, even the hardest bosses fall like pins in the bowling alley. It's quite possible you're a twitch combat god and just breeze through this game towards a flawless victory. Fine. But for vast majority of non-casual gamers, including me, a lot of battles on the Death March diff are pretty hectic, especially higher level mobs. Just fought a Water Hag 9 levels higher than me and it was pretty fucking exhilarating. Beat her after 5 attempts. And even a nest of neckers can molest you if you're not careful.

 

I dont see a black cock anywhere in that picture.

 

I've seen pretty much all of those. The door in the fort was a facepalm moment.
They didn't find any things floating in mid-air.

 

I'm not actually criticizing W3's sidequests, that was more of a generalized criticism of open world games. Witcher 3 is the best possible version of the open world formula we've seen. It's just really obvious to me comparing the best areas from Witcher 2 to the best from 3, Witcher 2 just seems to have a lot more "wow" factor going on, and that's the only merit you really expect from AAA games, the open world formula seems to cannibalize what I enjoy about the big budget games.

I guess I side with Erik Kain's article on Witcher 3. It's a good game and does the open world formula better than most such games, but the things the format demands be sacrificed on the altar of production isn't worth it in my book. Just compare Flotsam's forest to any forest in 3, and you see what is lost in order to be able to run 1,000 meters in any direction.

I wish the AAA market was less me-too, I guess, nothing wrong with there being one developer doing the niche, but it seems like every big singleplayer developer is trending towards the exact same game. Maybe that's the future of big games, no genre distinctions, just The Game: Insert Year.

 

So I've been playing this game nonstop due to the promise of it being a "100+ hour" game that's "3.5 times bigger than Skyrim". I'm close to the last part of the game. I've done almost all sidequests (I skipped some quests I outleveled by 20 levels or so), collected a ton of Gwent cards, done some treasure hunting. I'm about 40 hours in. Unless I'm missing something, there seems to be a *severe* lack of endgame content - I've only found two contracts and one quest that were meant for characters level 30 and above, and they were all short and not particularly challenging.

From what I've seen Witcher 3 is at best a 60 hour game. If you are a super completionist and do all the treasure hunts, *maybe* you can find 100 hours in it, but 40 hours will be spent on bland and unrewarding (from a gameplay objective/challenge point of view) treasure hunts that have no point since you did everything else, or doing quests far far below your character's level.

Now even if I'm right about the overall length and didn't miss any content I'm not writing this to say "Witcher 3 is shite!" or "CD Projekt RED" are lying dicks; I think this game is one of the best RPGs to come out in a long time. There is almost no filler content, the game's is *gorgeous* and makes you want to explore it, some of the monster designs are really cool, and there's a lot of good ol C&C elements. Even the combat is not too awful once you get the hang of it. But from what I've seen it's hardly a 100 hour game, and the lack of endgame content is fairly disappointing given how quickly your character outlevels everything else just by doing sidequests.

Now I might very well be wrong - I haven't finished the main quest yet (though I am close, and though it's basically the only thing I haven't finished AFAIK), so take this post with a grain of salt. It just seems like there is a huge lack of endgame content and it's a big shame.

Also, if someone finds any more level 30+ quests I'd be thrilled to know about them.

 

They're dotted around, but I agree overall. Not as far as you into it, but I've been wasting a lot of time on pointless stuff and it still seems like it isn't going to touch the hours I put into DA:I. Of course, DA:I was a loathsome experience, so Witcher 3 easily wins in the enjoyable department.

 

I was going to mention DA:I as an example of an actual 100 hour game, thank you. Witcher 3 absolutely trumps DA:I in most respects, but I wish they didn't market it as this colossal open world RPG where really, map size aside, it has about as much actual content as Skyrim does.

 

I remember spending way more hours on a single playthrough of Skyrim, but it's pretty hard to compare the two, they feel like very different sorts of games.