5 years after release codex GOTY The Witcher 3 breaks its all times user peak.

[Old Hans]

You could kill a granny in TW1. Imagine that now.

the drunk geralt scene with granny is the best

granny: YOU'RE DRUNK!

Geralt: not truuuuuuueee

 

[Stavrophore]

So Andrzej Sapkowski made this Netflix deal to prove that his books are actually better and yet people still buy the game, that has to make him happy.

Books are going pretty strong in Poland too

Seems like they are also going pretty strong on amazon.

 

[Machocruz]

Disagree Witcher 3 still feels like a polish game and there is shit ton of references that only a polish person will get. This is only from Hos dlc.

References, not design. The first game had a certain amount of eurojank and unorthodox choices that felt very unlike what a north american studio would produce. TW3 is built of what are considered "best practices" in current AAA RPG design, although some of that had already started in 2.

 

[Stavrophore]

Disagree Witcher 3 still feels like a polish game and there is shit ton of references that only a polish person will get. This is only from Hos dlc.

References, not design. The first game had a certain amount of eurojank and unorthodox choices that felt very unlike what a north american studio would produce. TW3 is built of what are considered "best practices" in current AAA RPG design, although some of that had already started in 2.

What was so eurojank about witcher 1? The slightly different combat than in other 100 ARPG clones that were present already in US?

 

[Old Hans]

i think the difference is the first game felt like a PC rpg. the 3rd game felt like a action adventure with tacked on rpg elements. From the second game onward the devs just got obsessed with adding useless crap like filling every box with stupid little crafting items and color coded loot.

 

[Stavrophore]

i think the difference is the first game felt like a PC rpg. the 3rd game felt like a action adventure with tacked on rpg elements. From the second game onward the devs just got obsessed with adding useless crap like filling every box with stupid little crafting items and color coded loot.

But this is what western audience like, so why the complains? :D

 

[Perkel]

Well the more people will read first two short stories collection the more criticism show will get

So i guess that is a win ?

 

[Old Hans]

Well the more people will read first two short stories collection the more criticism show will get

So i guess that is a win ?

my favorite story in the witcher series is the one where geralt just goes around collecting old crafting items and rusty swords to sell to the local merchent

 

[HarveyBirdman]

The first Witcher also broke its previous figure rather impressively. Interestingly enough, not Witcher 2.

Makes perfect sense. You have two general kinds of people playing:
(1) those who want to experience the whole franchise; and
(2) those who want to play the most recent release.
People Playing W1 will either drop it, or move onto 2 and then 3. They're just not done with 1 yet.

 

[Harthwain]

Explain.

I never thought highly of TW games, but I am surprised to hear that TW2 is considered by someone to be worse than TW1.

Is this because TW2 is basically a worse copy of Dark Souls in terms of combat (with TW3 being a bit more refined worse copy of Dark Souls) and TW1 is "click when your cursor changes icon (also, click to change style)"? It was so mind-numbingly primitive that I could win fights while not even looking at the screen (all I had to do is click in a rhythm). Then again, you could win fights in TW3 simply by spamming a single attack with your mouse button, so...

TW1 has opening, mid and closing it is full game. There is story here that is told and has pretty fucking awesome twist.
TW2 has no opening because it is ending of TW1, mid and no closing because by the end of game Nilfgard attacks and you recover all memories of yennefer and ciri. Literally all you did was to fumble around and recover memory. I liked main story and finding out Letho was BFF but it doesn't change the fact it is basically prequel to TW3.

TW1 has very similar to TW3 theme, art design and characterization. Focus on low key fantasy with down to ground themes.
TW2 literally has you taking part in kingdom war with fantastic battlefield of dead soldiers, assasination of kings, siege of city, literal kraken attacking city and so on. It was bombastic fantasy that didn't fit witcher themes. Game literally opens up with siege of castle with literall motherfucking dragon attacking you.

TW1 had pretty good OTS camera which despite being made in 2008 it was pretty free and there wasn't that much clunk.
TW2 was clunk impersonated. Everything felt floaty and clunky, invisible walls everywhere, delays before every action, hell if you load game enemies could hit your before you could hit them. IT was consolized which was proven later when they released xbox version.

All of those problem stem of from CDPR trying to do bombastic fantasy for muricans and consoletards.

TW3 is like mea culpa. They saw that they fucked up in their vision about TW2 and went back to redo TW1 style but this time with just better graphics and backtracking on consoletardation to acceptable levels (mostly due to consoles moving toward PC style controls)

So TW2 despite having some great stuff in it like 2 complete separate campaigns after act1 and plenty of good C&C is just failed experiment.

You can fire up TW1 right now and despite its dated mechanics you will still have plenty of fun toying with alchemy, figuring out who murdered that dude, getting drunk with friends, collecting whore cards and so on.
Then there is act 4 of TW1 which is basically what CDPR used to make TW3 theme.

Interesting.

To me TW3 feels like an extension of TW2. It's "bigger and better" in pretty much everything. The change from TW1 to TW2 is the most drastic one, but mostly in terms of swapping the entire combat system (and making the game with consoles in mind, which is clear when you look at the UI). My opinion always was that in TW3 they simply perfected what they tried to do with TW2 and added more to the pile, and it worked.

And I don't really share your opinion on TW1's gameplay whatsoever. The only thing I liked about it was the dice. That's pretty much it.

 

[Not.AI]

I really liked W1 for some reason; liked also W3.

Didn't like W2.

I tried reading Sapkowski's books. But they didn't feel strong, only ok.

Haven't seen the show - is it based only on the books? It is just me or are the writers for the games better storytellers?

I mean, in the sense of better dramatic power.

Then again, games are not films; story only matters to set up the core gameplay loop and motivate it. If the core game loop is fun, the story will seem better than it really is. If the core game loop, the systems are not particularly fun, the story will seem worse than it is. If the story matters, it matters conditionally and not a whole lot. Game are not books or films. Which is why it seems most game films, whatever the budget, aren't super good.

 

[S.torch]

Some crazy fan should explain to me the appeal of this game compared to all the other RPGs that came before it.
I barely forced myself to finish it and only after listening what a godsend it is for years.
The only memories I have are that it had some advanced technical stuff for a 2015. game,
a generic fantasy world with some Slavic references thrown in plus the clunky combat.

It's got modern AAA graphics, it's big, it's got a decent enough story and setting, it's open world. That's pretty much it. You've got to remember that the bulk of casuals doesn't really follow video games. They only know of things that are being marketed a lot, and if somebody showed them a good indie, they'd throw it away because "it looks old". From their point of view, Witcher 3 was the first RPG released since Skyrim or maybe Mass Effect 3, if they don't hate sci-fi (followed shortly by Fallout 4 which was too trash even for many casuals, thus elevating Witcher 3 to god-like status by comparison). Imagine for a moment that you've only played the most marketed games in the past 10 years and nothing else. The success of Witcher 3 then comes as no surprise.

Except The Witcher entered in the best RPGs by the Codex standars. "Casuals" has little to do with the appeal of the game.

 

[odrzut]

Witcher 3 has better worldbuilding, storytelling, characters, dialogues, animation and sidequests than any CRPG in the last decade. It also has a pretty good combat system for ARPG (better at least than any Elder Scrolls and FPS Fallouts). Its problems are in RPG mechanics - looting, leveling, balancing, which for ARPG are superficial anyway.

Haven't seen the show - is it based only on the books? It is just me or are the writers for the games better storytellers?

I mean, in the sense of better dramatic power.

Show is based on the books, but details are changed (often for the worse IMHO). They went for converging timelines and to make the final reveal more dramatic they fucked up several important events that make viewers care for the characters and understand them.

And I disagree about games having better "dramatic power". They are just more streamlined for western audiences, books (and Witcher 1 to some degree) use more quirky narration common in Polish culture that western audiences interpret as less dramatic/epic/interesting.

Conflict caused by misunderstanding and resolved with insight and communication = boring. Conflict between ancient evil and a defender of humanity resolved with superpowers and strong will = good shit. That's why they added White Frost in the Witcher 3 as the main villain - because for western audiences a good story needs the baddies and must be about saving the world. Saving a few elves from starvation by talking with them isn't nearly enough.

Example (Last Wish book/episode 5 of the netflix show spoilers):

Spoiler

There's a short story with Geralt and Dandelion(Jaskier) discovering a genie. Jaskier makes several wishes, genie tries to kill Jaskier, Geralt manages to force the genie to escape and tries to save wounded Jaskier. They meet a sorceress Yennefer in nearby town who helps Jaskier but in exchange mind-controls Geralt to do chores for her and beat up some important people who called her a whore. Then she tries to force Jaskier to say his final wish so she can control the genie to get infinite power and manages to destroy half the city in the process. Geralt is in the prison for beating up VIPs.

If this was a western fantasy - Geralt would break free of her spell with his superior Will save, escape the prison, and make genie kill the sorceress for her greed for power.

Instead the resolition is Geralt realising it was him not Jaskier who had the 3 wishes, the first wish was how he managed to make genie escape from them at the begining, the second was how he accidently escaped the prison and killed the guard, and the third was a wish that managed to save Yennefer from herself and save the city from the genie at the cost of binding Yenenfer and Geralt together. For me it's much more dramatic, but I can understand people prefering direct confrontation and good vs evil.

 

[Citizen]

Imagine how many more copies Grimoire would sell when they finaly air the netflix series

 

[Storyfag]

Spoiler

Geralt realising it was him not Jaskier who had the 3 wishes, the first wish was how he managed to make genie escape from them at the begining

It needs to be pointed out that

Spoiler

To make the genie flee, Geralt attempted an "exorcism" wich a priestess taught him. Said exorcism was in a secret temple language which the witcher did not know. Translated, the witcher's first wish was: "get thee away from here and plough thineself!"

They of course completely omitted it in the series

 

[DJOGamer PT]

To be honest IMO I think Witcher 2 is the best one in terms of narrative.
The Witcher is pretty much just taking classic fantasy works and tropes, and subverting them through modern lens.
W2 mostly moves away from that, which I like. Besides the premise itself is more interesting, "hunt down the assassin of kings to clear your name". Straighfoward concept with enormous potential - potential that W2 explores well. Much more engaging than the "save your adopted daughter and chose your waifu" crap from W3. W1 could've been excellent, but in my eyes it looses too much steam and sometimes drags on. W2 is more tighly directed.

And most importantly, W2 is the only game where choices actually matter in the context of videogames - that is, choices determine which chunk of content the players will experience.

Some crazy fan should explain to me the appeal of this game compared to all the other RPGs that came before it.

Emotionally engaging storyfaggotry (to be fair the writing is good); simple, shallow mechanics; good looking open-world for those steam pics.

It also has a pretty good combat system for ARPG

Nah.

(better at least than any Elder Scrolls and FPS Fallouts)

Not a high bar.

 

[Alphard]

Boring clunky unfun interactive movie.
It is not even worth pirating. It will just wear your ssd

 

[Tancred]

Well the more people will read first two short stories collection the more criticism show will get

So i guess that is a win ?

my favorite story in the witcher series is the one where geralt just goes around collecting old crafting items and rusty swords to sell to the local merchent

Mine is the one where Geralt uses his GPS-equipped horse to find the ancient, crumbling ruins full of violent spirits and monsters in order to get diagrams for pants that he can't wear until he levels up 7 more times.

Exciting stuff.

 

[Alphard]

My favorite part is when Geralt and the meaningless world he lives in is deleted from my hard disk. If i could slow the uninstallation i would do to picture in my head every facial hair of geralt getting slowly erased by overwriting the 0 s and 1 s they are made from in all 0.

 

[Tito Anic]

Tears in Bethestards eyes bring me joy!

 

[Alphard]

Tears in Bethestards eyes bring me joy!

Who cares about skyrim now? I play neither, both are bad games in their own way.
Tbh i must say homever, i had more fun choosing and installing skyrim mods ( wich is the most fun part of that game) than playing witcher. Go figure

 

[S.torch]

i had more fun choosing and installing skyrim mods ( wich is the most fun part of that game) than playing witcher. Go figure

We figure, don't worry

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

My favourite crpg . I wish for get back in next Wicher game from CDPR in any form.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

I read this thread two days after uninstalling Witcher 3.

Out on the road some people zig, some people zag.

 

[Fishy]

W3 is magnificent. Just this whole sequence would make it worth the asking price: