Game News The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine Expansion Released

[NotAGolfer]

Sure. And now tell me how that's supposed to work in a setting where garden variety monsters are the norm and really powerful ones are the exception. It's not like there are different areas for low and high level chars in the Witcher universe. Every place is basic medieval landscapes, villages and towns in the first place. And then there are monsters and monster contracts on top of that, disturbing the peace or civil war or whatever is happening on the non-supernatural level atm.
So in late game you still find drowners and other lowly monsters but now you are supposed to mop the floor with them? Even more than you already did at the beginning of the game? I mean you do, with the ones you met earlier. Other drowners take their place and pose a comparable challenge for higher level chars. Geralt still feels the same power level compared to all the monsters variants in the lore book, because now there are stronger ones waiting in the areas you are supposed to explore late game anyway. So as long as you don't run into high level areas on low level or come back on higher level and do low level quests that earn you close to zero XP now anyway, as long as you don't waste your time intentionally like that it doesn't feel like Geralt becomes much more powerful in comparison to the enemies (unless you overlevel him by doing every quest and destroying every monster nest etc).

So what again is the problem? Didn't you guys also bitch about how Geralt isn't supposed to get stonger because he's Geralt and already powerful enough to deal with all of it?

Again, this treadmill is there since the dawn of CRPGs. It's nothing new. So why bitch about it here? Because it's more apparent than in a levelscaled open world like Skyrim?

Or because it's more apparent than in a linear kind of game?


I mean what kind of moronic complaint is "He beat a dragon once and now [insert random monster type] are supposed to be a challenge lel" anyway?
This is a fucking game, it better have challenge in its gameplay. And not just when he meets his next dragon.

I have a different problem with this design. I'm still not sure if I'm grateful for the game telling me how difficult quests and enemies are compared to my level because that way it doesn't waste my time or if I should be butthurt because that's too much handholding.
This is a storyfag game, so I tend towards the first. I don't really want to wander back and forth trying to find the right challenges for my level or even have to chancel a quest I begun because I realize that I can't beat that monster yet.
I want to know before starting it so the narrative doesn't get disrupted too often.
A little more effort than labeling it "intended for level 20" in the journal wouldn't have hurt though. Maybe something more immersive like that bullshit about weak and great disturbances in the force in Star Wars. And then you can translate that into level requirements yourself. ^^

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

I can't tell if you are not even trying or trying too hard.

 

[NotAGolfer]

And I can't tell if any of you armchair designers even played the game for more than 10 minutes.


I don't even think that it's that great, it's just miles above the shit Bethesda churns out is all.

And except for the clumsy item distribution it is at least good for what it is and doesn't get in the way of the thing that it does incredibly well, storytelling.

But keep on with your lazy oneliners, bois. You're really convincing that way.

 

[Ninjerk]

I can't tell if you are not even trying or trying too hard.

I can tell you without saying anything at all.

 

[Carrion]

If they really went full akshun adventure style and got rid of levels that might work.
But I think they would have to reduce the open world freedom or risk that players would just ignore the intended order/sequence and find the perks/oils/items they need to kill the late game enemies.
And that would seriously screw things up and sour early game content for these players, especially with late game equipment that would be much more powerful than things you find at the start of the game.
After mastering late game enemies with more elaborate attack patterns the early game ones could also become nothing but boring chores.

So I'd say only let us find the tools needed to deal with late game challenges after we beat that early game boss or solved that middle game riddle that's part of the main quest, making sure that we follow the intended sequence. They still could give a bit of leeway for people who want to game the game of course but it should be made very obvious if you stumble upon something that's not intended for you yet.

I don't know if TW3 even has a need for an "intended sequence" of things. The main quest is pretty much designed with a BioWare-like "three separate locations that can be finished in any order" structure, and while the levelling system pretty much pushes you into doing things in a particular order, there isn't any real reason for doing so. Even if you removed levels altogether, you couldn't break the story by doing things out of order, and in general the late-game enemies aren't really any more challenging that the early-game ones when it comes to their attack patterns.

Besides,

Spoiler

solving that mid-game riddle requires you to visit every major location anyway.

I would've done something like this with the character system, level system and itemization:

- Much flatter power curve in general. No exponential growth of attack power or anything like that. With itemization I would've gone for a TW1-like approach, with a relatively low number of witcher swords and armor (having a thousand different swords and pieces or armor is a nice touch, but Geralt is supposed to use just witcher equipment all the time, and instead of having a dozen level-scaled versions of a Novigrad Shortsword you could have just one that stays the same throughout the game). Roughly speaking, I'd have the best sword do maybe about double damage compared to the early-game stuff, if even that, with the bigger differences coming from the special properties of swords, like runes, the durability of the weapons, their ability to pierce armor or cause bleeding, and so on, perhaps making certain swords more suitable against certain types of enemies instead of just being objectively better or worse compared to each other. The same would apply to armor, with different armor types allowing for different types of movement and having other unique properties, like Cat School armor allowing for swifter movement and more effective dodging while Bear School armor might have superior damage resistance, especially against piercing or crushing attacks. I would retain the equipment upgrade mechanic (i.e. being able to improve the witcher armor and weapon sets all the way Mastercrafted/Grandmaster), as it means that you'll really have to work to get your hands on the best equipment sets instead of being able to just stumble upon them by accident.
- Character development would happen mainly through learning new attacks and abilities (like alternative ways to use witcher signs) by spending skill points and using mutagens (see TW1), as well as improving your equipment and increasing your knowledge on alchemy, which could put a bit bigger emphasis on character skill. Attack power and HP should get only minor increases throughout the game and be mainly dependent on the equipment you're using. Late-game Geralt could be quicker and more powerful than early-game Geralt and have a much larger bag of tricks, but he shouldn't make early-game Geralt look like a pathetic joke by comparison.
- Remove the level gating and visible levels from enemies. Having stronger versions of existing monsters is okay, as the game already has separate models for the low and high-level versions of particular enemies, but there shouldn't be a huge difference between them, just like there shouldn't be a huge difference between early-game and late-game Geralt. The game already has some enemies which require particular tactics or equipment to take them out (e.g. Jenny O' the Woods can be a very tough early-game fight without Moon Dust), and I'd take that approach a bit further, making proper preparation more or less mandatory when facing the strongest enemies.
- Put more focus on encounter design than just the level of enemies to create challenging encounters. Even level 1 monsters should be able to pose a real threat if you face them in less than optimal circumstances. A successful enemy attack should always carry the risk of dealing some serious damage, as proven by a certain level 1 peasant with a pitchfork.

I think that with these kind of changes you could create a game where you'd have a sense of growing in power without trivializing the encounters against low-level enemies, thus allowing you to get rid of the level-gating mechanic while still retaining a game world that makes sense and is populated by appropriate creatures.

 

[Roguey]

So from what I've skimmed, this is a "grogs complain about how most RPG developers no longer care to simulate a verisimilar world through levels anymore" thread.

 

[Joni Odin von Hassenstein]

Fuck level scaling! [/Thread]

And it's a german, you think they'd have an altar for Gothic on every home.

We do.

 

[Ninjerk]

Fuck level scaling! [/Thread]

And it's a german, you think they'd have an altar for Gothic on every home.

We do.

Better handle your fifth column, then.

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

Man, these meltdown posts by fags who were once angry at oblivion level scaling.

"MAN GERALT ISN'T SUPPOSED TO DEFEAT DROWNERS THAT EASILY I SUPPORT LEVEL 346 DROWNERS AT END GAME BECAUSE IT IS NOT REALISTIC OTHERWISE-"

How about you all suck a dick?

 

[Trash]

Drowners and other low level pests are just that. Pests. And what is Geralt? Indeed. An exterminator.

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

Drowners and other low level pests are just that. Pests. And what is Geralt? Indeed. An exterminator.

It's an excuse not to put in more enemies at higher levels. Just hp bloat to justify "realism" is as far from rpg as you can go as it shows there is neither any impactful character power progression or that character skill matters (only player skill does). The ones who claim that it is tradishiunal are insane, rabid fanbois or both.

Just call it for what it is, an action game with an exp bar and dialogue options and move on.

 

[Ninjerk]

Gotta make sure you get 100 hours out of it.

 

[J_C]

Isn't there a mod which puts a max level limit to each of the monsters?

 

[ghostdog]

It would need much more than that to actually fix any of this.

-Completely remove all level scaling.
-All monsters should have finite numbers. No respawning crap. All monsters/enemies after the prologue should be much harder to kill.
-After each major quest solved, the areas should be repopulated with fewer but harder monsters (not just higher level of the same monsters)
-Trophy killings should be very hard and should absolutely require the preparation of potions, but...
-All special potions for killing specific monsters should be removed. This is crap. Potions and oils should be of the general variety and be used and combined after consideration.
-Complete overhaul of loot and equipment:
-Remove 3/5 of current equipment and random loot because it's crap you'll never use, and it just clutters the world and your inventory.
-Redistribute equipment and schematics so that they would be actually useful to the player.
-Remove all level requirements from equipment.
-No different levels of the same witcher gear. Specialized witcher school gear should become available only late-game.
-Complete overhaul of witcher's character progression scheme:
-....

Well, I'm bored writing this post, so that's all I'm willing to offer. Someone else could add more.

 

[Joni Odin von Hassenstein]

I pretty much agree, except for

-After each major quest solved, the areas should be repopulated with fewer but harder monsters (not just higher level of the same monsters)

This doesn't sound very "organic" to me. If I cleared an area, I want it fucking cleared.
I'd accept to have some minor (and same level as in the beginning) respawns of the same type of monster if it is kind of tied to the place in the world (like... idk, wolves in the woods or something like that). But only for making the world more believeable.

 

[ghostdog]

I pretty much agree, except for

-After each major quest solved, the areas should be repopulated with fewer but harder monsters (not just higher level of the same monsters)

This doesn't sound very "organic" to me. If I cleared an area, I want it fucking cleared.
I'd accept to have some minor (and same level as in the beginning) respawns of the same type of monster if it is kind of tied to the place in the world (like... idk, wolves in the woods or something like that). But only for making the world more believeable.

I was going by the rule of this dude:

In G2 (probably in G1 too, I don't remember) certain monsters respawn at each new chapter and some harder ones appear and I think it worked really well in giving you some new challenge and making the world less barren.

 

[Joni Odin von Hassenstein]

I pretty much agree, except for

-After each major quest solved, the areas should be repopulated with fewer but harder monsters (not just higher level of the same monsters)

This doesn't sound very "organic" to me. If I cleared an area, I want it fucking cleared.
I'd accept to have some minor (and same level as in the beginning) respawns of the same type of monster if it is kind of tied to the place in the world (like... idk, wolves in the woods or something like that). But only for making the world more believeable.

I was going by the rule of this dude:

In G2 (probably in G1 too, I don't remember) certain monsters respawn at each new chapter and some harder ones appear and I think it worked really well in giving you some new challenge and making the world less barren.

Kinda, but afair these respawns are really sparse. Also I'm not sure it's harder enemies that respawn, but I might be wrong about that. All in all I think Gothic is doing it pretty similar to what I described in the post above.
So if respawn is done very rarely I'm kinda okay with it.

 

[Duellist_D]

Geralt got canonically killed by some random peasant boy with a pitchfork. The "everything stays dangerous" mechanic is absolutely justified by lore, though the execution is of debatable quality.


Anyways, this whole discussion is just derp and indeed full with "bicycles would be better if they had 4 wheels and a motor" arguments boiling down to "just design a totally different game". If you want to play Dark Souls, play Dark Souls and don't cry about twitcher not being Dark Souls.

 

[Carrion]

I was going by the rule of this dude:

Then again, even in Gothic the increasingly powerful respawns were mostly a nonsensical, gamey design decision that happened to work very well because it fit in very well with the structure of the game (was there some sort of story reason for it, aside from some of the late-game spawns? I can't remember), meaning that it was clearly divided into separate chapters that took place more or less in the same general area. In TW3 such a system wouldn't make any sense at all, and it would also be mostly unnecessary since the game is already divided into different areas with varying difficulty levels — after Velen you'll go to Novigrad, which is a higher-level area, and so on. The game's relatively free-form nature regarding side content also wouldn't sit at all well with the difficulty being tied to your progress in the main quest, because unlike Gothic, most of the side quests can be completed at any point of the game. Besides, repopulating each area with stronger enemies after reaching some arbirtrary spot in the main quest could be seen as just a form of level-scaling, as opposed to the current system where every enemy has a fixed level that remains the same throughout the game.

For me Gothic is one of the shining examples of how to create an open-world game, but in my view copying its respawn mechanics would've been just cargo cult design.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Drowners and other low level pests are just that. Pests. And what is Geralt? Indeed. An exterminator.

It's an excuse not to put in more enemies at higher levels. Just hp bloat to justify "realism" is as far from rpg as you can go as it shows there is neither any impactful character power progression or that character skill matters (only player skill does). The ones who claim that it is tradishiunal are insane, rabid fanbois or both.

Just call it for what it is, an action game with an exp bar and dialogue options and move on.

But the game already uses a chapter system. Couldn't you cure this by having an influx of harder monsters via ingame events in later chapters?

Having the ravages of war force stronger monsters out into the old areas, in turn explaining the disappearance of low-level lurkers who are forced to move on elsewhere, would be very much in keeping with the game's world and atmosphere.

 

[RK47]

 

[Trash]

The whole levelling discussion is mostly tied to the approach CD Project took regarding character advancement. Remember how in the first Witcher you had to equip the right weapons and prepare yourself with the right potions to even start a fight with a crypt ghoul? Garden variety monsters there felt dangerous and needed to be handled very much in the spirit of the novels. Preparation was key.

Apparantly they deemed that to be too much of a hassle/burden for their public and they switched more and more towards the system we have now. I personally preferred the system in the first game, as it felt more meaningful. However, I can live with the action game with levelling we have now. Still, I miss sitting down at a fire to put the right poison on my silver sword and decide which potions to take in order to go into that sewer and come out alive. With a paycheck for another dead monster to look forward to.

 

[cvv]

However, I can live with the action game with levelling we have now.

I hate it tbh. In TW1 the system made sense and suited Geralt character perfectly.

In TW3 tho they couldn't go completely off the rails with Geralt's abilities, making him hurl lightnings and firebals and wield greataxes like in Dark Souls without completely fucking up the lore and enraging the entire fandom. Geralt is a predefined character with a predefined skill set. They had to stick to a fairly narrow limits. So predictably when they decided to go with a more traditional "actiony" levelling the character progression feels lame and boring and dry since going from "+3,41% sword damage" to "+3,85% sword damage" after long and epic boss battle isn't exactly exciting.

They should've stuck with the basic TW1 system and only polish off some of it's ponderousness. And then they should've just copypasted the combat from Dark Souls (without the anime side of things). The industry should finally accept it's the only way to go. Resisting and trying come up with some other brilliant systems is futile. Dark Souls combat is what a car was to the horse and buggy industry. No point trying to invent faster horseshoes or cushier carriages.

 

[CyberWhale]

They aren't trying to invent on DS combat, they're just incapable of ripping it off properly.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

I think you guys are definitely romanticizing your memories of TW1.
The fighting system in that game wasn't just the dullest across the entire serie, but also the one that scaled the WORST in term of difficulty.

How it played: extracting the right weapon (superfluous after a while) and clicking on the mouse at regular intervals, without even caring much about position.
How hard it was: from some point going on, you could literally just use style group, close your eyes and click every three second without paying attention at the screen and you could clear hordes of enemies.

There were few good ideas at the core of the system (i.e. unique mutagens acquired by unique monsters to unlock exclusive special abilities), but in the end they were all tragically misused and wasted in an underdeveloped combat.

EDIT - Anyway, I don't even think that going for a more "action-y" combat for the sequels was a bad thing in itself, it's just that they never achieve to make it particularly good.
All things considered I'd easily rate TW3 the best one in the series when it comes to combat, but sadly that doesn't say much since it's a fight for scraps.

Honestly, for how I see it, the disdain for anything focused on action is silly in principle.
As far as I'm concerned you, as a developer, can go for whatever style of combat you want, ranging from turn based to pure skill-based action, and all I will care about is that you manage to make it good.

I also don't think that relying on stats and avoiding reflex-based systems is what defines a good "genuine" RPG. To me it's all about interactions, choices and consequences and more in generally having a world that reacts in a convincing way to your inputs.