The Witcher 3 GOTY Edition

[v1rus]

About that, how the fuck does alchemy actually work? Do I only need the ingredients for the "first" pot i make, and then just spam alcohol? In other words, are those 100 celendine i have in meh pockets bloody useless?

 

[ilitarist]

About that, how the fuck does alchemy actually work? Do I only need the ingredients for the "first" pot i make, and then just spam alcohol? In other words, are those 100 celendine i have in meh pockets are bloody useless?

Yes. You may need like 10 of those if you later decide to brew every potion in the world, I think.

Also I haven't ever had a problem with alcohol. It was sometimes hard to find a specific vodka to brew a potion but not the one that helps with replenishing.

 

[vonAchdorf]

They basically copied the Dark Souls Estus system, but without a good reason other than casualization and "convenience". While in Dark Souls, it was introduced for better balancing (preventing healing / moss spam) - TW already had a system which prevented this (toxicity of potions).

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

It just makes it seem worthless full stop to me.

Not disagreeing with you. Just explaining why they do it. Why everyone is doing it.

What sucks is that no one is designing games for us anymore. They are designing them for some army of casuals with no attention span. Then again, Gold Box gamers said the same about our gaming generation, so...

The silver lining is that CDPR actually cared enough not to let it completely dominate the game the way recent Bioware titles have. DA:I might as well have been a cell phone game.

Don't disagree, DO:I, ME:A, KOA:R, Skyrim - many other soulless Open Worlds out there, but I don't think TW3 bucks that trend really. It just has better actual quests.

Quests are part of what add soul to a world though.

Here's a DA:I quest: "Find the 10 crystal fragments"
And once you find them you get a bonus or a note some NPC left.

TW3 had the treasure hunt quests that were sort of similar to that, but it mainly had real NPCs with actual unique quests. And there were choices and consequences in each quest.

That's the soul of TW3's world. DA:I is soulless because you really are just collecting X number of X to complete X quest.

Skyrim isn't soulless. It's just that its soul is the half-assed and stupid, just like Obivion's was.

Like I say, it's not an awful game, it's just dull and drags for large parts. Personally my rating for it would be 5/10, but as a game I think it deserves a 7/10 because of all the counterpoints other people have mentioned.

What I find bizare is how it's praised for being the perfect example of a modern RPG, when older RPG's nailed elements of exploration, emotion, tension, drama etc. much better.

I haven't said it's perfect, but I honestly can't think of a single RPG in the past 10 years that was better written or presented. Not that there's a lot of stellar competition there, mind you.

Go back even further: was KOTOR better? NWN? Morrowind? Just what game is it that this doesn't hold a candle to in your mind? How far back are we time travelling here?

"It's gud, guise, but it's no Fallout 1. 7/10"?

You have something if you say that the loot system/leveling was kind of broken, but beyond that...

 

[ilitarist]

Never thought about it this way. In Dark Souls replenishing Estus means going to a specific place and reviving enemies. In Witcher 3 you can just sit in a field and restore potions.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Never thought about it this way. In Dark Souls replenishing Estus means going to a specific place and reviving enemies. In Witcher 3 you can just sit in a field and restore potions.

It's a similar system, but not with the same purpose - in DS it's for balancing, in TW it's convenience (and maybe a little bit of balancing (only 3/4/5 heals per encounter even with high toxicity tolerance)).

 

[ilitarist]

What sucks is that no one is designing games for us anymore. They are designing them for some army of casuals with no attention span. Then again, Gold Box gamers said the same about our gaming generation, so...

I haven't said it's perfect, but I honestly can't think of a single RPG in the past 10 years that was better written or presented. Not that there's a lot of stellar competition there, mind you.

Strange how you combine very sane argument about TW3 sadly being the best we have with shaking fist at imaginary army of casuals. Yes, everybody always designed games for "casuals". Wolfenstein 3D was much simpler and more "casual" than any modern shooter and it's not because tech didn't allow for anything more complex. And today there's a cult of "hardcore games" like Dark Souls. I know DS is not as hard as they say, I've played ADOM, Wizardry and Severance - but it's AAA game designed specifically to break your casual mindset. Meanwhile many old games where hardcore because you had to read a book or two to understand rules, see IceWind Dale problems as described by Josh Sawyer - playtesters were going mad over the encounter that seemed trivial to Josh. Sort of unintentional hardcoreness.

 

[Carrion]

They gutted the alchemy system already in TW2. TW3 basically reinvented the whole system, and one thing that it succeeds in is making alchemy necessary and very useful again*. As a whole the system has a few ups and quite many downs.

What pisses me off that the system is loaded with nonsense, kind of like all of the systems in the game:
- The potion replenishment system is of course incredibly dumb, especially with alcohol just lying around so that it's impossible to run out of it after an hour or two. What should've been a system requiring resource management and strategic thinking is reduced to fucking nothing when you can refill your entire potion arsenal anytime you want to. It's like a Vancian magic system without any decision-making and with exponential power growth.
- Many of the potion effects make zero sense, especially when it comes to the decoctions (how the fuck does healing through stamina use or dealt damage work anyway?), and many of them are downright useless (anyone ever use the Werewolf Decoction that lets you sprint indefinitely while out of combat, or any of those "attack power grows slowly until you take damage" ones?).
- It took them until Blood & Wine to make Black Blood work like it did in TW1, with vampires actually sucking your blood rather than simply starting to bleed whenever they're near you, and even then it's limited to maybe two enemy types.
- Being able to drink potions in combat as a free action is another mind-boggling decision, arguably even worse than TW2's hour-long meditation animation except for the opposite reason.
- I'm still not sure if blade oils work like they intended them to work, being literally unlimited from the start, and every single one of them is of the "increase damage against enemy type" variety, with zero creativity put into them whatsoever.
- The toxicity system was improved from TW2 and made actually relevant again, but a lot more could've been done with it, like having separate toxicity costs for each potion, or making toxicity last longer so that you can't just grab a new potion the moment the last one wears out. Then again, you can rest anywhere and anytime and reset your potions and toxicity, so what would have been the point?
- Potion durations could've been much longer from the start, although decoctions at least remedy the situation somewhat.
- Like TW2, the system is missing most of the intricacies or TW1's system, such as potions having secondary effects when using a specific set of ingredients.

In the end the weird thing is that they already got the system absolutely right once, yet for some reason they insist on fixing what isn't broken over and over again.

* Yes, TW2's alchemy tree was overpowered as fuck, but potions remained shit throughout the game.

 

[ilitarist]

- Being able to drink potions in combat as a free action is another mind-boggling decision, arguably even worse than TW2's hour-long meditation animation except for the opposite reason.
- I'm still not sure if blade oils work like they intended them to work, being literally unlimited from the start, and every single one of them is of the "increase damage against enemy type" variety, with zero creativity put into them whatsoever.

I don't mind potions as a free action - after all, we have a toxicity to limit potion use. But unlimited blade oil which you can apply in a middle of a combat is really, really strange. It could actually have benefited from replenishment on rest system even if it's free action. Making it not free would be coming back to TW2 system where you meet a monster, load back to when you could have meditated and drink specific potions against said monster. Right now there's no thinking involved unless you fight a monster for the first time and don't know which type it is, afterwards you can check bestiary and that's it.

Oil thing is especially funny cause you have skills that make oil effect last longer. This means that you'll open inventory and apply your infinite supply of oil on the sword after 25 attacks, not after 20. It's obvious they changed the way oil functions late in development cause this shit is bananas.

 

[Carrion]

Making it not free would be coming back to TW2 system where you meet a monster, load back to when you could have meditated and drink specific potions against said monster.

You've got witcher senses for locating your enemies before having to face them. Witcher contracts all involve figuring out what kind of a monster you're up against before fighting it. Monsters are tied to specific environments (drowners are near water, ghouls are in places with fresh corpses, forests have wolves and bears, draconids are usually in open or mountainous areas, mages often use golems or elementals to guard their laboratories etc.), allowing you to make an educated guess on what you'll be fighting next. Having to go in completely blind is extremely rare.

Again, TW1 did it right: you could drink potions or apply blade oils mid-combat, but it made you vulnerable for a couple of seconds, making it a good idea to either gain some distance to your enemies or cast Quen. Some potions were specifically intended to be used in combat, like White Raffard's Decoction with its instantaneous healing powers but very high toxicity. It was a system that made sense and worked the best from a gameplay perspective, and there was no reason to change it.

 

[veskoandroid]

Was there a lot of hype though? TW2 was so forgetable that I don't remember a single reference to the Wild Hunt. And while there was buildup in TW1, all the weird retconning of the Wild Hunt from ghosts who take people's souls in TW1 into inter-dimensional elves in TW3 kind of nullifies that.



I disagree that TW3 had soulless MMO areas. Look to DA:I or Andromeda for true soulless MMO areas. TW3 was packed with quests and I can't think of one area in the game that didn't have a hidden side quest for you to stumble upon - and I'm not taking about bandit clearing or treasure spots.

The over abundance of loot and the poor scaling system did make most of it meaningless though, but I think that was down to poor implementation.


Praise does nothing for a game. It's all about money. The trend you are noticing is because of casuals an a much broader trend toward instant gratification that is being pushed in EVERY media, not just gaming and certainly not because of games like TW3.

We're witnessing a warping of our culture due to constant instantaneous feedback from things like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, cellphone games, even sugary foods.

TW3's bad design decisions relating to items for example seem to spring from the idea that the average player is only going to play the game for X amount of minutes, therefore in those X minutes, the developers want to ensure gratification. So you play for 15-30 minutes, a monster drops a sword that's either better than your old one, or at least looks cool and you can sell for gold, and you leave the game with a positive feeling and a desire to come back and play more later.

Of course, the problem is that this makes items seem worthless to people who play it for an hour or more at a time.

Wow such a clear vision of game in modern times. Exactly this. Im playin a game for hours and find shitload of crapp items. Frustrating to find that one single worthy piece of eq to change into.

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[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Wow such a clear vision of game in modern times. Exactly this. Im playin a game for hours and find shitload of crapp items. Frustrating to find that one single worthy piece of eq to change into.

You think that's bad, try playing a cell phone "RPG". You'll likely level up and find new items every minute or so.

This is our society. Masturbating itself into a shadow of its former glory year after year.

 

[Mark Richard]

Making it not free would be coming back to TW2 system where you meet a monster, load back to when you could have meditated and drink specific potions against said monster.

You've got witcher senses for locating your enemies before having to face them. Witcher contracts all involve figuring out what kind of a monster you're up against before fighting it. Monsters are tied to specific environments (drowners are near water, ghouls are in places with fresh corpses, forests have wolves and bears, draconids are usually in open or mountainous areas, mages often use golems or elementals to guard their laboratories etc.), allowing you to make an educated guess on what you'll be fighting next. Having to go in completely blind is extremely rare.

The free action potion-chugging is too gamey/abstract. Even on higher difficulties players need to use every weapon in their arsenal except their mind. I'd rather we were pushed to be more observant and the tracking system overhauled to reflect that. It would make finding the identity of monsters (before engaging) as much a priority for the player as the character they control.

 

[Storyfag]

It's a fair pov, I'd just had the Wild Hunt built up so much from previous games & hype, that the casual, lazy pace of TW3 seemed jarring.

Was there a lot of hype though? TW2 was so forgetable that I don't remember a single reference to the Wild Hunt. And while there was buildup in TW1, all the weird retconning of the Wild Hunt from ghosts who take people's souls in TW1 into inter-dimensional elves in TW3 kind of nullifies that.

It's not a retcon though. It's how they're presented in the source material. Dimension-conquering elves who, after loosing the ability to mass-transport armies, started a breeding program to regain it. Ciri is the result, because an elven sorceress went for a piece of human fun. And while said elves cannot transport entire armies, they can project their psyches and manifest as beings similar to wraiths - the Wild Hunt. A select few actually can still travel to a select few other worlds bodily.

Ofc this is all poorly explained in the game itself though.

 

[Carrion]

TW2 was so forgetable that I don't remember a single reference to the Wild Hunt.

http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Returning_Memories

The Wild Hunt was one of the weakest parts of the books, but TW3 made it even worse by making Eredin a non-character and including Naglfar, Ragnarök Ragh nar Roog and other crap that didn't at all fit the tone of the rest of the game. It's a universe that regularly subverts fantasy clichés and makes fun of peasant superstition, yet these clowns are played completely straight. It would've been better if the Wild Hunt was portrayed as just a bunch of interdimensional elven commandos (not necessarily all that different from the Scoia'tael, really), with actual personalities and motivations, as they do have reasons for their actions even though the game doesn't really like to show them. Making this part of the story less "epic" and more personal would've been appropriate, even, as both Geralt and Ciri share some history with Eredin and the Hunt. I guess CDPR just had no idea what they wanted to do with the plot after you manage to reunite with Ciri.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Making it not free would be coming back to TW2 system where you meet a monster, load back to when you could have meditated and drink specific potions against said monster.

You've got witcher senses for locating your enemies before having to face them. Witcher contracts all involve figuring out what kind of a monster you're up against before fighting it. Monsters are tied to specific environments (drowners are near water, ghouls are in places with fresh corpses, forests have wolves and bears, draconids are usually in open or mountainous areas, mages often use golems or elementals to guard their laboratories etc.), allowing you to make an educated guess on what you'll be fighting next. Having to go in completely blind is extremely rare.

This is exactly what I meant when I said "preparation". Why couldn't they just make a game based on being a Witcher and properly preparing for tough fights (having to read books to figure out the lore behind the creatures, their habitats, etc. - same for alchemy, plants would only spawn once you figured out where to look and in very limited quantities (potions would be much stronger to compensate) instead of having a fucking Ubishit theme park with WoW quests dotting the landscape?

 

[Falksi]

This is exactly what I meant when I said "preparation". Why couldn't they just make a game based on being a Witcher and properly preparing for tough fights (having to read books to figure out the lore behind the creatures, their habitats, etc. - same for alchemy, plants would only spawn once you figured out where to look and in very limited quantities (potions would be much stronger to compensate) instead of having a fucking Ubishit theme park with WoW quests dotting the landscape?

This is what I expected after TW2. Now THAT would have given us a deep RPG. Every monster in TW3 felt very beatable, so long as you levelled up enough.
I wanted beasts who were indestructible unless I'd spent time preparing right (building on how the Kayren in TW2 was handled) The depth of the quests coming from unique monsters which lead me to search for various potions, spells, traps, oils, methods of detection etc. Before being able to confront and kill them. They flirted with this in some quests, but it was very thin on the ground sadly.
As for Ciri, I personally felt fuck all connection with her, and detested most of the main quest. If they'd have removed the search for her I reckon I'd have enjoyed it far more.

 

[ilitarist]

BTW I think devs understood that main quest is a one time thing. If you have expansions they allow you to start in a world without the main quest. Frankly, it feels much more suitable: you're just a witcher doing some witchering. It makes sense you engage in the lengthy Faustian endeavor or ride away to Not France because those quests and main game sidequests feel much more like Geralt just living his life, saving villagers for a price, playing cards, drinking and travelling.

 

[AwesomeButton]

It's the lack of anything meaningful which makes things drag.

I don't play it like it's supposed to have anything meaningful beyond the next quest. It's "The adventures of a witcher in the the northern lands", where I spend half-hour to an hour going through a quest or two, and the next episode of the show is tomorrow, not connected to the previous one.

All that filler is fine for folk who like watching DVD extras, & immersing themselves in lore etc. Those of us who just want to get to the meat of the game just get weighed down by it. I much prefer things which I can interact with and which keep me engaged.

So, you want a different game. I don't think Witcher 3 has any "meat" to speak of. Any of its elements, when taken out, is pretty dull -- watching just the story and dialogues can get dull. I've been frustrated sometimes by having to spend 5 or more minutes just in very long conversations. The combat, if taken out of the rest, again dull - sidestep and counterattack, roll occasionally. The witcher senses - pretty dull - follow the red color on the screen until you can press "E" on the keyboard against some object. When you put it together though, it's a pretty nice interactive movie with occasional twitch combat. It also has C&C which is more than we can say for most RPGs.

For that to happen it has to feel like there's something meaningful behind a quest or interaction, and far too often in TW3 it doesn't.

So, bonus points for realistic plot - life has no meaning either. :D

I've just defeated Eredin, and boy the relief. Not in a "yay, Ciri is safe!" way, but in a "yay, it feels like it's Friday afternoon and all the past work & slog thro the week has ended!".

That's pretty subjective. After an exhausting day, I've also felt how I don't feel accomplishment but relief to be done with a quest. But then I know I should let go of the game for now.

Hopefully the expansions fresh main quests may give me something to enjoy out this whole experience.

I think both expansions rock, but I liked Blood & Wine better. The new idyllic area topped my expectations so much. Most companies nowadays would release such an amount of content as a full game, just think of that. I get to be knight errant, there are multiple secondary quests which are obvious easter eggs, and the writing of the main story is great. But mostly, I'm a sucker for the atmosphere of Catalonia~Languedoc that the Toussaint region has.

 

[veskoandroid]

Wtf! I finished most of major quests in velen, only few 15+ side/witcher quests left. And it says b&w can be started but recommended level 34! Where tf do i get that level? And funnily i get more xp playing in theater than killing a damn wyvern or 10 bears.
Though again graphics, colours and textures are a-mazing! Speaking of theaters and dandelion its a pleasure to look at his clothes.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Have you been to Skellige yet? Advance the main quest a little bit, it gives loads of XP.

 

[veskoandroid]

Nope want to clear velen first. Overall i can say i do love this game. Yes wilderness wandering can be drag, but bigger drag is town traveling amd finding places in quest, real pita. At least in wilderness you can horse ride mindlessly. And after spending an entire real day in city doing quests i can really say i miss nature and wilderness. Monsters are simple, just wanna eat ya. Humans are horrible to deal with. Hahaha, it reflects my real life experiences suppose.
Thx awesome button.

Gotta visit Triss for some W2 rumble.

And can anyone tell me how to remove this damn -

Sent from my Xperia ZR using Tapatalk

- Signature?

 

[Gepeu]

Nope want to clear velen first.

But why?

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Nope want to clear velen first.

But why?

Because it's the fucking Witcher 3 and he wants to see all content?

 

[v1rus]

So it turns out i missed a secondary quest where a lynch mob wants to hang a Nilfgardian deserter, since he's already hanging if you complete Keira storyline. IS IT WORTH A RESTART, GAYIZ?