The Witcher 3 GOTY Edition

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

Does every non witcher gear have a higher level version?

Just about. It's nearly all randomly spawned and scaled to your level or the enemy's level and with randomized stats.

I generally agree with not using mods for a first playthrough unless there are important bugfix mods (bethesda games you get unofficial patches that fix a shitload of broken quests, in tw3's case bugfix mods are mostly for minor cosmetic issues) or mods made by the game's developers that are a further refinement/development of the game (jsawyer mod for fonv, fcr3 for tw3).

 

[typical user]

Actually for newcomers I recommend to try this if they have GOTY version:
https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/2788

Basically it's JSawyer for Witcher 3.

 

[sullynathan]

The game is quite good on a story front. There's a lot of it and it's the bulk of the quests at hand. I finally went back to the main quest, at level 13, and I'm doing the Bloody Baron quest.

This is something that CDPR has been doing since Witcher 1 I think, but with a twist in nearly every main + side quest, things become quickly predictable but once in a while they are surprising. So far the most surprising twists was the old woman working for the Crones being The Baron's wife and the ghost in Fyke Isle asking me to bring her corpse to her past lover so she can rest. The guy still loved her, and made a shrine for her. It really caught me off guard when I was leaving and the guy cried out while dying and I turned around to see an evil ghost above his corpse. The ghost was rather convincing because she was telling the truth so the devs did well with the twist.

The Baron is an asshole who his daughter and wife disliked. I won't repeat everything that went through the quest, but the game loves using a story twist in everything.

There's a few things that bothered me about the quest, primarily the limit of having two dialogue choices. The dialogue that Geralt says being different from what you picked is eh what? I remember saving one of the Baron's soldiers from the barn and immediately Geralt responds aggressively to the baron, gets into a fight, beats him up and then shoves his face in water nearly drowning him. After that you can now tell the guy that you just beat and broke his teeth that you feel bad for him. You aren't given enough choice to be sympathetic to The Baron as you progress along the quest. Later on when you learn why his daughter left, you can't tell him that you feel bad for him.

I obviously went against the crones because they were ugly, untrustworthy and evil. They cursed the godling, they were demanding sacrificies and grooming children to eat them and demanding people cut off their ears a tribute to them. It's unfortunate that almost nothing good came out of this though. The old woman turns into a hag. Even if you cure her curse, she still dies in turn making the baron commit suicide and none of his subordinates mourned him and just moved on. It's almost being negative for the sake of being negative especially when the game looks so peachy and happy in comparison to how dreary and dirty Witcher 1 & to a lesser extent Witcher 2 looked.

I don't know if the game has completely run out of rewards, but I'm still constantly getting loot that is never used because it's almost all worse than the Witcher gear I'm wearing or it's skematics that creates good gear that I can't wear for another 5+ levels. Unfortunately, leveling up is really really slow. I have done multiple quests and killed many bosses and enemies over what 5 - 10 hours now, and I'm still level 13. You only get 7 xp for doing certain things in a quest. My character is not progressing at all even though the game throws stuff at me that should allow me to progress.

Next time: Visiting Triss. Let's see what our Sexy Red Head has been up to.

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

^There are happy endings to the baron/crones, but first playthroughs are more fun when you fuck up/suboptimal.

Vanilla armor progression is basically starter/kaer morhen set->maybe the temerian dlc set or some other armor you pick up before lv10-> witcher school sets.

As far as swords go there are a few relics that outmatch witcher stuff at the same level.

 

[sullynathan]

sigh, High Stakes Gwent is just spy spamming. This whore played and recovered 4 spies every round then this racist elf wants to fight me. It's just a game man, why you hef to be mad?

Anway, 50 + hours in and still in Act 1. Fatigue is somewhat starting to set in. The quest to find Dandelion & helping Triss was so far less interesting than the Bloody Baron and Ciri's portions were even worse to play. A horse chase scene doesn't work when your horse doesn't work very well CDPR. Indoor fights don't work very well when the camera doesn't pan out enough.

The repetition of quests is getting to me now. The combat is now far too easy and I don't believe I'm close to beating the game either. I'm starting to get some really weird glitches particularly in Novigrad. Textures taking a while to load, characters taking a while to load into the world, enemies being glitched and taking no damage.

I'm not quite sure why I can't go back to Kaer Morhan but I can go to the rest of the map. The story restrictions are a bit annoying.

 

[Haplo]

Vanilla itemization just never feels rewarding or right.

Regarding XP, I think main quests provide much more xp then side-quest, so you level faster if you stick to the main quest line.

I've found the Isles more interesting then Novigrad. Perhaps it's worth it to go there first (you can do that). At least the game would keep some semblance of challenge for a while. That said, the Baron/Crones were the highlight of the game for me, by far.
You outlevel the content in Novigrad very fast anyways.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

sigh, High Stakes Gwent is just spy spamming. This whore played and recovered 4 spies every round then this racist elf wants to fight me. It's just a game man, why you hef to be mad?

Anway, 50 + hours in and still in Act 1. Fatigue is somewhat starting to set in. The quest to find Dandelion & helping Triss was so far less interesting than the Bloody Baron and Ciri's portions were even worse to play. A horse chase scene doesn't work when your horse doesn't work very well CDPR. Indoor fights don't work very well when the camera doesn't pan out enough.

The repetition of quests is getting to me now. The combat is now far too easy and I don't believe I'm close to beating the game either. I'm starting to get some really weird glitches particularly in Novigrad. Textures taking a while to load, characters taking a while to load into the world, enemies being glitched and taking no damage.

I'm not quite sure why I can't go back to Kaer Morhan but I can go to the rest of the map. The story restrictions are a bit annoying.

bloody baron is basically the high point of the base game
IMO both DLCs are better than the base game, with Hearts of Stone coming out on top. It's easily one of my favorite parts of any game now.

Spoiler

Well struck, Witcher.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

Novigrad has way, way, way to many fetch shaped quests that force you to constantly go back and forth between a few locations and it grinds down any sense of the gameplay and the story pace.

The design of the city is amazing, and there are several interesting small quests there, but they fucked up colossally in terms of forcing you to go back and forth to complete quests. Most of the small subquests force you to return to first quest giver several fucking times during that one quest. Even getting clues abut Ciri lasts just too fucking long with several multi-part "do this for me and ill tell you a part of the story" shit and you already go through such really fucking long (only interesting) quest chain with the Baron. Just thinking how many times i had to return to that tavern... Goose or something, makes me sick. Yet if you go to Skellige you overlevel it so much it becomes a joke.

btw, its a real waste and a shame to play the vanilla version with its broken stamina and endless rolling for morons and magically refilling free alchemy.
The game is meant to be played modded. Overhauls that remain faithful to the vanilla general style like Ghost mod seriously improve it - although that one retains the dumb free alchemy. Another, School of the Roach is a complete overhaul that changes alchemy too and still plays like extremely improved vanilla.

 

[sullynathan]

Was Lambert always this much of an asshole? Sheesh.

Anyway, his quest is odd. When you get to the trolls, it's possible to reach them and attack them but the game makes them invincible and they just stop attacking.
If I go to the altar to place the phylactery, I can't unless I go back and use Aard to let Lambert through and then turn on a cutscene.

The skellige quests were a lot shorter than the Velen/Novigrad stuff. I ended up picking Hjalmar unexpectedly because he seemed to be right about the bear people.

Found the sword of the rogue witcher from witcher 1, too bad it's worse than my gear.

 

[MajorMace]

Hoy hoy gentlemen.
I'm playing through twitcher 3. I thought I'd drop after 10-15~ hours (as often with open worlds, i can't fathom the purpose of those) but I kept on going this time. I think what clicked now, which didn't then, is that I'm now fully aware that the choices in the first two games don't matter all that much. I remember being genuinely disappointed back then that in a dozen of hours of playtime I still wouldn't get to meet Vernon, Triss, Jaskier, Siegfried (is he even alive, I don't remember) etc.
Anyway long story short, really like the plot again, it's back on the tracks I liked in the first two : a good balance between world-driven plots and character arcs. Here's the thing : right now we have steam sales, I know the dlcs are good from hearsay and reviews, but what are they actually about ? I know one of them is about wandering around Toussaint etc but the plot didn't sound really interesting. Do they bring anything regarding the regular plot & characters or is it just extras ?

I'm asking because even if I like it, I still don't get the open world. I think the game would have worked just the same, if not better, without these vast empty fields. I don't see it being put to use in an efficient way (for now at least) and it doesn't actually convey what it's - I assume - supposed to convey : there are factions clashing here, it's a battlefield, a zone of tension etc. I'm just roaming the land on horseback casually, sometimes bandits, sometimes monsters. No sense of danger though.
Reminds me of MGS5, another open world whose world is open for motives unknown (besides marketing, also mgs is the most baffling case since the series was renowned for its level design.. owell)
Anyway, if the twitcher3 dlcs are only extras (let's say, 2 little open world regions for instance) I'd be really disappointed.

Also I haven't read the novels so my knowledge comes from the video games only : why is triss portrayed like "the good witch" in this game ? I remember her as a rather faithful representation of a plotting character living among courtesans of wyzima and now her bio is like "she's bae, not like other witches and all". What gives ?

The design of the city is amazing

Yeah also this. Both cities look very good and strolling in the streets feels rather organic. But then again it feels empty. Wyzima - even Flotsam - had stuff to offer at least.

 

[pomenitul]

Hearts of Stone is the Witcher series' peak, but it is not narratively essential to the base game. Blood and Wine, on the other hand, is an epilogue, best tackled after completing the main quest. Both are very much worth picking up.

 

[MajorMace]

Any incentive to pick them up early ? As in, i'm still going through the OC atm, will I benefit from some additions or QOL improvements with the add-ons installed ? Can I wait and see ? I read about enchantments, glyphs etc. Are these added to the OC ?

 

[Carrion]

Any incentive to pick them up early ?

Not really. Some pieces of dialogue in Hearts of Stone play differently depending on whether you've finished the main quest, but that's about it. You can use the glyphs and other stuff in the OC as well, but I don't really see the point in that. It's best to play the DLC as separate adventures, since they all have a pretty different atmosphere.

Hoy hoy gentlemen.
Also I haven't read the novels so my knowledge comes from the video games only : why is triss portrayed like "the good witch" in this game ? I remember her as a rather faithful representation of a plotting character living among courtesans of wyzima and now her bio is like "she's bae, not like other witches and all". What gives ?

TW3 Triss is closer to the book Triss than the one in TW1. I think the main reason for her personality change was that in TW1 she basically represented all sorceresses, whereas the later games have Philippa, Síle, Yennefer and others showing you the bitchier side of witching. The writers probably also wanted to make her different enough from Shani, who was another friendly redhead.

 

[MajorMace]

Yeah that makes sense.
Well she's really bae then. Why would anyone let her go in exile besides canon autists ? Heartless fuckers.

 

[sputtering fart balloon]

Dropped this game around halfway because it's a western VN with no gameplay but you're a buster if you didn't stop and listen to this whole song when you first heard it played by the band in Novigrad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMxo_3oHULE

That Polish band, Percival, is interesting. Doing the medieval LARP thing IRL.

 

[Haplo]

Yeah that makes sense.
Well she's really bae then. Why would anyone let her go in exile besides canon autists ? Heartless fuckers.

...wait till Skellige and reunion with Yenn before you make rash decisions

 

[cvv]

 

[rusty_shackleford]

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Yeah that makes sense.
Well she's really bae then. Why would anyone let her go in exile besides canon autists ? Heartless fuckers.

...wait till Skellige and reunion with Yenn before you make rash decisions

Yenn tries to emotionally guilt-trip you. She's a horrible person.

 

[Storyfag]

Yeah that makes sense.
Well she's really bae then. Why would anyone let her go in exile besides canon autists ? Heartless fuckers.

...wait till Skellige and reunion with Yenn before you make rash decisions

Yenn tries to emotionally guilt-trip you. She's a horrible person.

Yes. This makes her the best waifu.

 

[Sentinel]

Dropped this game around halfway because it's a western VN with no gameplay but you're a buster if you didn't stop and listen to this whole song when you first heard it played by the band in Novigrad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMxo_3oHULE

That Polish band, Percival, is interesting. Doing the medieval LARP thing IRL.

They get fully into it too. This singer doing the creepy demon voice at 17:11 is kinda scary.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[AwesomeButton]

I always liked Blood & Wine better. The Toussaint region is such a blissful place.

 

[cvv]

I always liked Blood & Wine better. The Toussaint region is such a blissful place.

It'd kill you faster than the Velen bog tho. In a few short years you'd die of morbid obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, syphilis and cirrhosis at the same time.

 

[vota DC]

I always liked Blood & Wine better. The Toussaint region is such a blissful place.

It is Swadia. Monsters are destroying our country but feast until we die!