The Witcher 3 Pre-Expansion Thread

[Zep Zepo]

Having never played Twitcher 1 or 2. I felt the C&C in Twitcher 3 was something I was not privy too. Most of the choices seemed obscure at best (for the most part). I just ended up haphazardly picking shit and hoped for the best.

Zep--

 

[Brayko]

Yeah don't expect it to pass VD's C&C test. Its basically a Bioware game with a much better plot and characters and better character system.

 

[Azarkon]

Spoiler

A lot of the choices came off as arbitrary because you didn't know how the plot would end up to begin with. Sure, you know Ciri was going to be central to it, but did you know your parenting choices would have an effect on whether she "dies"? No, you don't, and the game doesn't tell you, so when it offers you those parenting choices, you have no idea whether it's just fluff content vs. vital C&C.

And I'd argue that it isn't just a matter of being overly protective. For example, I distinctly remember the scene at Avallach's lab - and keep in mind Avallach is presented as a wise, heroic character in this game - where Ciri wants to SMASH, and you have the choice to either tell her to man up to her destiny, or "go ahead, do it." I'm sorry, but which parent would actually take the second choice and think it'd be a great way to raise their child? That whenever they want to throw a tantrum, you just let them?

In fact, a lot of the parent-child interactions between Geralt and Ciri feel retarded, even in retrospect. Think about the "correct" choices in 2/5 critical events: "hey I know, SNOWBALL FIGHT!!!" in Blood on the Battlefield and "go ahead, SMASH the lab cause you feel insecure!" in Child of the Elder Blood. In these two cases, Geralt is basically treating Ciri as a child, yet they're the "correct" choices.

The other three are less problematic because two of them are straight-forwardly "are you a douche?" choices: ie do you accept money in front of Ciri's face for retrieving her, and do you forbid Ciri to visit her friend's grave for no cause besides "I'm in a hurry." The third one, where you allow Ciri to face the Lodge alone, is capable of being portrayed as not being overly protective, which is fine.

But then where does that leave us? Two "douche" choices, one "overly protective" choice, and two "be a child" choices? Not exactly impressive in terms of the moral it teaches.

Spoiler

Like I said, I haven't checked what the "right" choices were, I was basing it on my two playthroughs. Anyway:

With the snowball fight, your options are basically to cheer Ciri up after her failures, or tell her that it's alright that she can't do everything, possibly causing her to give up on her current traning. It seems fair that the former would be the better choice when it comes to preparing Ciri for her challenge. The other choices you mentioned could be seen as Geralt robbing Ciri of her own agency, making her decisions for her: overruling her choice to visit Skjall, stepping in as a parent to prevent her smashing the lab, or making her feel like a simple pawn by accepting Emhyr's gold. Eh, maybe it's a bit of a stretch with some of those choices, but there is still a certain logic behind them. Alternatively you could just scratch everything I just said and simply see it as a question of whether you've been nice to Ciri or not (maybe she just needs to be confident about herself to succeed?), which I suppose seems more likely but would also be pretty lame.

I honestly don't get the complaints about the game not telling you that Ciri can die. At all. How explicit should it have been, exactly? I just can't see it as a bad thing if it turns out that the choices you thought were just fluff actually carried real consequences.

Spoiler

That might have been the logic ie "allow Ciri to do whatever she wants" but, besides being a shitty way to parent, I don't see why such choices were made the difference between life and death. That's, in fact, the bigger problem. The game makes this psychological hocus pocus about whether you cheered her up with a snowball fight, whether you smashed Avallach's lab, and whether you allowed her to deal with the Lodge herself decide her fate. But that's pretty dumb when you think about it - Ciri is a grown woman who's had to survive on her own for years while being chased by the Wild Hunt through different worlds. How could her personality be so fragile that not being able to have a temper tantrum at Avallach's house would break her confidence? That's simply not believable.

Plus, it's a "lame" way to do C&C in the first place. The whole narrative of Witcher 3 is about Geralt's search for Ciri, and yet at the end, the pay off of whether she lives/dies is based on a "choice" you didn't even know you were making? By and large, the "fluff" choices in Witcher 3 have no consequence, so I don't buy the "you should've put thought into every choice" argument. Imagine making a choice in Act 1 about whether to give money to a beggar, and then later on, in Act 3, the beggar shows up and says, "Aha! You didn't give me money in Act I, and because of that, my wife starved to death, and I decided to become a master assassin, and now I'm going to murder Triss and Yennefer to make you feel the way I felt. <kills Triss and Yennefer>. So long, douchebag, you ought to have thought harder about not giving money to me!" That's not great C&C. That's the developer trolling you with bullshit.

 

[k-t]

Spoiler

That might have been the logic ie "allow Ciri to do whatever she wants" but, besides being a shitty way to parent, I don't see why such choices were made the difference between life and death.

Spoiler

I'm not sure why almost everyone assumes that Ciri is dead in the bad ending. Only thing we know is that she didn't return. Ciri has the power to travel to any world, and IMO the most important thing that keeps her in this particular world is her strong relationship with Geralt. It can be severed by player choices, so in the end she could've decided to "walk on her own path", or something.

 

[Carrion]

Spoiler

I'm not sure why almost everyone assumes that Ciri is dead in the bad ending. Only thing we know is that she didn't return. Ciri has the power to travel to any world, and IMO the most important thing that keeps her in this particular world is her strong relationship with Geralt. It can be severed by player choices, so in the end she could've decided to "walk on her own path", or something.

Spoiler

That's a very good point, although for me the bit of dialogue with the crone might've confirmed her death, with her mentioning that Ciri lies (dead?) somewhere alone in the snow. So little is known of the crones that it's possible that she was somehow able to pick Geralt's brain and was just fucking with him, though.

 

[Excidium II]

Novigrad has way too much content

 

[DeepOcean]

Novigrad has way too much cutscenes

Fixed.

 

[Excidium II]

Yeah. It's like they didn't know what to do with a witcher in an urban zone. I'm tired of dudes throwing themselves on my swords like they forgot what a witcher does for a living

 

[Riso]

People complaining about too much content in a game.

I think that's new.

 

[Brayko]

People complaining about too much content in a game.

I think that's new.

When it enters "clutter" territory like POE and DA:I than yes. Theres intriguing content and then there's content overload where's you can smell the mechanics and programming dumps which could be potentially immersion breaking.

 

[Carrion]

It's not so much about the amount of content but the clear loss of focus. I thought the Novigrad quests were mostly great and a ton of fun when judged in isolation, but the story got heavily sidetracked and the whole thing probably should've been structured differently. The storyline has got a lot of length but not that much depth, and some interesting elements and characters are forgotten almost as quickly as they're introduced, as the plot constantly keeps moving the goal posts. You end up with a rather absurd chain of events that ultimately doesn't have much of a payoff, which is pretty surprising considering that CDPR are usually great at creating satisfying climaxes for their storylines (see Velen or pretty much any chapter from the previous two games).

 

[Gerrard]

Call me a fag but that scene where Geralt finds Ciri in the hut on the island was fantastic.

I think I can honestly say now that the work they put into facial animations is the best thing they as a technical aspect.

 

[Brayko]

Use spoiler tags ffs

 

[Malpercio]

Oh FFS.

I entered in a cave to recover the Cat School Sword.. lotted everything, but there wasn't any schematic.

Spoiler

The problem? I had to check the graffiti at the entrance to "magically" make the schematic appear in the chest (a chest that I already checked too!).

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

I call bull on that, found plenty of schematics without ever clicking on the thingie. It's way more likely you didn't loot that chest before.

 

[Gerrard]

Yeah, I found some of the schematics without even having the quest for them or inspecting the symbol.

Use spoiler tags ffs

 

[Malpercio]

I call bull on that, found plenty of schematics without ever clicking on the thingie. It's way more likely you didn't loot that chest before.

I'll check if I have a save before that, but I'm pretty sure I looted everything on the cave, hence why I resorted to checking the quest mark at the entrance.

 

[made]

People complaining about too much content in a game.

I think that's new.

Bet you loved scanning planets in Mass Effect.

While TW3 busywork > busywork in similar games, there's still too much unnecessary padding. They should have scrapped half the filler quests and instead fleshed out the rest, especially in Novigrad.

 

[DeepOcean]

People complaining about too much content in a game.

I think that's new.

The problem is that by content, what is in there, on Novigrad, is shitty combat with enemies you probably outleveled and tons of cutscenes. Velen and the Skellige Islands are the best part of the game by far and Novigrad is a never ending cutscene about random shit you are not sure you care about.

 

[Carrion]

Nah, Velen is by far the best area of the game but Skellige is the worst, having the worst writing and generally the lowest quality of content with notably more filler than the other two areas. It too does have some notable highlights when it comes to the side quests, and it arguably has the most fun exploration of all of the areas (excluding all those smuggler's caches), but its pacing issues are much more severe than Novigrad's (so many quests that require you to travel to hell and back on a slow-ass boat), it has a few half-assed fetch quests that should've never made it to the game in the first place, it feels both stretched and compressed at the same time, and the main story part there feels almost like an afterthought.

All of the areas have their own strengths and I like every one of them, but it's just so notable how Velen manages to stand out so much from the rest in terms of writing, atmosphere, pacing and quest design.

 

[Beowulf]

Novigrad, with Dandelion storyline is just a string of predictable fetch quests until you hit that CSI Novigrad quest.

 

[Tigranes]

The fucking boat. The fucking boat and the fucking diving sequences. Fuck you TW3, I would just watch TV & look at some DeviantArt if I wanted unskippable dialogue and fake splashy water.

Velen is indeed far superior, and TW3 definitely wears out its welcome after the halfway or 2/3 point. TW combat is so limited that it doesn't support swinging swords at a thousand monsters for 80 hours. I don't need 50 monster contracts. I don't need to accompany Ciri or Triss or whoever to every single step of the plan. Grab that stone, oh on the way back let's check out my friend who lives nearby how is he doing, oh also let's get on a boat and talk to some secondary character, ok now we can use the stone...

 

[Excidium II]

Novigrad also has a serious lack of monster hunting contracts inside it, y'know the kind of thing witchers should be doing instead of fighting suicidal thugs

In twitcher 1 Vizima you had the vampire prostitutes, cockatrice in the sewer, the thing with tentacles, necrophages in the cemetery...

 

[Brayko]

Yeah that's shitty part about open world games. Less focii on individual areas.

 

[Carrion]

Although there could've been a couple of more of them, I think the witcher contracts inside the city are pretty cool, different from the stuff you find in the outskirts or the other areas. Probably not as cool as Vincent the Werewolf, the zeugl or the vampire brothel, but those were something you just kind of bumped into for one reason or another whereas the actual contracts had you do some seriously intense stuff like killing stray dogs for Thaler or scouring the sewers for drowners.

The thugs are a bit of a mystery, though, as they bring nothing to the game. On my first playthrough I thought they bothered me because I had pissed a few people off in certain quests and shrugged it off as a nice bit of C&C, but no, they'll attack you even if you're as diplomatic as you possibly can be. They could've at least limited their attacks to night time instead of them throwing themselves at Geralt's sword in broad daylight. In Vizima you could walk around for hours drinking beer, playing dice and ploughing whores without having to enter combat once, and it was still fun.