The Witcher 3 Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Cyberarmy]

PS4 player review,

http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/35956-In-depth-SPOILER-FREE-review-of-TW3-by-a-gamer

 

[Echo Mirage]

At the end look at the cave, the graphics look better than on consoles and it's with ultra and not uber which you can set in xml.

Maybe the graphics on uber will look close to what we have seen! here's hoping.

I guessing outside of the config files, HBAO+ (which they didn't have turned on) and AA are going to be the saving graces to set it above the console versions.

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

PS4 player review,

http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/35956-In-depth-SPOILER-FREE-review-of-TW3-by-a-gamer

combat 10/10

seems legit

 

[MicoSelva]

http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/35956-In-depth-SPOILER-FREE-review-of-TW3-by-a-gamer

The reviewer calls Roach a 'he', and claims that Mass Effect 2 had grid inventory (lol), so the review must be fake.

But seriously, I do nut trust the scores and opinions (10/10 combat - right), but there is some good info in there.

Can you elaborate about population density in cities some more?

Its definitely less than what has been shown in the trailers in 2013-14. But you wont be disappointed. The density is sufficient. Also the gameplay videos you are referring to might be from different times of the day... The population in the city outside might be less during different times of the day. But rest assured, walk into any building, you will find someone inside.
People dont appear on the streets doesnt mean, the city is empty. Many of them are inside.

3) Hard sifficulty suited me the best. The first difficulty is basically god mode. The second is easier than witcher 2 to play. The hard is the best I feel. U need to plan before u attack a monster. A lot depends on ur preparation. U need to keep ur weapon and armour degradation in chck. It just adds much more life to the game. But again, different people might prefer different difficulty. Playing on hard also restricts my access to a certain areas coz of the monsters, which I am happy to discover later in the game. Its a good way of saving a few spots to explore later in the game.

NO blood in water.
Quest variety only manages to surprise me. No senseless fetch quests. Even if some seem like that, they are not. The side quests in the witcher 3 are its selling point. They are simply amazing! I give you my world.

 

[Obsequious Approbation]

wow such graphics, much pixel count

Piss on Geralt, plough the downgrade, stop the thread -- where is this from? Source? Mod? Shopped? Don't remember seeing this in the game.

 

[PhantasmaNL]

"Population density may be less than in trailers but hey, everybody is inside" lol

 

[Tytus]

"Population density may be less than in trailers but hey, everybody is inside" lol

So the world is populated by Codexers, Neckbeards and Socially Awkward Penguins?

 

[Black]

PS4 player review,

http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/35956-In-depth-SPOILER-FREE-review-of-TW3-by-a-gamer

combat 10/10

seems legit

They're consolefags, they don't know any better.

 

[MicoSelva]

Time.com has some impressions. In true codexian fashion, I will only quote the negative:

the world’s also stuffed with vacuous nobodies

Cities and towns are choked with citizenry going about their scripted business, and you can chat with any of them. Trouble is, almost no one has much more than a catchphrase to work with. Wander through a village and you’ll be assaulted by “talk” prompts, but tap to do so and you’ll be treated to a barrage of boilerplate-isms: “Yes?” “Erhm?” “Step away.” “Nordling?” “Hm?” “What do you want?” “Tidings from Vizima?” Et cetera.

Conversational window dressing just wastes precious time in ginormous games like this. Better to disable that level of interactivity outright and let the ambulatory props shuffle through their subroutines. Save talking for situations that involve actual talking, in other words.

And the interface needs work

Getting Geralt to properly interact with something, say another person or chest of goods, feels a little fiddly, requiring too much sidling up or scooting backwards to conjure the prompt.

The way things are labeled also feels a little lazy: When you’re out gathering flora for The Witcher 3‘s alchemy game, for instance, the prompt you’ll see is generically “Gather Ingredients,” instead of a more helpful “Gather [name of ingredient].” Why ask players to stop and pull up a dialogue box, when you could more readily specify what they’re looking at as they wander by?

The world itself, though gorgeous, has shortcomings

Spatial physics? Who needs ’em! Instead of building off basic line of sight principles, where you might use ledges or walls or giant trees to sneak up on an opponent, enemies simply “sense” you through plainly obfuscating geometry. They’ll even brokenly fire arrows through trees, either a glitch or collision detection oversight that outs the environment as a facade in combat. Less ambitious open-world games manage to pull this stuff off competently, so why not The Witcher 3?

(For that matter, why can’t Geralt sneak? I’m not asking for Thief or Dishonored or Assassin’s Creed here, but Witchers aren’t tanks, and Geralt’s surely capable of creeping up on squads of foes, so why can’t he at least attempt to here?)

And despite its delays, the game still has bugs

My first two matches of Gwent (a semi-interesting collectible card game you can play with other characters in the game for money) crashed the game hard. And while hanging out in a tavern, a horse (not mine) outside wandered over and stuck its head through the tavern wall—creepy for all the wrong reasons.

 

[Gerrard]

Time.com has some impressions. In true codexian fashion, I will only quote the negative:

the world’s also stuffed with vacuous nobodies

Cities and towns are choked with citizenry going about their scripted business, and you can chat with any of them. Trouble is, almost no one has much more than a catchphrase to work with. Wander through a village and you’ll be assaulted by “talk” prompts, but tap to do so and you’ll be treated to a barrage of boilerplate-isms: “Yes?” “Erhm?” “Step away.” “Nordling?” “Hm?” “What do you want?” “Tidings from Vizima?” Et cetera.

I MUST TALK TO ALL OF THESE NAMESLESS NPCS
WHAT THE FUCK? THEY HAVE NOTHING INTERESTING TO SAY
SHIT GAME

 

[ArchAngel]

Time.com has some impressions. In true codexian fashion, I will only quote the negative:

the world’s also stuffed with vacuous nobodies

Cities and towns are choked with citizenry going about their scripted business, and you can chat with any of them. Trouble is, almost no one has much more than a catchphrase to work with. Wander through a village and you’ll be assaulted by “talk” prompts, but tap to do so and you’ll be treated to a barrage of boilerplate-isms: “Yes?” “Erhm?” “Step away.” “Nordling?” “Hm?” “What do you want?” “Tidings from Vizima?” Et cetera.

I MUST TALK TO ALL OF THESE NAMESLESS NPCS
WHAT THE FUCK? THEY HAVE NOTHING INTERESTING TO SAY
SHIT GAME

Well in IWD you could talk to nameless NPCs and they had lots to say. You could find out some good info on what is happening and even solve quests. In Bg1 nameless NPCs also had some cool info about quests and people or events connected with quests.

But yea, maybe AAA games like TW3 know better?
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I think Sir you don't belong on Codex

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Time.com has some impressions. In true codexian fashion, I will only quote the negative:

the world’s also stuffed with vacuous nobodies

Cities and towns are choked with citizenry going about their scripted business, and you can chat with any of them. Trouble is, almost no one has much more than a catchphrase to work with. Wander through a village and you’ll be assaulted by “talk” prompts, but tap to do so and you’ll be treated to a barrage of boilerplate-isms: “Yes?” “Erhm?” “Step away.” “Nordling?” “Hm?” “What do you want?” “Tidings from Vizima?” Et cetera.

I MUST TALK TO ALL OF THESE NAMESLESS NPCS
WHAT THE FUCK? THEY HAVE NOTHING INTERESTING TO SAY
SHIT GAME

Well in IWD you could talk to nameless NPCs and they had lots to say. You could find out some good info on what is happening and even solve quests. In Bg1 nameless NPCs also had some cool info about quests and people or events connected with quests.

But yea, maybe AAA games like TW3 know better?
.
.
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I think Sir you don't belong on Codex

Forget AAA rpgs, look at Gothic, try talking to anyone you don't have business, and tell me how much exposition and philosophy you get out of passers-by.

Or perhaps Morrowind's wiki-walkies are more to your taste?

 

[Senntinel]

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/cd-project-reds-visual-effects-artist-on-downgrade-ation-very-unfair-to-compare-trailers-and-gameplay-demos/

No downgrade, just optimisation.

Spoiler

 

[MasPingon]

I just brofisted ERYFKRAD. I'm confused.

 

[pippin]

I just brofisted ERYFKRAD. I'm confused.

Who brofists the brofister?

About NPCs in games: it baffles me that a game made in 1992 got it better than any other big rpg made after it. Especially when Ultima 7 was AAA on its day, with Origin being praised by both fans and press and with the Devil's Company watching it all from behind. And it didn't really made it complex: NPCs would wake up, do their chores, say a thing or two, eat something, and then go to sleep. Rinse and repeat. I do think this is more believable than having a gal popping out of nowhere telling you how she likes to hunt in this mountain or valley or whatever. You don't need a whole backstory to make an NPC relevant to the game; in Fallout 1, a ghoul at Necropolis could tell you about their water problem and their leader Seth without even opening the dialogue interface. If we go back to NPCs with normal day to day routines, we would make something more credible than having a guy standing there, waiting for the PC to talk to him.

 

[ArchAngel]

Time.com has some impressions. In true codexian fashion, I will only quote the negative:

the world’s also stuffed with vacuous nobodies

Cities and towns are choked with citizenry going about their scripted business, and you can chat with any of them. Trouble is, almost no one has much more than a catchphrase to work with. Wander through a village and you’ll be assaulted by “talk” prompts, but tap to do so and you’ll be treated to a barrage of boilerplate-isms: “Yes?” “Erhm?” “Step away.” “Nordling?” “Hm?” “What do you want?” “Tidings from Vizima?” Et cetera.

I MUST TALK TO ALL OF THESE NAMESLESS NPCS
WHAT THE FUCK? THEY HAVE NOTHING INTERESTING TO SAY
SHIT GAME

Well in IWD you could talk to nameless NPCs and they had lots to say. You could find out some good info on what is happening and even solve quests. In Bg1 nameless NPCs also had some cool info about quests and people or events connected with quests.

But yea, maybe AAA games like TW3 know better?
.
.
.
I think Sir you don't belong on Codex

Forget AAA rpgs, look at Gothic, try talking to anyone you don't have business, and tell me how much exposition and philosophy you get out of passers-by.

Or perhaps Morrowind's wiki-walkies are more to your taste?

To my taste would a RPG where nobody has their name above their head except for people that you know about by talking to them before or someone else telling your their name, how they look and where you can find them.

 

[PhantasmaNL]

The Gwent crashes may explain the shock and horror on the cdpr faces during the ing stream yesterday when someone on twitter asked about seeing it in action. "We think people are more interested in other things, and besides it is Very Complicated so not suited for showing now" or something to that effect. Translated, gwent may crash our stream so we it has no place in this PR session, move along now.

 

[MicoSelva]

Any Italian consolereta- gamers among the Codexers?

http://www.tmag.it/2015/05/14/the-witcher-3-wild-hunts-street-date-broken-in-italy/

 

[MasPingon]

While playing PoE I hated being flooded with the wall of text by non-important NPCs. If there is no dialog window pop up every time you click on pedestrian, I'm ok with that.

Any Italian consolereta- gamers among the Codexers?

http://www.tmag.it/2015/05/14/the-witcher-3-wild-hunts-street-date-broken-in-italy/

God damn 1st world savages.

 

[dragonul09]

Any Italian consolereta- gamers among the Codexers?

http://www.tmag.it/2015/05/14/the-witcher-3-wild-hunts-street-date-broken-in-italy/

They should put some sort of date check on those console so they can't play whenever the fuck they want,if i can't play it,nobody should play it.Fucking PC with their encrypted files...

 

[Infinitron]

About NPCs in games: it baffles me that a game made in 1992 got it better than any other big rpg made after it. Especially when Ultima 7 was AAA on its day, with Origin being praised by both fans and press and with the Devil's Company watching it all from behind. And it didn't really made it complex: NPCs would wake up, do their chores, say a thing or two, eat something, and then go to sleep. Rinse and repeat.

One reason U7 was able to do those things was because it was a top-down game, which meant you wouldn't notice all the pathfinding/teleportation hacks it did to make that stuff work. Although patrolling guards running into each other and yelling at each other to move out of the way is still funny to this day.

That stuff was also just cooler and more noticeable in U7 because of how fast it all was. You'd see waitresses zoom through the restaurant, bringing food from the kitchen and back, barking at the customers. The behaviors being scheduled were just a lot more lively. In modern games, animations tend to be a lot slower. So it's like, there might be a schedule running behind the scenes, but it's not really interesting to look at for the player. And at that point, why should it even exist?

You don't need a whole backstory to make an NPC relevant to the game

Well, NPCs in U7 did have a lot of backstory as well, even the unimportant ones. That's another one of those things that game developers just don't really do anymore.

 

[Talby]

I want to see that in more games. Two guards bump into eachother and stand there shouting for the other to move... forever. You come back six months later in game time and the town is clogged with guards shouting at eachother to move. Trade is disrupted, the economy crashes, everyone dies.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/cd-pr...nfair-to-compare-trailers-and-gameplay-demos/

No downgrade, just optimisation.

Spoiler

It's always funny to watch pr people dance around the truth. The insider in this article is more straightforward though:
http://whatifgaming.com/developer-i...-from-2013-list-of-all-features-taken-out-why

We just did not have the manpower, budget or the console power to produce the vision we intended before the consoles were released to create a more visually stunning game of higher fidelity like 2013 assets. The PCs themselves had more than enough power to achieve this vision, almost certainly. But working on the game across 3 platforms did not make it feasible to keep features included that could potentially break the game as we kept building around it. All the 2013 trailers were actually in-game footage (not prerendered or vertical slices) but essentially just not an entirely finished world running on a high-end PC at the time.

Moral of the story: consoles - making your games look like shit since forever.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

I Polygon for real? I meam seriously, right now they exist only to provide big devs with street creed. Everyone shitting on us for downgrades? Let's make Polygon call us racists and mysogynists, that will make us opponents of leftists and cool with gamers once again. At this point Polygon serves the role of Youtube trolls for the opposite site. Anita is cool for the feminists because she's opressed by mysogynistic trolls, CD Projekt is cool for the gamers because they are opressed by leftist journalists.
I mean right now if I was making a game I'd want nothing else than for Polygon to call it racists and homophobic.

 

[Alienman]

I want to see that in more games. Two guards bump into eachother and stand there shouting for the other to move... forever. You come back six months later in game time and the town is clogged with guards shouting at eachother to move. Trade is disrupted, the economy crashes, everyone dies.

Funny

You can probably make a really advanced Skyrim mod that will do that