Witcher 3

Quaid_sl said:

Good lord the game slowed down once I hit Novigrad. How long until I'm done with this shit?

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Tons of optional things there, and some you will surely want to do.

Quaid_sl said:

Good lord the game slowed down once I hit Novigrad. How long until I'm done with this shit?

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Yeah there are some good things in Novigrad but they get hidden behind some boring shit and what is interesting has way to many steps as filler. Game speeds up considerably in Skel

I was very disappointed with their bro's and ho's quests. RPG's generally spend a lot of time with those and they are almost always interesting and make great diversions. Not so in Witcher 3. Those quests were way too short and or terrible.

Not a real spoiler but suggestion

Quaid_sl said:

Good lord the game slowed down once I hit Novigrad. How long until I'm done with this shit?

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Ha you will be coming back to novigrad so get to used to it. But it is a pretty dull place. Think you are good to head out once you have finished dandelions quest line.

I liked the Novigrad quests. It was a nice change of pace after all the Baron stuff.

You can always break it up with a trip to Skellige if you want. If nothing else, you'll get to do a few things over there that are otherwise practically guaranteed to be grey and give no xp.

I...I finished it.

It is the best game I have ever played.

Clocked in around 70 hours (although the ingame timer says 112... which I think is bullshit, considering I started playing last Friday)on hard, did all sidequests and contracts besides horse racing/gwent/brawling, majority of PoIs in Novigrad/Velen, less than 50% in Skellige, ended at lvl 35 when the credits rolled. The difficulty started a bit frustrating, but toward the end it was on the easier side, didn't die to any of the last bosses. Definitely get mastercrafted stuff before you finish off the main questline. The greatest quality of the game is definitely writing, you will laugh, you will cry and when things get really serious, the game will slow down and let you relax a bit before the battle. A lot has been said about graphics, I played on medium with no fps drops and while they are impressive, I don't think the game would work as well if they were worse, simply due to all the characters looking alive and visible emotions and body language. Then, of course, you have Geralt riding into a sunset, which somehow manages to look gorgeous no matter where are you going.

Now for some endgame spoilers!


I'll post something more detailed tomorrow, once I get some sleep and time to collect my thoughts.

The reception for this game here is interesting and inclines me to give it another go. Initial impressions were almost universally positive -verypositive - but the consensus seemed to be that it didn't live up to the hype. Fast forward to the past few days and you guys are much, much more effusive about it. I really tend not to like open-world games - I bought every Elder Scrolls and Grand Theft Auto as well as a handful of their imitators and finished not a one (and Skyrim was the only one to which I dedicated more than 15 hours) - but the only complaint you guys are consistently lodging against this game aside from loot/control issues is that itdoesn'toffer a true sandbox, that youaren'tinterrupted with a ceaseless discharge (intentional unintentional Souls reference) of menial miscellany, or at least not on the level of Elder Scrolls games.

That isn't a criticism for me. That makes it sound awesome.

Yes, a big part of the reason why I like the game as much as I do is because the "sandbox" is of so little consequence. They made a token effort to fill the map up with POIs, but beyond that it's just as story-driven as the previous games were.

DoctorSpooge_sl said:

The reception for this game here is interesting and inclines me to give it another go. Initial impressions were almost universally positive -verypositive - but the consensus seemed to be that it didn't live up to the hype. Fast forward to the past few days and you guys are much, much more effusive about it. I really tend not to like open-world games - I bought every Elder Scrolls and Grand Theft Auto as well as a handful of their imitators and finished not a one (and Skyrim was the only one to which I dedicated more than 15 hours) - but the only complaint you guys are consistently lodging against this game aside from loot/control issues is that itdoesn'toffer a true sandbox, that youaren'tinterrupted with a ceaseless discharge (intentional unintentional Souls reference) of menial miscellany, or at least not on the level of Elder Scrolls games.

That isn't a criticism for me. That makes it sound awesome.

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The hype was mostly about the graphics and CDPR dropped the ball in that regard but the rest of the game lives up to the initial promise that the first two witcher games hinted at. The Witcher 3 has some of the most well written and believable characters and stories ever put into a game imo. CDPR nailed the characterization so well that to me it matches any of those that you see in film and TV. It's just that good. I want to play another round savoring all the quests and characters as my initial run had to be rushed cause I got a busy rl at the moment. If you like well written stories and characters then I totally recommend the game.

Mixtilplix_sl said:

The hype was mostly about the graphics and CDPR dropped the ball in that regard but the rest of the game lives up to the initial promise that the first two witcher games hinted at. The Witcher 3 has some of the most well written and believable characters and stories ever put into a game imo. CDPR nailed the characterization so well that to me it matches any of those that you see in film and TV. It's just that good. I want to play another round savoring all the quests and characters as my initial run had to be rushed cause I got a busy rl at the moment. If you like well written stories and characters then I totally recommend the game.

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Graphics may not be as amazing as we thought they would be but they are still the best you will find atm, so i cant really say i feel let down by the fact everything shown didnt make it in.

I love this game. Playing casually after work and it's great.

There was never any hype about the graphics. Like at all.

It was always that it looked pretty good (but not mind blowing or anything), and then the pcfags went all menstrual whining that they downgraded it for consoles.

Witcher 3 Interactive Map - Velen Novigrad

Comes pretty handy

I want to play this, but i haven't finished witcher 1 and 2. should i play them first? I played witcher 1 a while, but found the combat repetitive and awful. should i play witcher 1 on easy for the story? should I play 2? or just dive into 3?

If you have time, look for some story summary on youtube, but Witcher 3 has pretty solid journal with all the major characters, so you can pick it up as you go if you don't mind some reading. Dive in I say.

..._sl said:

I want to play this, but i haven't finished witcher 1 and 2. should i play them first? I played witcher 1 a while, but found the combat repetitive and awful. should i play witcher 1 on easy for the story? should I play 2? or just dive into 3?

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Witcher 1 was boring, Witcher 2 was amazing and you should definitely play it.

Yeah I found towards the end novigrad was getting quite tedious, a lot of 'run to this place to do one thing then come the whole way back again', and the thing wasn't particularly interesting or enticing because of the janky controls. The intro to skellige has been great though, and Im really enjoying it so far. Im actually getting a lot of fun out just doing the contracts and slaying some monsters, even finished off killing some creature that was one shotting me at the start when I was 18 (it was 24) after I practiced the fight a bit, which was satisfying.

Overall, I really like this game and its the most Ive played something in ages. Was 4:30am last night when I closed it down and its been a looong time since I lost track of time in a game like this.

Highly recommend the over 9000 weight mod though, and I feel like an 'instant mount' mod would drastically increase my enjoyment of the game.

X X E X X_sl said:

Graphics may not be as amazing as we thought they would be but they are still the best you will find atm, so i cant really say i feel let down by the fact everything shown didnt make it in.

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yeah. not as amazing as promised.. but still more then my pc can handle, which is still 99% of other games just fine.

Ritley_sl said:

There was never any hype about the graphics. Like at all.

It was always that it looked pretty good (but not mind blowing or anything), and then the pcfags went all menstrual whining that they downgraded it for consoles.

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well...