Witcher 3

Needless

Toe Sucker
<Silver Donator>
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Worth playing 1&2? I tried to play the first one when it came out but haaated the controls lol
thinking of just watching catch up videos or something and start when this comes out, it looks incredibly good

edit: fuck it, gonna try and power through the first game this weekend!
 

supertouch_sl

shitlord
1,858
3
1 is a good RPG if you can get past the god awful voice acting. 2 is a lot more refined but also much smaller. I personally thought the story was pretty weak and there wasn't much "witching" done.
 

spronk

FPS noob
23,820
29,047
Worth playing 1&2? I tried to play the first one when it came out but haaated the controls lol
thinking of just watching catch up videos or something and start when this comes out, it looks incredibly good

edit: fuck it, gonna try and power through the first game this weekend!
yeah i think i'm gonna just watch a catch up video, i couldn't get into 1 at all and I tried playing 2 last weekend but the controls just are way off when using an xbox one controller. everything just feels wonky and wrong and "floaty" when compared to a normal console game, maybe i'll try some more this weekend. I'll be playing W3 on PS4 so i think it'll be a bit smoother experience and I'm sure they'll have a quick story catch up in game.

haven't watched this, ppl say it may have some w3 spoilers in it

 

Evernothing

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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Read a synopsis for 1, or watch youtube.

I highly recommend playing 2. It's one of my favorite RPGs ever.

It's also like $3 on steam at the moment.
 

Joeboo

Molten Core Raider
8,157
140
I remember Baldur's Gate coming on 5 CDs, heh.
Story time!

I was managing a Software Etc(pre-Gamestop rebranding) when Baldurs Gate originally released. As you mentioned, a 5 CD game, one of the biggest game installs I'd ever seen up to that point. Well, apparently the entire first batch of Baldurs Gate that my store received all had defective disk 4s. The install would crap out around 80% or so and not continue.

Sold a shitload of Baldurs Gate the day it released. Within the hour, one guy comes back to exchange it, says he has a defective copy that wont install. Whatever...I give him another one. Then over the next couple of hours a couple more people come back in for exchanges...then more, then the 1st guy who already did 1 echange comes back pretty pissed off. He's probably spent 2-3 hours of his day watching install progress bars at this point.

He wants me to test out another copy in our in-store PC before he takes it home. So I bust one open, start to install it, I think our in-store PC had like a 4x CD rom drive, so it was taking FOREVER. We stood around for like an hour, and sure enough, crapped out on disk 4.

Ended up taking all of our copies back as return and having to send people across the street to Best Buy to purchase it instead. That sucked ass.

2nd most annoying day ever, only behind the Starcraft 1 launch, and every bastard wanted a particular box art(3 different boxes, Protoss, Zerg, Terran). We had no clue that the boxes would be like that before launch, so we didn't know what box to hold for people that pre-ordered it. We ran out of Protoss first, and several people threw massive hissy fits that they didn't get the box they wanted, once they realized they had 3 different options. Star Wars Rebellion also launched that same day, that was a goddamn busy day(even though probably 50% of Rebellions got returned because that game was a bug-filled mess on launch)
 

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
<Gold Donor>
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For some reason the defective disk 4 thing strikes a bell.

Funnily enough I've purchased baldur's gate on 3 separate occasions. Worth it each time.
 

jdfording

Trakanon Raider
149
1,144
I just played through Witcher 1 and 2 over the last week. I actually liked both of them. The combat in Witcher 1 takes a bit to get used to but once you do it's fine. The Witcher 2 looks amazing with 2 GTX980's and Ubersampling on.
 

Vorph

Silver Baronet of the Realm
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5,527
I still think Witcher 1 was the superior game. They both had gameplay that was functional but very flawed, just for completely different reasons. The story is what matters, and Witcher 1's was a lot more interesting.
 

Zaphid

Trakanon Raider
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Witcher 1 had all the signs of being a labor of love for the devs. They managed to pack a lot of stuff into rather small areas. I don't remember the combat being bad at all, QTE-ish ? Yes, but if you didn't like it you could just level up igni and plow through the game easily.
 

Dandai

<WoW Guild Officer>
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The simplest answer is probably scope creep. They tried to make a huge game with a small studio and some shit had to be cut/rearranged.

As far as the little aesthetic changes, I'd say those were victims of performance optimization. The lighting and dynamic shadows are HUGE processing challenges, and throwing in interesting shapes and non smooth surfaces taxes your processors even more. When the rubber meets the road, you want your game running well, even if it means losing some of the flavor.

If they're guilty of anything, I'd say it's showing the game off a little too early.
 

mixtilplix

Lord Nagafen Raider
1,295
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Yeah the more and more I see of the game the more disappointing the graphics seem to me. I am chalking it up to having an open world. From what I hear CDPR aren't the kind of studio known for coding to the metal so it comes as no surprise that they had to downgrade.
 

hodj

Vox Populi Jihadi
<Silver Donator>
31,673
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Poland has a good economy, but its pay is shit. Its probably pretty hard to find experienced, quality coders in the nation, and even harder to recruit outside the nation since people have to take a pretty hefty pay cut to go work there.
 

Vorph

Silver Baronet of the Realm
11,702
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Reviews will be out starting on Tuesday, it's not one of those games that has an embargo right up to release day.

I still can't decide between PC and PS4. I'm going to play it with my DS4 either way, I don't really think that 30 vs. 60 fps matters with Witcher's combat system, I vastly prefer the sound I get from my PS4, and it doesn't matter that I won't have a savegame to import to PS4 because you get to pick what happened in TW1&2 (sort of like Dragon Age Keep, except in-game instead of on a website). Hopefully Digital Foundry does an analysis of the PS4 version this week; 30 fps I can deal with, but if there's frequent framerate drops below that it's a deal-breaker.
 

Kedwyn

Silver Squire
3,915
80
I'm getting it on PS4. Going to be played with a controller anyway so no reason to limit myself to my pc. Couch, large tv and surround sound win out for me on long games like this.

I'm not surprised the graphics got a downgrade from 2. The scope of the game world is much larger and I'll gladly take that for open world vs the corridors of 1 and 2. Still looks fine to me.