I might be late to the game but Witcher 3 is one of the best games I've ever played.

The Game Room
1

Seriously, I’m afraid I’m getting closer to the end of the last DLC and I’m going to be heartbroken. The only other game I’ve felt like that about in the past few decades was Red Dead Redemption, and while I was more emotionally involved with that one it wasn’t as flat out good a game, I think.

Seriously. I love that the side quests are good and interesting and only once or twice have I had to go flower picking. I love Geralt and his dad jokes. I love having him shave every so often and watching his beard grow back. I… could do with less T&A, and I think it’s hilarious everybody greases up to do the nasty because they’re very… shiny?, but you can’t win 'em all.

I think it’s hilarious that in general the game is about family, and deals realistically with war, and then they let some 12 year old boy add a ton of titties in. But hey, it’s less “you aren’t welcome in this game, female” than most games. AND at least one set of dem titties was solidly middle aged, which must have been very confusing for the peanut gallery. So, you know, win some, lose some.

I love that I had a side quest to get his portrait made and the results are awesomely hilarious. I love that I got so worked up about some of the choices I had to make that I cheated and spoiled myself and I still didn’t know what to do because sometimes all your options just suck and that’s life. (Sorry, Baron.) I love that the relationship options were actually pretty meaningful and bittersweet.

I am not quite sure why at this point my Geralt is pretty much a rolling armored division but he dies if he trips off a hay loft, but I suppose we all have our little peccadilloes.

I was really uninterested in this game until I saw a lot of people talking about just how big the world is around last Christmas or so; I had to decide on something to play when I got tired of Creeding Asses and wanted a big open world so I picked this over Fallout 4 and I am so glad. I wish once I found a game I love that they’d just keep making content for it forever.

I’d try the other two games but I kind of get the feeling it would be a step down, yes? (Also, ugh, Yennifer is such a drama hound, please don’t make me hang out with her again.)

2

W3 is bazillion times better than W2 which is a ton better than W1. The combat especially was horrible in the first game, not to mention you go around collecting trading cards of the women Geralt sleeps with which might not be your cup of tea. Though if you do check Witcher 2 out it’s mostly about Triss for the romance parts, I can’t remember if Yennifer makes much of an appearance at all.

3

Well, look, if bangin’ dimes is part of the game then you better fucking believe I’m going bang the… dimiest dimes. My husband was there watching when I met the Clearly Fuckable Dame in the Hearts of Stone DLC. “Have you seen that pair yet?” “Not yet.” “Are you gonna?” “You always ask stupid questions?”

(Spoiler: I did. It was ridiculous. I’m so sorry he missed it.)

ETA - I liked Triss, but my understanding is she’s kind of horrible also in the previous games, which makes me sad.

4

The story in Witcher 1 is pretty grea,t though a slow burn. Witcher 2 is a bit convoluted, even by Witcher standard, but still pretty good.

Witcher 3 is definitely several steps up from either.

I just finished the last bit of DLC myself, was pretty damn great. I won’t spoil it, but keep a close eye on the final scene, something happens at the end, a tiny little thing, that was almost magical. Made me tear up.

Great game. Can’t wait for Cyberpunk.

The combat has never been good on any of the games really. Witcher one was this weird hybrid of mouse and keyboard tactical and action. Two was unforgiving, and not much better than 3 in terms of responsiveness.

5

I am also completely thrilled that there is an easy mode. I suck at video games and I never get to see the rest of the story if you don’t give me an easy mode.

6

I think I died like 5 times in the tutorial/opening in EASY in in the Witcher 2. They patched it up though and made the game a bit easier.

7

In Witcher 3, I fell off a wall and died during the tutorial. I’m sure everyone was REALLY impressed :stuck_out_tongue:

I never finished the game but should give it another try one of these days. I do remember everyone having a sob story about why they shouldn’t have to pay me and me quickly being “Shut up and pay your bills, deadbeat” to everyone. Hey, if I was hiring an exterminator to get the opossums out of my attic, I’m not going to wait until he’s done and say “Oh, also my son is sick. Yep, so very very sick. He really needs this money for the doctor but… here you go… I guess…” Look, lady, you should have thought about that before hiring me to get the Drowners out of your basement.

8

I played through the vanilla game already. Does the DLC just add extra quests, or do I start a whole new area/storyline or what?

Agree the game is pretty great. I kinda wished they’d made the combat system deeper. You can tell they wanted to, with all the potions and spells and items and different enemies with different vulnerabilites. But even on the harder difficulty, once you get past the first few levels, you can just ignore all that stuff, since most things are pretty easily killable.

But as far as offering a well-developed open world, its pretty on point.

9

I got into the books because of the games, and have found the world fascinating. The games are full of references that you probably don’t have to get, but which the books fill you in on. Fortunately, most of the books can be bought in Kindle editions with accompanying audio companions, and the reader has been fantastic. I had previously been going through the novels, but now I must recommend reading the short story collections first. This page gives the details:

https://www.reddit.com/r/witcher/comments/3qm8p9/so_you_want_to_read_the_witcher_books_guide/

It’s a little out-of-date. The Tower of Swallows has now already gotten an official translation.

I haven’t finished the previous two games, though at this point I think I’ll worry about them after going through the whole book series again first. But if you want to get the background of the games, YouTube has videos of the relevant plot scenes. Takes some 20 hours of viewing to get through the vital info for both games.

10

She’s not horrible-horrible, just a bit bland and bossy though nowhere near as bossy as Yen can be (but I love the whole chemistry Yen and Geralt have, so :wink: ).
But she does do a very shady thing that the player could only know is a shady thing if he’s read the books… or played W3. In the books she’s kind of this adoptive daughter to Geralt and Yen/a sister to Ciri, even though she has a giant crush on him. But in W1 Geralt loses all his memories and she seizes the opportunity to pose as the love of his life and not telling him anything about Yen *or *Ciri. In W2 Geralt slowly starts remembering Yen, and in W3 he remembers everything and starts actively looking for her.
I’m not sure you can openly confront Triss about it in W3, but Yen is pretty pissed off about the whole thing as you may have seen. It *was *a good bed - it starred in the opening scene of the first game :).

[QUOTE=Simplicio]
I played through the vanilla game already. Does the DLC just add extra quests, or do I start a whole new area/storyline or what?
[/QUOTE]

Heart of Stone is an additional questline in the Novigrad area (plus it fleshes out the whole NE of the map with new stuff, a few more quests and contracts) with some pretty great bits. Blood & Wine is a full blown expansion set in another country, new map new monsters new characters new Gwent deck etc…

11

I’m still blown away by the attention to detail in every aspect of the world. I swear every medieval historian in Poland must have been involved in some way. Some of the examples are little things, like the stitching and construction of some random peasant’s garments. Or the fact that all of the leather straps on Geralt’s armor actually seem to serve a purpose. For a while I was missing important conversations while gawking at some little material detail in the background.

The entire world is obviously a fantasy creation, but it’s one made with exquisite design and world building. In comparison, the worlds made by Bethesda or Bioware seem to be simultaneously bland and ridiculously fantastical.

I need to get the expansions and play through them. At some point I’ll replay the whole thing, but I’m afraid that if I do it too soon, some of the magic will be ruined (while there was a lot of genuine choice and surprising consequence, much of the feeling of “anything could happen” was just well-crafted writing).

12

Yep.

Medieval fantasy settings made by not a single “old world” dev :slight_smile:

visiting family in Germany was super cool, not only because of the food and, everything being so damn clean (I swear we passed by the ‘bad part of town’ which was marred by a solitary napkin near the trash), was the sense of history… old, old history. Several pieces of the original wall that protected the town, dating back to the 1th century still stood!

13

Agreed, even though I still wonder why so many of the jerkins Geralt can wear come in such hideous colours. I’m not clamouring for my peasant misery simulator ™ to be World of Brown and medieval folks were actually pretty into the garish, but c’mon, teal and purple stripes ? Lime ? Yeesh :eek:.

Also the world being hella realistic doesn’t stop the designers from goofing off too. Obviously the world is full of little pop culture reference e.g. Durden the Tailor, get it ? You can also find Tyrion Lannister’s body, as well as a sword stuck vertically in a fire (Dark Souls, anyone ?). In W2 you could stumble upon Altaïr in a crushed hay cart. Things like that.
But there’s more. Play W2 and upon reaching the first village you might or might not notice something is… off about the villagers. Maybe it’ll jump to your eyes, maybe not, but once seen you can’t unsee it : a good many of them aren’t wearing any pants. Why ? A bug during development caused random NPCs to spawn without their clothes on. The devs found that funny and deliberately left some of that wonky code in after fixing it :).

And then there’s the trolls. All of the trolls. Boats guard boats !

14

Back when I was still reading every book one of them was a hilarious little Twilight parody.

One detail I love is how all Geralt’s outfits are patched to hell… Because it’s real armor stolen from real corpses who have really been maintaining it.

The trolls are so sweet, I hate when I have to kill one.

15

There was one maneater troll I felt obliged to kill, but otherwise they were harmless dolts, and usually funny.

I haven’t actually finished the game, and I was planning to deal with the DLC in another run-through. I’m real close, but there’s no reason anymore for me to bother chasing after all those question marks on the Skellige map. I liked even all those invitations to explore, but I need absolutely no more money before I confront the final battle.

16

Including ALL the prostitutes? That’s a fair bit of bangin’ if you’re going to be a completist :D.

But I do like the fact that despite his…uh…casual attitude towards recreational sex, Geralt’s “familial” relationships feel quite strong and real. The writing really is well done.

True, but I’d say storywise all three deliver the same fairly strong and morally ambiguous set of choices. Those Poles are quite the morose fatalists. I think the first two are still worth it for the backstory and writing ( though the sex card collecting in 1 really is the height of juvenalia ). Witcher 2 at the very least I think is worth playing, despite the dicey mechanics. You can at least play varied builds unlike 1, where there really was only one optimal way to create a character.

But I agree 3 really is the masterpiece.

Second ;).

17

There’s a certain sort of 19th century “anthropology” museum that is common in the northeast US. These are packed full of souvenirs of some rich fop who touristed around the world and kept a diary that just barely qualified as “scholarship”. There’s barely any thought about the lives of the people that these artifacts come from, or any context at all really. Just a bunch of exotic mementos and shinies.

The material culture of Skyrim reminds me of such a museum. To be entirely uncharitable, it feels like the designers of all the background objects had one or two semesters of medieval history in college (where they paid attention just enough to get a B-), go to the local ren faire every few years, and have a buddy that’s totally into SCA. They dimly understand that objects have meaning, and that the world is full of peasants that farm muck or something. So they dutifully check out a few books on Scandinavian design motifs, make a bunch of “clutter”, and scatter that shit all around the world without much further thought. The world that’s produced is instead filled with Epic Architecture and Legend, suitable for a pretty awesome heavy metal album cover, but is otherwise flat and dead.

In the Witcher 3, I’ve spent hours gawking at the peasants going about their daily lives. I bet if you went into the animations, there’d be easily 10-100 times as many minutes of Peasant Economic Activities animated in W3 vs Skyrim.

18

You swisha-swash wham-a-wham ?! Now we see who the *real *monsters are… :slight_smile:

19

**Hearts of Stone **expands the Velen/Novigrad map to the NE a bit and adds a new questline & a different way to upgrade weapons & armor.

Blood & Wine adds a completely new map with new highest-tier Witcher swords & armor, and what is basically Geralt’s retirement send-off.

20

Pam paraaaaaaam…