You’re going to have massive fear of missing out. You’ve gotta just make your choices and live with them. They do matter, though, and some of them will make you feel seriously shitty.
Never ever sell off your Witcher gear. Eventually you do get chests to stash stuff in. Don’t get particularly attached otherwise to any of your gear; use the best stuff you can find and feel free to let the rest of it go (except the Witcher gear, which is highlighted in green).
Money is a problem in the beginning but eventually you’ll have more than you know what to do with, so don’t sweat the gold issue.
Oh and evidently they’re doing a Witcher series for Netflix. I look forward to hating it and screaming at my television. It’ll be a blast.
ETA - if it isn’t clear in the game, and as I recall it might not be, you only have to get together the stuff to craft a potion or whatever ONCE. That’s it. Then as long as you always have alcohol in your inventory, and you will, you’ll refresh your stock of everything when you meditate.
If you play at higher difficulties (recommended…top or one notch down) you will need to prepare for some fights by using oil on your swords and drinking potions.
Also, some armor and weapons have slots that allow you to add buffs to them. Don’t neglect those.
I would also get a few points in Axii (mind control) early on. Two at least, maybe three (I forget). Occasionally it allows you options in conversations you would not otherwise have.
One thing I did not realize first time…just having a skill (the ones you choose as you level up) does not make it active. It must be slotted in to the panel on the right on that screen and you have limited slots (more open as you level up). As a result you need to plan your progression a bit and level up existing skills.
I picked up W3 bundle for 20 bucks last weekend. It’s been fun but I’ve only made level 4 and got stuck in a quest (wandering dark) that I don’t have the equipment to finish. Looks like I’m going to have to abandon several hours of gameplay which sucks.
I assume you are having trouble with the boss of that level. Its almost unfair at that progression point.
BUT I have been able to do it:
[SPOILER]
THe trick was against the big bad I didn’t really use my weapons at all but hit it with the fire attack until it was pushed into a corner. On your own this wouldn’t stop him in time for the power to recharge but you have Keira Metz zapping him with lightning that stuns him as well.
It took forever, death by a thousand tiny burns, but he eventually ran out of regenerations and died. yay.[/SPOILER]
So steam has Witcher 3 + all DLC for $20 at the moment. I really liked Witcher 2 (“My favorite type of magic - Lesbomancy!”) but one thing drove me nuts was that you had to apply oils & drink potions before a fight, but you had no idea if a fight was coming or not, and they wore off in 5 or 10 minutes. So you could start exploring a cave or skulking around a camp, use your oils & potions, only to find that either you used the wrong ones, or they wore off before you actually started fighting. Does the same thing happen in Witcher 3?
Sorta, but not really. It isn’t really an issue in term of mechanics. You can pause and take any potions or apply oils at any point in a fight and oils specifically are based on # of attacks, so don’t wear off on a timer. Potions are on a timer, but they are so easily refreshed in this game that it is almost never an issue.
It’s only bothersome if you’re an impatient type who wants visceral, immersive combat to the point where they hate pausing to drink potions/pick bombs/apply oils :).
Potions and oils are still a Thing, but you have infinite oil and can reapply whenever (even mid-combat IIRC). Potions are also simpler : you craft them once and then you just have a stock of them forever ; and you can imbibe them wherever. So if you have an idea what you’re going to fight or what you’re going to need you can tailor your drug use ; and if you don’t you can just go with the old staples (they last for quite a while, too ; and again you have an unlimited stock replenished on rest so it’s not like you’re wasting anything by just shotgunning some pots every so often). The only mechanic gating potion use is that if you drink too many at once you start getting real sick but a) you can specialize in potions if you want, which lets you drink more and b) you can always drink the “reset every potion effect including poison” potion and be good as new.
Also the game is REALLY good. Get it. There’s Cheesemancy in it.
Cool, thanks. In Witcher 2 you couldn’t reapply/drink during a battle, since you had to into the meditation state. So you had to guess ahead of time when/what kind of battle you were going into, or consult a guide or reload a previous save after you got slaughtered.
Just to add to this, a potion-focused Witcher is VERY formidable. Once you’ve dug down into the tree a bit you can transform into quite the powerhouse.
That said all of the trees are functional/reasonably balanced and will get the job done. There are numerous ways to build an effective Geralt, which adds a bit to replayability( but it is a longgg game, so you won’t have to worry about that for a awhile ).
Oh absolutely. I specc’d almost full green on my first playthrough (with token red thrown in for sword damage early on), reasoning that it was akin to hard mode in W2 which is how I wanted it and I could sword my way through most everything anyway.
I had been playing a lot of Dark Souls, you see.
And then somehow my grenades started destroying entire bandit camps by themselves. Also I had like a million of them and it was so absurdly OP I just kept digging deeper. Meanwhile my friend was like “Igni is pretty good when you upgrade it, you can one shot guys with it if you go deep enough” and I could only snigger. Come back when your shrapnel has shrapnel, nerd !
There are also a lot of great mods available at nexusmods for W3. One of my favorites is a mod that will auto apply the relevant oils to your weapon as you go into battle.
I wound up buying this around Christmas, and have been playing it a lot for the past month or so. Every bit of praise in this thread is deserved, and if anything, understates what a great game this is. Good gameplay, interesting characters and plot, etc. Even the characters who you think are going to wind up evil are far more nuanced -Dijkstra’s speech about why he hates Radovid is one of the best things I’ve ever seen in a video game.
I’m maybe 1/4 - 1/3 of the way through, and I’m still not sure who I should be rooting for - Radovid to repel Nilfgaard and keep a free North? Sure he’s insane, but are the Nilfgaardians worse? Should the Skelligans remain free, when their economy apparently depends on raiding civilization, slaughtering & enslaving peasants? I have no idea.
And the trolls are just awesome. The way Bart (Djikstra’s vault guard) was so distraught that he had let the chorfun be stolen, and the way Djikstra’s gruffly consoled him. The boat guard, the trolls who wanted shoes, I was so disappointed whenever I reached the end of a troll dialogue tree.
With regard to the major plot story, and the final resolution / cut scene you’ll end up with…I’d recommend looking up a walkthrough or wiki that identifies the dialog branching points in the game that determine your final plot resolution. They are few, not obvious, irreversible, and can railroad you into an ending that was not the one you wanted or thought you deserved.
IMO part of what is so great about the writing in this game is how non-obvious the plot branch points are. Like I real life, you can constantly make little decisions about how you act or what you say, but most of the time your choices don’t make a damn bit of difference. But in this game, you’re constantly being surprised about what did or did not matter. (Unlike other RPGs that bring the plot to a screeching halt when there’s a decision to make: do you want the BLUE ENDING or the RED ENDING?!)
I looked up a guide like this after finishing the game, and it honestly ruined a bit of the magic for me. The story felt less meaningful once I knew how the trick worked.
