Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - latecomer and newbie thoughts

Yeah, that one can be slightly tricky to pull off without a guide. Glad you got it :slight_smile:.

Agreed. It’s a great coda, not just to the game but to the whole series of games (of which this is purportedly the last one, with the story nicely wrapped up). One of the better endings to a game, really.

Yeah, makes me want to consider going back for Witcher 2 and then eventually Witcher 1. I kind of can view them as prequels even though they were made before 3.

I will likely find something different after about another week of playing Witcher 3 to wrap up sidequests.

Make sure you find the quest where Geralt eats some magic mushrooms and has a long conversation with his horse.

I heard about it, but where do I get this quest? I’m trying to find a good list of “best quests”, or the ones with the best stories.

IIRC, it’s at one of the question marks in the southeastern area of the Toussaint map. I only found it myself in my third play-through.

Fun? I collected all the Skellige deck cards, and just got around to playing the Toussaint Gwent tournament quest, and I cannot think of anything less fun. The Skellige deck totally sucks. I have all the best cards, I looked up several strategy guides and discussion boards where people discuss how to optimize your deck and win the tournament, and even after going into my game settings and lowering the Gwent difficulty to “easy,” I can’t win. I can usually win the first round, but it’s about 50/50 as to whether I win the second round, and even when I do, I can’t beat the 3rd guy, the one who uses the Skellige deck himself. Even when it looks like I might just squeak by, he always has some trick up his sleeve at the last second. I’m putting this quest on the back burner for now to finish the rest of Blood & Wine first, but the completionist in me may very well have to swallow his pride and just give up on this one.

To be fair, I had the Gwent difficulty set to easy for the entire game, so take my comments with a grain of salt. I might have had one close shave, but I found that more interesting than steamrolling opponents with the same Northern Realms deck over and over again. And I found it extremely satisfying every time I played Cerys and her shieldmaidens!

I just finished the base game the other day. Now I’m continuing with Heart of Stone, and while it seems cool so far, part of me can’t help but be anxiously awaiting the journey to Toussaint as well.

You are doing them in the right order. Hearts of Stone is excellent and the wait for Toussaint is well worth it. Blood and Wine was probably the highlight of the whole game for me, but it works best as a final act or partial epilogue to everything else.

Update:

It is being released for PS5 and Xbox SeriesX with a free upgrade for current owners.

Relevant to me: Current PC(and PS4, Xbone) owners will automatically get the upgrade to the enhanced version free of charge.

Any indication when? It’s about time for my annual playthrough, but I’ll wait for the upgrade if I have to.

It says 2021 online, but no clear release date.

I picked up The Witcher (and two expansions?) on steam last week for a steal. All three were 11.99. I don’t know if I will ever play them, but I saved so much money!

Hmm. If you don’t play them then you’ve wasted 11.99 and haven’t saved anything!

Pftt. If you are going to use logic, I can’t talk to you. But I did survive the cut screen, so I might dive in.

Yeah I’m good at logic. Alternatively, if you do play it then you really have saved $60 or so, in which case you can spend that money you saved on something else you want.

The Witcher 1? I just finished Witcher 2 and found it to be much worse than Witcher 3

I believe I grabbed Witcher 1 and 2 with all DLC for under $10 a few years ago.

Yeah, I honestly think Witcher 2 is a decent game relative to its time, but it isn’t within spitting distance of 3.

Witcher 1 is rather worse mechanically, graphically and sexually. Though it does have a decently grim story line.

I was looking at it and it came out after Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a much superior game. In fact, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblvion was a few years before it and was much better despite having poorer graphics.

I think Witcher 2 wasn’t just a worse experience than Witcher 3, but a much worse experience. Ultimately, I found Witcher 2 to be a bad game, actually.

Fully agreed.

We’ll have to agree to disagree here. I really, really disliked the mechanics of Oblivion and was pretty indifferent to the story line. I do appreciate its greater size (longer rpgs get favorable points with me). Horses for courses, obviously.

There is something about the Witcher world-building that I think just really appeals to me. Might also be better voice-acting. I definitely find that for me W3 is easily superior to Skyrim, which I’m sure many would dispute. There is just something about Witcher that feels a bit less generic despite it borrowing from just as many common fantasy tropes.