That certainly factors into my own scoring. I love huge, open worlds and Witcher 3 scores very highly there. For me the main plot is usually a back burner thing (game mechanics allowing). In games like the Fallouts I’m often much more engrossed with secondary quests and will return to the main plot only periodically. And yes, I tend to be a completionist .
But beyond that my fondness for the game also based on what I consider to be superior writing, mostly quite good voice acting, lovely graphics and pretty solid gameplay. But mostly the first. I could pick some nits with the game to be sure, but Witcher 3’s combination of humor, sentiment and bleak pragmatism was pretty appealing to me.
While rare being 40+ years old with kids, today I had the chance to play for a few hours.
I am looking for Tris and had to…ugh…follow thieves to their secret area. Assassin Creed style, my least favorite type of thing. I hate following from a distance in games.
Anyway, made it past that and hope they don’t do that to me much more.
This game is like what everyone hoped Ultima IX would be when we saw screenshots and demos.
I kind of love it.
Hey, when Geralt says, “Windy here” or “Looks like lightning”, is there any significance to it? He comments, only very occasionally, on the weather or environment and I wonder if it was anything other than game-flavor.
Am I the only one who is blown away by the interiors of buildings in this game? A lot of screenshots showing off the beauty of this game show landscapes, but when I am inside manors, inns, etc., I am blown away by how great the interiors look.
I was pleased to see that Ultima VII was an inspiration for some game designers that worked on this game. It is clear that if Richard Garriott could go back and make a new Ultima game, Witcher 3 could be the model of everything he hoped for around the Ultima VII time.
There was a fair amount of gushing in this old thread. I’m fully onboard with lazybratsche in particular, with their comments on peasant animations and realistic-seeming background detail.
Heck, I get a big kick out of Geralt’s dynamic beard . I made a regular habit of visiting barbers just to enjoy watching his appearance change.
I saw a barber in the really big city I’ve been in(looking eternally for Dandelion). I didn’t use it. Does it do more than reset his short hair look from earlier?
In addition to having the option of changing hair-styles, you can also just get a clean shave, in which case his facial hair grows back over time. He goes from clean-shaven, to stubbly, to short-beard, to long-beard (but it maxes out well short of Gandalf, more’s the pity) and does so pretty seamlessly. It’s an absolutely tiny thing, but I honestly find it a charming bit of graphics candy.
It’s already growing in my game. He got clean-shaved back when he met some nobleman and while it cut to a couple weeks later, his beard has grown over the time I’ve been playing.
Right. It will grow until it hits a maximum and then freeze. You can at any time go to a barber and start the process from clean-shaven again. Again, a very minor thing and probably not of interest to many . But it is very cheap and there is a barber in many major towns. I like the idea of Geralt trying to get presentable once in awhile when in civilization, then grizzling up again as he gets distracted hunting necrophages in the boonies. Bit of role-playing distraction.
I’m so glad I grabbed a torch. Lighting it up, even inside buildings, reveals the detail.
This is the first game that made me think, “Yes, my little-gaming-laptop-graphic-card is actually working.”
The game is set to near max settings(1080p, though, not 4K) and is honestly stunning. Again, it’s the big city I’m in that is blowing my mind, not the nature. Yes, nature is beautiful, but I’ve seen things like that before(Breath of the Wild, etc.). These buildings and alleyways feel real.
That sounds perfect to me. If you are driven to “finish” and don’t have tons of time, you can, but there’s lots of room to play around if you DO have time and you want to.
Maybe someday I will be good enough at video games to play this.
I’m getting a little burned-out on sidequests. This game is amazing, but (again, much like Ultima VII), you can get caught up in literally hours and hours of sidequests. It’s nice, but I have to remind myself to just go and push through the main storyline.
With that “5 levels above and you get 1/15 experience”, I try to do most sidequests within that range, but yeesh, it never ends!
I am finally almost to the point of finding Dandelion, a plot-point that has taken hours of gameplay just to deal with. I think I have 17 hours in the game.
I think it is a small case of cabin fever as well. I love, in fact am in awe, of how big Novigrad is, but most of my quests have been within there, a few taking me to another location just outside the city.
I just waved goodbye to Triss on a ship and went back to speak to Priscilla about performing a play to convince a small-person to doppelgang as Dandelion.
I did use a map to locate Places of Power and have, I think, claimed all but two of the ones available in the three areas I’ve been(Novigrad, White Orchard, and Velen). The two I missed I looked a bit into and they require some kind of quest to activate the area.
Level 17, with tons of combat abilities, all levels of deception/persuasion, and a few points in fire magic as well, my most common magic attack.
I almost never throw bombs and I hardly use the other magic spells. I did use the calming/hypnotism one on some humans in battle and it worked great, but I usually just throw fire and wack them with my sword. I’m still alive, so it seems to be working.
As somone said in a Reddit post I recently read though, there’s no point in intenionally trying to level up in this game. The XP system (part of which is the reduction in XP for quests far below your level) is designed to always keep you at the right level for the main story, and in fact it’s balanced so that everyone will be pretty much the same level when they finish the game, regardless of how much or little side content they did.
Also, I have to add as an aside, I’m mystified by all the concern these days about games being too easy. I like being a god of war, being able to return to earlier areas/do lower-level side-quests and one-hit kill enemies. It’s fun. One of the things I hated about Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was the mandatory enemy level scaling. And though I never wind up following through on a New Game+ in any game, I was quite disappointed to learn that in Witcher 3’s New Game+, enemies levels are scaled up.
One thing to keep in mind is that some of the side quests affect the ending. So if you completely ignored everything except the main story, you might not get the ending you want.
I found the whole Novigrad quest line kind of a grind. I don’t think it would be too bad if you stuck to the main story, but when you add in the side quests, there’s too much to do there all in one shot. The problem for me is that I was afraid if I started the quest where you sail for Skellige, a bunch of Novigrad side quests would fail and undiscovered ones would become never available, so I felt compelled to do everything you can possibly do in Novigrad before moving on. In retrospect, I’ve learned that’s not necessary.
The skills system is one of the frustrating things about this game. At level 31, with 51 skill points, I bought a respec potion and decided to try out a “build” I looked up in one of these online guides with build suggestions. Turns out even with 51 points, I couldn’t build the entire build, because of the system where you have to spend 10 points in one level before you can buy any skills in the next level. So if you want a build where you have several high-level combat skills, several high-level potion skills, and several high-level signs skills, you have to pump points into buying lower-level skills you’re not even going to use. I also don’t like the fact that you can only have so many “active” skills at one time, even when you have the points to buy way more.
Such aspects of this game remind me of Red Ded Redemption 2, where they intentionally made it somewhat cumbersome in order to make it more “challenging” or “realistic.” To me, that just makes it less fun.
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. I made a regular habit of visiting barbers just to enjoy watching his appearance change.
. But it is very cheap and there is a barber in many major towns. I like the idea of Geralt trying to get presentable once in awhile when in civilization, then grizzling up again as he gets distracted hunting necrophages in the boonies. Bit of role-playing distraction.