The Witcher 3 Pre-Expansion Thread

[Gerrard]

One way to find some challenge later in the game is to choose monster contracts that are 5+ levels above you. Unlike some people wil tell you, there are ways for beating (most of) these fights, but they require proper preparation and can get pretty intense at times. It's pretty much self-imposed challenge, but if you put even a bit of thought into how to spend your skill points, even fights that are supposedly a couple of levels above yours will become rather easy when you get a bit further in the main quest.

That is true. I was in Novigrad on around level 12-14 (something like that) and I found the quest with that Tarantino Elf Swordsmith. The Quest was on level 24, normally I would drop it, but I was fed up with the fact that the game is telling me what I can or can't do. So I said fuck and started the quest. It was hard at first, but when I got the hang of my surrodings I was able to finish it. You just need to fight smart, use proper oils and potions and have skills equipped that will help you win the fight you got yourself into.

Yeah bro, I'm sure those 10% bonus damage oils you had at that level helped you tremendously.

 

[Maculo]

I finally beat this game after several months. I had a love-hate relationship with the game, and I had to take frequent, week-long breaks. Personally, I found the combat to be a slog after a while. Once I found out how good burn damage was, I quickly killed off a lot of high level creatures for loot (I think 10-14 levels above was the highest that I killed). If I could not burn the creature, I just ran in and stole the treasure chests. Eventually, igni spam got very boring, and so I switched to a alchemy build, which I found more varied. That being said, I was horribly over-leveled when I started the story quests.

Despite my issues with the combat, I found the game worth playing for the story. The main story was very entertaining towards the end.

 

[Tytus]

Yeah bro, I'm sure those 10% bonus damage oils you had at that level helped you tremendously.

Casuing the enemy bleeding is one of the most useful abilities in this game, bro.

 

[Carrion]

Yeah bro, I'm sure those 10% bonus damage oils you had at that level helped you tremendously.

It's not about the damage, it's about the critical effects. Bleeding is good, but Poisoned Blades is just ridiculous against certain enemy types and makes oils super useful.

 

[Maculo]

Yeah bro, I'm sure those 10% bonus damage oils you had at that level helped you tremendously.

It's not about the damage, it's about the critical effects. Bleeding is good, but Poisoned Blades is just ridiculous against certain enemy types and makes oils super useful.

In addition to the Poison upgrades, the final tiers of alchemy that (a) increases critical hit damage and (b) increases the chance of critical hits after each kill makes a big difference.

 

[Vandringsmann]

I'm doing a playthrough of The Witcher 3 now. They've done a particularly good job with facial animation. Take Geralt himself, in example... despite nearly always looking stoic, there's so many different subtleties to his stoic expressions.

Here's a screenshot I just took. I have a hard time even describing the expression, especially when coupled with the body language.

 

[Tigranes]

Agreed about all the subtleties, but it's pretty clear that's some skinhead cut innit

 

[Stabwound]

I've been playing this game off and on, I only have about 12 hours into it and I can't even honestly say I'm having fun. It's kind of like how I felt with the other 2 games in the series, and I never did finish W2. I'll keep playing but I probably won't finish it.

My real main gripe with these games is that they feel more like action/adventure games than RPGs. Being into the loot whore aspect of RPGs makes for a lot of disappointment in this series, but at least there are unique equipment pieces this time around.

And jesus, I don't understand Gwent at all. I've won a few games but I don't see how the game isn't like 95% luck and hoping the CPU player fucks up.

 

[typical user]

And jesus, I don't understand Gwent at all. I've won a few games but I don't see how the game isn't like 95% luck and hoping the CPU player fucks up.

Gwent is easy. You just need to discover most OP tactic and farm the best cards. PC can be easily baited to go all-in and then beated in next round with weakest cards. He will also forfeit first rounds from time to time, giving you very easy match, just force him to use all of his cards so he doesn't lose the game then leave one powerful card for 3rd round while throwing trash because he will draw more and more, refusing to pass.

 

[Stabwound]

Sounds really stupid, I kind of hate the card game. I'm hoping you don't miss much by not playing it.

Anyway, are there any recommended mods for W3? Looking at the nexus site, it looks like they're all just "make geralt a beautiful long-haired young man and dress him up with fancy armors" or "completely change every single thing about the game".

 

[Rev]

You just lose a fun minigame. The only rewards you get from playing gwent are stronger cards and 25 XP for every opponent you beat, you'll still end up on level 33-35 even if you skip it completely.

 

[Neanderthal]

I go wi School o Roach mod, one o them that changes everything but makes game far more playable for me. Might wanna go vanilla at first though.

 

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

Just finished the game (vanilla only, no mods or expansions), and I have to say I had a great time. Very few games have done sidequests as well as the various witchering quests in this game. It was really cool to do the PI kind of figuring out what happened to people, and piecing together these interesting and tragic stories (even though the gameplay of that often ended up being holding right click and spamming E).

Obviously there were still several negatives that people have mentioned countless times through the thread. Popamoleizations and MMOizations were pretty annoying, though it looks like most of them are fixed by that School of Roach mod that I'll have to give a try. The one that can't be fixed by mods though is the stupid quest compass. I tried turning it off at the start but it's just so obviously designed to be needed that I gave up and played nearly the whole game following the compass from one place to the next. The worst part is that they built this giant and beautiful world for you to explore, except thanks to the quest compass design, while you're going through the world you're spending half of your time looking at the minimap not really taking in the world they so carefully crafted. They basically shot themselves in the foot with this design. It's hard for me to grasp the fact that the Morrowind school of direction design is used by basically nobody anymore. The real genius behind Morrowind's directions, apart from being more realistic since people in the real world actually give directions by using landmarks and stuff, is that it made you pay attention to the world. To find the landmark the direction-giver told you about, you have to be focused on the game world, which lets you notice how handcrafted and detailed it is, instead of taking your focus off the world every couple of seconds to look back at the minimap to see where you need to go. Of course, you also get the benefit of getting lost, finding yourself in a completely new place, and going "fuck it, guess I'll do stuff here now" and almost forgetting about the old quest, which I always enjoyed.

Immersion can be a silly buzzword when used by stupid faggots who don't know the first thing about it, but in big, well-crafted open world games like Witcher 3 it's actually a big deal. It's still a great game, but it could have been so much more with just one design change.

 

[Eirikur]

You just lose a fun minigame. The only rewards you get from playing gwent are stronger cards and 25 XP for every opponent you beat, you'll still end up on level 33-35 even if you skip it completely.

You also miss out on the "High Stakes Gwent Tournament" quest. There's much more to it than playing Gwent, although it might not seem like it at first.

 

[Toffeli]

Do not try School of Roach! Really! It's seriously unfinished! Many new features are currently very buggy and not properly implemented. Also it hasn't been updated since November and the author of the mod is not sure when he can continue working on it. There was a post in January that he would release a big patch in March, but we'll see. But at it's current state is not worth even trying, you just end up quitting after a couple of hours and end up with a broken save game.

 

[Perkel]

Do not try School of Roach! Really! It's seriously unfinished! Many new features are currently very buggy and not properly implemented. Also it hasn't been updated since November and the author of the mod is not sure when he can continue working on it. There was a post in January that he would release a big patch in March, but we'll see. But at it's current state is not worth even trying, you just end up quitting after a couple of hours and end up with a broken save game.

Probably he is waiting as rest for Blood and Wine.
B&W supposedly will change a lot in gameplay part, maybe they even will change few animations and other things.

Doing huge patch just to scrap it and work on it again in next few months is idiotic.

 

[Eirikur]

Doing another playthrough. Don't think I've seen his kind of thing in any other RPG.
I'm of course referring to the rope clipping through her arm.

 

[Cyberarmy]

 

[Gerrard]

Wojciech Mann confirmed for Blood and Wine?

 

[sullynathan]

This game runs like shit, I installed both GTA V and Witcher 3. GTA V runs 10 times better and my computer isn't even all that good. Its almost like I need a super computer to run this shit.

Since I got that out of my system, The game looks good. I will play it even with the shitty performance.

 

[Zeriel]

This game runs like shit, I installed both GTA V and Witcher 3. GTA V runs 10 times better and my computer isn't even all that good. Its almost like I need a super computer to run this shit.

Since I got that out of my system, The game looks good. I will play it even with the shitty performance.

Weird, I had the exact opposite experience. Witcher 3 runs much better than GTA V in general for me. Novigrad is a slog, though. And I guess you could point out that almost every area in Gta V is the equivelant of Novigrad, so that explains it.

 

[sullynathan]

This game runs like shit, I installed both GTA V and Witcher 3. GTA V runs 10 times better and my computer isn't even all that good. Its almost like I need a super computer to run this shit.

Since I got that out of my system, The game looks good. I will play it even with the shitty performance.

Weird, I had the exact opposite experience. Witcher 3 runs much better than GTA V in general for me. Novigrad is a slog, though. And I guess you could point out that almost every area in Gta V is the equivelant of Novigrad, so that explains it.

I can play GTA V with a pretty good resolution and on high above 30fps. Can't even play this game on the absolute lowest without the game being below 30fps.

 

[Perkel]

I can play GTA V with a pretty good resolution and on high above 30fps. Can't even play this game on the absolute lowest without the game being below 30fps.

Weird. What is your cpu and gpu ?

 

[Carrion]

Do you have Hairworks on? I don't know if they've optimized it later on, but it was a huge resource hog early on, and I think it's set on by default. My computer barely meets the recommended specs (actually it might be just below them), but I can still run it with almost everything set on Ultra.

 

[Perkel]

Do you have Hairworks on?

This. Hairworks is big pile of shit. Wat is weird is that when you switch it on monsters it works well but anything on geralt head works like garbage in therm of FPS.

BTW you should try this dude aproach low end gaming pretty fucking amazing vid btw;