The Witcher 3 Pre-Expansion Thread

[Haba]

Oh well, I guess W3 will be fixed by the time I get to playing W2... heh.

 

[Makabb]

You get a physical thank you note when you purchase the game

 

[ERYFKRAD]

You get a physical thank you note when you purchase the game

For a fucking second I thought that was Pierce Brosnan starring as Kurwa.

 

[MicoSelva]

Unofficial Official Harbingers of the Decline List:

MicoSelva

Peace, bro. I am witcher fanboy ever since I have read the short story collection at the age of twelve. My witcher books are so worn out from reading that they are literally falling apart. There was no way I could have not bought Wild Hunt on day one, even though I thought both The Witcher 1 and 2 were decent games at most.

I hope for TW3 to be the best of them, but even if it is the worst - I will still enjoy it because the witcher.

I was not joking about going back to PoE before starting TW3, though. Playing two long games at the same time means not finishing at least one of them. I have also not played the enhanced edition of TW2 and would like to do that (and check Roche's path) before TW3 too.

 

[kain30]

well, i have to say that as an RPG i don´t like it, but as an action game yes. when i finish the game i´ll go back to temple of elemental evil. Metro i´ve never said this is a a good RPG.

 

[Jools]

I'm with Ulminati : bring back dice poker. In its simplicity, it's way more compelling and addicting than fucking gwent. Also, gwent makes me think of Gwent, you know, the swampy shithole in Wales. Fuck gwent. I know they had to introduce the pokemon thing (collect'emm all) to the game, but WTF? Dice poker is 200000000x better. Or Pazaak, for that matter. <3 Pazaak (which also had some "collect'em all" value to it).

Fucking hell even Caravan is better than gwent.

AI IS LOLTARDED

Oh, I caught the deathbed-bound girl at the herbalist shack actually merrily walking back from the stove to the bed, only because I fast-travelled there at dawn (not sure how it's repeatable, but it sure as fuck was annoying, especially because I was going there for the very purpose of curing her, only to find her up and running already...).

A lot of people just repeat "yawn" every time I walk by or try and talk to them.

COMBAT WOMBAT

On normal, combat is easy, mildly fun. Great improvement over TW2. Spamming rolling and dodging is still very OP, haven't even tried Quen yet.

OTHER STUFF

Voice acting is pretty decent in the english version. Nothing amazing, but appropriate most of the time.

I found it very average, to be honest. Some voices/accents don't really fit the character.


So far the biggest disappointment has been the "open world". Most of it is just loads of trees with little to nothing interesting. POIs, as Ulminati also said, are mostly pointless (huehue, see what I did there?). 5 wolves, one shitty chest, stuff like that.

The world doesn't feel that "large", TBH, and I've mostly been travelling on foot (some kinda choice of mine).

Granted, I'm only 4 hours into the game, and still need to open up most of it, but I have a bad feeling about this. The starting region already feel "tight".




Aiming and highlighting stuff (herbs, containers, anything) is very clunky. Moving around on foot is also quite fucked up, especially if trying to "tread carefully", eg not bumping into everyone, or trying to get close to something "usable". Hell, gathering herbs is just retarded, and mostly because of the shitty implementation of movement.


Oh, most conversations are really dull. One lines after one liner, and 2 reply options at best. There doesn't seem to be any way to have a deep and meaningful conversation, with anyone at all.

But hey, it runs fairly ok on my machine despite said machine not meeting minimum sys req. And even on low, the graphics are kinda ok (think vanilla skyrim). Fuck it, bitches! XD

 

[Ulminati]

Oh yeah. Good luck looting a container if there's an investigation object nearby. Targeting is fiddly as fuck. I put it down to playing with a gamepad. But seriously CDPR, how hard would it be to base your targetting on what the camera is pointed at rather than what direction Geralt is turned? Use your vertical axis ffs.

Also, having 30+ question marks on your map first time you open it -- and knowing they're all of the box+wolf vareity -- really kills your desire to explore.

 

[Hegel]

Wait until you hear the Emperor of MILFguard (who's the guy doing the VA? He's good) or Triss or Ciri, then you'll cream in your pants. Also the C&C is good.
At this point, the codex is just nitpicking. The game is moddable by the way.

 

[da_rays]

This thread created too much emotion for me. My opinion on this was first : Hmmm ARPG? Nothankyoudontcareaboutalamur2downgradedconsoleversion then I got curious about the fanboys writing about the story being good , and after reading Metro posts this thread, i just feel like sodomizing myself with a red hot poker rather than getting this.
/endsenslessbitching

Now thats out of the way , would you guys recommend Witcher 1 ? the serie itself seem nice enough , i just dont want to go through another ''Hand of Fate'' minus the card collection.

 

[AwesomeButton]

There are a couple of peasants in the first town. One of them changed his name to a Milfgaard one after they got conquered. The other is shocked and outraged to learn this. Except they have this conversation every time you walk by. The fifth time it stopped being a nice little detail and became downright embarrassing. Hasn't cdpr heard of marking unique dialogues as player so they won't repeat as nauseam?

I see your point but this happens to be a very welcome bug/half-assed functionality for me. I'm playing with French audio and english text in order to study while playing

Strange enough my very first impressions (up to receiving the griffon quest) are rather positive.

Graphics are not at all bad. Sure GTAV looks better, but I was expecting a lot worse. I still think the game could use much more optimization - I'm playing with everything on ultra except foilage view distance which is on High, and my framerate is in the 30-45 range in most places, with a GTX 780/i7 4790-K/8 GB Ram, which runs GTAV without any problems. I'll probably turn Hairworks off after the griffon battle, but I just want to see how it will look.

Combat is button mashing for now, but I'm playing on normal, so that might be part of the reason. I chose that difficulty because I don't think I'm very good at popamole combat (even with having played PoE for 70 hours, it's not the same thing), and I like combat where challenge comes from the enemies, not from battling with the controls.
I do like the sidestepping mechanics though,I think they feel more natural than the rolling.

Gameplay is pseudo-interactive CGI cinema but that's what I expected anyway. In this regard it's up to personal taste if you'll like it or not. I have never read the books, but I like the Slavic folklore used as inspiration (probably a feature of the books originally), things like west/south slavic influences in the music and that they use the Glagolithic alphabet as a coommon writing system. These thigs just press the right buttons for me, might not mean anything to others, but it's a nice feeling to have a super famous triple A title that's after your preference in design details instead of the super-generic shit that they turned Dragon age into.

My main reasons for having fun with it is that I dig the realism in the characters' reasoning and motivation - what the PR calls "mature themes" - and that I'm a sucker for exploration in open world games.

Final verdict: Will buy when on discount/10

 

[Hegel]

It's an ARPG series with a partial stat system, alchemy and crafting (still better than your average rpg), the combat was atrocious (until W3). The emphasis is on the plot, the characters and dialogues. It's great if you love drimdark games with an atmosphere.

 

[Ulminati]

Yeh. The atmosphere (especially at eveninig/night with high winds) and ambience is very nice. I liked the muddy battlefields too.

 

[Doktor Best]

@Da_Rais: Nah its just codexers trying too hard to please the crowd with being over the top edgy. Game is gud for people who like arpgs, and ofcourse its not so good for edgy codexers who fail at twitch combat with their wurstfingers or have an obsessional neurosis to pick every herb in the game.

Hegel: The VA of Emrys is Charles Dance, the dude who played Tywin Lannister in Game of Boobies.

 

[Hegel]

Yeh. The atmosphere (especially at eveninig/night with high winds) and ambience is very nice. I liked the muddy battlefields too.

I kickstarted Kill the xaurip, in all honesty it wouldn't be right if I valued Witcher 3 anything less. Your tastes may differ (for example I hate the cutscene fest), but it's a top quality production nonetheless and stating the contrary would demean all the work they put into this, they cared and it shows. They said Geralt's story is over; I don't know, I have the feeling they will go back on their words. The game will sell like hotcakes.

@Da_Rais: Nah its just codexers trying too hard to please the crowd with being over the top edgy. Game is gud for people who like arpgs, and ofcourse its not so good for edgy codexers who fail at twitch combat with their wurstfingers or have an obsessional neurosis to pick every herb in the game.

Hegel: The VA of Emrys is Charles Dance, the dude who played Tywin Lannister in Game of Boobies.

Had to google it, I don't watch much TV. He's a very :monocle: gentleman.

 

[prodigydancer]

would you guys recommend Witcher 1

Absolutely. In days of yonder CDPR was genuinely good; too bad it didn't last. Aside from combat, TW1 is a nearly perfect story-driven RPG.

 

[Perkel]

Initial impressions after 1 hour. Got to first small village and fought only ghouls.

Performance & Graphics
I can't fucking believe it how good it runs on my rig. i53470+7970 turned down few options to med some to ultra and i managed to almost lock game to 50ty. I am playing it on my TV which has native support for 50fps refresh thus i don't need to hit 60 if i want to have smooth framerate (though i can set 60 if i want)
Downgrade. HAHAHAHA.... nope. @ 1080p with almost all things on ultra game really looks amazing. Sure obviously somethings were scaled back (probably will see it later in game) but it is hands down best looking RPG ever. Sure i played DAI and there frostbyte engine also looks good but here everything looks natural and not pastel shit everywhere.

Combat system. Biggest surprise.
What i expected... was button mash lel press A to awesome.
I started game on death march (highest def) and combat is not like that at all.
I fought initial battle like 20 times and got outright murdered when i started with spamming fast attack.
Then i started to spam roll because that is how TW2 worked. Nope. Murdered in seconds.
Then i started to use dodge instead of roll and generally attack only when i knew i would get a hit. 3-4 battles later i got hang on it.
I think biggest difference here is that monster do fallow you through if you roll away and if you start to attack they will not wait for opportunity to counterattack but simply attack you.
This way combat is more like few clashes and since you can't roll away or run away (monsters are faster) this really works well.
I yet to fight humans but so far enemy AI was excellent for me. They don't mind attacking you from behind or stopping when you roll away. When they attack they instantly move away from counterattack.

Then there is weight. It isn't weightless TW2 or near no weight Dark Souls movement. Here there is a weight and it is noticeable in how geralt moves. With gamepad imo it is excellent stuff but with keyboard there is no way to scale your movement. There is no analog way to tell geralt to move just a little instead of full movement and this is i think where problem lies for many people.

Unlike TW2 geralt here has animations between standing and running. He moves from standing to full run without steps.

VA and writting.
Playing potato version with eng subs to see difference. Yep potato writting and VA are excellent. Though i noticed few differences in eng version that sometimes worked better in that situation. So i think eng version so far is imo big upgrade over TW2. Didn't listen yet eng voices.


Summary of initial 1 hour.
positive but you really need gamepad for precise analogue movement.
Like other people i noticed it in Kaer Moren but then i started to walk instead run everywhere and i dind't have any problems later nor now.

EDIT: Weight of combat is very similar to monster hunter games.

 

[prodigydancer]

you really need gamepad

No sale.

 

[Cyberarmy]

You don't need a game pad, game plays fine with k&m.

 

[Perkel]

you really need gamepad

No sale.

Shame but what i said is true. Analogue movement is really needed when you have so much weight to manage in battle.
It really reminds me of monster hunter games where also your dude has almost same weight.

Biggest difference here is that small movements make a difference from what i noticed in combat. Slight movement to the left and dodge then counterattack rinse and repeat seems to be modus operandi of TW3. I wonder how it will change later in game.

Also lel Queen is life. On highest def monster fuck you up in 3-5 shots. With queen you have additional 1 shoot survived and you can use it again after a while. So when i fought 4-5 ghouls at the same time i used queen like 2-3 times and thanks to it survived.

Also horses. They kick like a motherfucker. One horse outright killed ghoul when it tried to dodge away my blow

 

[Perkel]

You don't need a game pad, game plays fine with k&m.

I really think movement indoors will be a problem for km users.

 

[dragonul09]

The open world approach just doesn't fit this game,it feels disjointed and i keep losing interest in the main quest and side quests as well.I got so many quests that require a much higher level than mine and it sucks,by the time i come back to do them i will already lose any interest in those particular quests.
They should have created a more compact world similar to Gothic 1+2,with a more unique scenery not just the same copy pasted landscape to please the Skyrim audience.They told us exploring is rewarding,when? There's nothing rewarding by finding the same stupid old crate filled with diagrams guarded by the same old stupid ghouls.

 

[PhantasmaNL]

The starting prologue region is very small and you can walk about 5 minutes till you reach the End Of The World. Kinda ironic in a "huge open world" game. Agreed on the atmosphere, i like it. Also the VA and dialogue sofar (im a bit after the prologue) is good. I am sure this game will not sink to the depths of the shit, pretentious and extremely cringeworthy singalong in dai.
The loot/gather targeting is indeed somewhat fucked up, when in standard "run" mode (overshooting its minute target is common) i switch to walk when looting and only gather ingredients when they are bunched up. Only an insane person would gather all those flowers and shit btw.

 

[Ulminati]

Hegel: The VA of Emrys is Charles Dance, the dude who played Tywin Lannister in Game of Boobies.

Had to google it, I don't watch much TV. He's a very :monocle: gentleman.

 

[prodigydancer]

Shame but what i said is true.

I know. I could buy a controller, I'm not that broke. But everyone needs to draw a line in the sand somewhere and I choose to draw it right here, in front of the "you need a controller to play our crappy console port on your PC" bullshit because it's decline in its purest form.

It's not about money, it's about sending a message.

 

[Starwars]

Hegel: The VA of Emrys is Charles Dance, the dude who played Tywin Lannister in Game of Boobies.

Had to google it, I don't watch much TV. He's a very :monocle: gentleman.

Haha, that was fantastic.

"Yeah... that's what I thought."