Plausible theory on where all the life path content got reworked into:
Plausible theory, certainly.
It seems like an absurd theory, nothing about it makes sense.
Let’s say that it were true, and you were only supposed to play through one of those three questlines in one playthrough. What happens with the main story part of that content? The McGuffins, the characters, and the exposition. Is the idea that you’d really only get one of the McGuffins and the other two would be hand-waved away? Or that you’d have a generic alternative story line for replicating each of the main story plotlines for the other two life paths?
How would the distribution of content across the game world look like? It seems like you’d not have much of a reason to got to vast amounts of the map without those quest lines. Like, you’d pop into the wastelands for two 5 minute trips. If there was supposed to be a bunch generic content in those places in addition to the life path, where is that content now? Literally none of it got implemented?
Some of the endings are pretty tightly linked to the quest chains as well. Is the idea that the ending would be directly tied to your life path, with no player agency? That doesn’t sound at all plausible.
This would also mean that the romance options would be pretty closely linked to the life paths. It’s pretty clear that they put an order of magnitude more effort into the female romance options. Do you really think it’s plausible that e.g. Judy was supposed to only be present in 1/3 the games and romancable in 1/6?
What about the pacing of the story? Those quest lines are really, really tightly linked to you already having the Relic. You can’t make them work as a prologue at all. And with the relic, you’re on the clock. You can’t fit what’s supposed to be V’s main backstory in at that point (and it doesn’t even make sense). The life paths would have to be happening before the heist, not after.
Yeah, I don’t know if the posted theory holds up under scrutiny or not, but I can say that I was shocked at how little the corpo lifepath has to do with anything after the prologue. I think there’s like one optional follow-on side mission with your old boss, but it amounts to a lame fight in an alley.
With hindsight, is there any ‘best choice’ for those three starting options…?
Corpo has least content, has a throwaway extra mission and a unique iconic pistol. Nomad has an extra lifepath-specific vehicle and mission with cameo by streamer Alannah Pearce. Street Kid still is reflected the most in all the post-selection dialogue.
You make good points. OTOH, it’s also pretty clear that the game is hollow as hell inside, and that the origin stories are pretty much stillborn. Something happened, and some stuff was definitely rudely excised to get the game out the door.
I think the lifepaths ended up just the way they always planned it. I think CDPR felt the Witcher 2 path where tons of content is shut off by player choice was a mistake. The stuff that got cut was game systems that broke story content.
Possibly. Though if true, I think it was a bad choice, but YMMV.
Not necessarily, but their decision to market the game saying it had tons of consequential player choice and then not offer any was definitely the wrong way to go.
Well, by “bad,” I mean, of course, from my own perspective. Hence the YMMV. But yes, objectively, saying this and delivering that ain’t a good look.
So I saw this on sale for like $26 yesterday and Googled if my laptop’s GPU could even function under this game’s weight (GTX 1660) and it seemed like it might – and I have GeForce Now if I need to pull that in – so I pulled the trigger yesterday, installed last night. I only got as far as the first sleep in the very scripted section at the very beginning (maybe an hour, counting tutorial stuff?) but so far it’s running just fine, nice and smooth. Haven’t even bothered to check what the settings are set to, but it’s pretty and it’s running alright.
So we’ll see over the next few days what the experience is going to be like once they take the training wheels off. I really intended to wait to play it until I got a good desktop PC finished up, but video card woes…no idea when that’s going to be. I figured it was worth taking a peek in the meantime.
It’s a fun ride if you approach it like I did with zero expectations. All the criticisms levelled against it are in the main valid, but I still had a lot of fun with it.
Its an elegantly wrapped birthday gift with a five dollar Subway gift card inside. I am playing Mass Effect Andromeda over it currently which isn’t something I would have believed prior to release simply because of how much I enjoyed W3.
Yeah, I’m one of the few who bounced off the Witcher 3 hard, so my view is probably an outlier.
I’ve really struggled with all the Witcher titles because I just CANNOT STAND the combat system.
3 seemed better, but I’ve probably got less than 20 hours with it as well.
I spent a little time with 1, and don’t think I ever touched 2.
I love fantasy RPGs, but I haven’t had much luck digging into The Witcher games, as much as I want to love them.
This is very much me and I almost fineshed the first 2 Gothics! Ive gotten about 3 to 10 hours in each one a couple times before wandering off. I’ll take a turn based tactical Witcher whenever their ready.
Thronebreaker: the Witcher Tales, their Gwent RPG, comes pretty close to that.
It’s not tactical, but perhaps you might call it operational?
It’s a port of an actual boardgame. Basically a Witcher version of Fantasy Flight’s Eldritch Horror, where you walk around the map with dudes from the Witcherverse and solves challenges and whatnot. Kind of a silly format for the license, but I enjoyed it.
-Tom
I like Eldrich Horror. That’s kind of a fun idea.