The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Yep, and in the houses there is nothing valuable anyway. Inventory size can be increased heavily by the various saddles though.

Well then, rummage away! I stand by the fact that it is a waste of time though :)

I wish this was true. If you have any desire to craft all bombs, potions, oils, armors, swords, etc… then you better be checking those cupboards. It’s also fuel for the raging alcoholism of an alchemy build on death march.

There are AutoLoot mods out there that let you set custom filters on what to loot and when, etc., that can ease the pain of being a klepto.

Late to the party (yuge backlog and all that), I’ve finally finished Witcher 3 base game.

And what a game.

Good:

The father/daughter relationship is the best part. I got the “best” or “2nd best” ending (Ciri survived and will be empress). It would be a waste of Ciri’s talent to be a simple witcher, so of course my Geralt brought her to her biological father to prepare her for her life after the Wild Hunt.

The thing about letting your daughter choosing her own path is very very liberal/western. Some other culture may think it is perfectly fair for the father to dictate what his daughter can do (fair in the sense that when the time comes Ciri will be equally entitled to dictate what her son or daughter will do.)

The main story about the Wild Hunt is a bit meh. End of the world and the struggle that entails? AGAIN? All the politics bores me because I have no stake one way or another. And there is another semi-viking culture focused on pillaging. What a surprise. But the racism allegory and the father/daughter narrative made the story bearable.

The open world, especially the urban area, is far more realistic than Skyrim. It is basically impossible to imagine e.g. Whiterun in Skyrim is a city, with so few people around, but the cities in Witcher 3 just looked right. And the colour palette of the world is beautiful, as beautiful as Skyrim. And the contract system gives you lots and lots of things to do.

Bad

All the question marks around the map is a drag. It took away the wonder of wandering. Don’t tell me there are stuff to explore! Let me find them at my own leisure. Skyrim or Fallout 4 is much better in that regard.

And the voice acting is below par. In terms of graphics, art direction, and gameplay it is great, but I feel like the voice acting and direction could be so much better. The accent for one is all over the place. In Dragon Age they have this nice mirroring with the real world. People from Orlai speak English with a French accent. Dwarves have American accent. People in the east and north have BBC accent. And so on. Here with Witcher 3 only Nilfgaardian sounds distinctively German, others are all over the place. Triss and Dandelion are especially dire IMO. Many of the lesser NPCs sound almost indistinguishable from one another.

Nudity/Flesh:

Special mention to all the gratuitous breasts and a lack of any dick shot. Keira is the worst, Yennefer is the best/most tasteful. Even Ciri showed a bit too much flesh. She certainly doesn’t dress like someone prepared to do physical fighting wearing NO armour.

Now on to DLCs.

PS: Gwent. Can’t get enough of that.

Before you start the DLC, just a quick note to say you can turn these off.

Ah thanks, will turn it off for Heart of Stone.

One more thing, the Witcher contracts reminded me of Western, where a gun for hire solves problem for common folks, or get cheated by them.

I thought the voice acting was good, but Triss and Dandelion did sound a bit strange compared to The Witcher 2.

I actually like the question marks, because I don’t want to miss things. I can see the appeal if I planned to play the game over and over and find new things each time, but I’m more of a ‘planned tourist’ type - gotta see all the sights in one trip!

Continuing my recent spate of catching up on 2015 games I never played at the time, I’ve been getting into this. It really is quite superb and I’m enjoying the heck out of it. That is all.

Re. the combat, about which one sees a fair amount of bitching from tryhards: yes, in terms of mechanics it’s not terribly deep or challenging, but it’s … serviceable … and the animations are very fluid and it feels nice and badass. I can see myself getting bored with it in the not too distant future though, and I’m already looking forward to trying modded alternatives. The Enhanced Edition mod combat looks good, and there are some nice Wasteland Ghost mods for the game too, including her own overhaul, some of which is incorporated into TEE (she’s one of the team that did the Long War mod for XCOM). Modding is quite a bit more painful than Skyrim, and a lot of the mods on Nexus are out of date, but there’s still a healthy number of decent mods that are functioning with the last version of the game, enough to have some fun playing about with.

Anyway, highly addictive, highly recommended.

I actually picked up the Complete Edition, which is considered a different game so all-new gamerscore. Going to replay it as soon as the Xbox One X Enhanced version ships and (1) do the side missions I skipped the first time, (2) make some different decisions, and (3) start playing Gwent at the beginning of the game this time.

Kinda more excited about this than most of the new games out right now. :)

Here’s a question about playing with English subs but voice acting in a different language: GOG Galaxy, it seems that if you pick a different language under settings, you have an audio choice in the main menu of the “main” language for your market (English for the US one, obviously) + ONE other only. If you choose say, Polish after having picked German for your “other” audio, Galaxy seems to erase the one you downloaded before, and if you want to go back to German in this case, it has to freaking re-download it (a stupid waste of bandwidth, IMHO).

Maybe part of the problem with my Galaxy installed version is that it’s NOT the GotY but the original version (patched to current status, of course). I have bought the two expansions but haven’t installed them. Don’t know if doing so would automagically turn my Galaxy installed version into the GotY one, or whether that only happens if I install from the GotY entry that appeared in my library when I bought the expansions.

Does the GotY Galaxy-managed version let you have more than two audio language tracks installed at a time (currently, for me, English + one other), so you can just pick the audio track on the fly from the main menu, as one used to be able to do in Witcher 1 EE–so convenient?

Cheers for the link. Best part was the use of the AMIGA at 7 mins :-)

Finally got around to playing this over the weekend (and, yeah, I pre-ordered it!). It’s got it’s hooks in me pretty bad. Got through the first region and now in the 2nd. Love the visuals, atmosphere, characters and story. Don’t quite feel like I have a handle on combat yet, but hopefully I will get there.

And hoo-boy there are a lot of systems here. The skills, crafting, alchemy, etc. etc. All have me pretty overhelmed, and I feel like I will surely nerf my character unless I spend a bunch of time reading guides (which I’d rather not do). Are there any re-spec opportunities down the road? I’m already sorta regretting a couple of my skill point expenditures.

Yeah, you can buy the potions of respec and they’re fairly cheap. You can also obtain all witcher sets (and later upgrade them) so you can basically respec and try different builds at will, as long as you sell stuff to merchants at least every once in a while.

As for nerfing your character - the talent tree is painfully simple and it takes ages before you get to any interesting talents, even if you focus on one school. By the time you get to the part where you’d actually see any impact from your talent choices you’ll probably know what you want to play as.

I re-specced many times. As someone who’s bored by stat padding talents (i.e. increase critical hit chance by 5%), I respecced fairly often to take advantage of whichever tree gave me access to new active abilities. Each tree puts their big active talents at different tiers

  • Magic- tier 2- secondary casts
  • Combat- tier 3- secondary attacks
  • Alchemy tier 4- cluster bombs

Alchemy and crafting will never amount to much if you don’t loot fairly extensively. There are a lot of important materials that cannot to my knowledge by purchased at reasonable prices. It’s a fairly easy game even on the highest difficulty, so making the most of the ability trees is more about having fun than completing the game. I would definitely recommend avoiding guides.

The Witcher 3 is one of my all time favorite games, but the combat is just serviceable and the ability tree is utterly uninspired. The systems added by the expansions (e.g. Set bonuses and mutations) made up a little for the latter point.

You don’t need to loot all that much for alchemy, mat requirements are ‘steep’ only for the first craft, after that you can refresh all consumables with one dose of alcohol. You do however have to track down some of those rare components, most of which come from bounties and such. I think some can even be missed if you take certain paths in quests and spare your targets. I’m not sure how I circumvented that, it was either with a mod or CDP added a merchant that sold those mutagens, I honestly don’t remember.

Got a bit more play time in yesterday. Still loving it, but it’s driving the completionist in me crazy. There are so many question marks on the map in Velen (dozens of them!), and I’ve still got a bunch of secondary quests and monster hunts in my queue. But, I’m through the Baron/family stuff and the story is urging me to move on to Novigrad. I’m like level 10 and my sense is that trying to “clear the map” in Velen is going to have me out-leveling the main story and other regions.

But, if I leave and come back I imagine I will have out-leveled most of the stuff here?

Is the idea that I’m not supposed to be chasing all of the question marks and sub-quests? In Skyrim, I’d just sorta’ happen across stuff. In Witcher, they are there on my map and I’ve got to go see what they are about, damnit.

Someone needs to make a truly open world RPG without a main quest story, where you can just wander about and do what strikes your fancy. A hex crawl, in tabletop RPG terms. Instead, it’s like “hold on, I’ll save the world next week. Right now, I’ve got to help this farmer find his errant pig.”

Anyway, any advice on how to proceed along the main storyline while managing sub-quests and exploring?

Secondly, can anyone give me some not-too-spoilery direction on witcher gear? I’m still wearing my starting tunic because all of the poofy bits of armor I’ve found look like hell (I don’t care if they better – I don’t want to wear the poofy shirt!). I’ve been finding these bits of witcher gear maps, but I think they are too be found in other regions. Should I be wearing some of that stuff by now? I assume it’s better/cooler than the random loot or other crafted bits?

Turn off the question marks, seriously. There are about 200 people in this very thread making that comment. Just discover stuff organically. If you don’t like it after a while, you can turn them back on.

As others have suggested turning off the question marks is a good option.

One thing that you might think is helpful as a completionist when considering turning off the marks: The question marks that have some kind of story attached to them will be part of a quest you will get from talking to people, so you will be directed there through the quest. For example: Scavenger hunts will end at a question mark but you will get a quest objective marker for lets say, the Griffen pantaloons. You will not miss them if you just follow the quest and have the markers turned off.

The majority of question marks should be thought of as loot chests. You can get crap gear to sell/dismantle and materials. That is about it. Which ties into your question about gear. Craft witcher gear if you have the patterns. Witches gear is a nice investment because it can be upgraded. The master piece requires the sub-master piece as a component. Crafting the gear costs money and mats so if you are low on either turn the marks back on, clear a few bandit camps, collect loot to sell, turn off marks, and craft you gear.

Hope this helps.

This. The game is so much better not just following icons.