3923

This game re-enforces my decision not to have children.

I have a tough time trying to control my daughter and wish she was not in my life.

(she moves even weirder than Geralt and all her sequences feel like a super shitty original xbox mediocre 3rd person action title)

At this point I’d happily play through will all bugs and framerate issues if they just released a patch to remove those sequences.

3924

That’s what I was hoping, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. I got a bunch of statues now and no quest related to them.

3925

I seem to recall someone saying that there’s some kind of permadeath mode? Was that just a joke, or is it something that opens up after beating it?

3926

Ohh, my first CTD. Well, my second, but the previous one was because I abused of alt-tabbing in full screen, I think. Still, two in 120 hours of game isn’t so bad.

3927

Hmm, not sure. I’d definitely not play with permadeath though! Not in a heavily story driven game like this.

3928

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Singleplayer game. Why?

3929

Not a fan of Yennifer. To controlling. Glad I picked Triss.

Finally went to Skelige (sp?) at level 18. Need to concentrate on main story missions.

3930

Tip for Skellige - if you’re not short on cash then buy the fast travel maps from the first mechant you see and visit the Bounty boards asap. Quests are scattered all over (level req wise) so it’s best to find out which island has the ones in your level range when you get there.

3931

And finished! 123.5 hours.

My end. Spoileeeers

ending

-Blood baron hanged himself, horse beast spirit thing freed.
-Cerys queen.
-Nilfgaard defeated, Redania expanded.
-Geralt goes to Kovir with Triss, finally leaves the Path, more or less.
-Ciri free and being a witcher. Which is a bit stupid, girl, the moment people know about a pretty girl of 20 years with white hair working as a witcher every-fucking-one is going to know you are still alive! :P Not a lot more of witcher-women in this world.

The only thing where I “failed” was with Radovid. There was a quest to kill him but I missed it because I used the wrong option with Djisktra. It seemed wrong for me to say about Ciri, as he is a powerful person which still is much the old spymaster that he was once, that could provoke more people plotting using her.

3932

Mrs Alistair just bought me this for our fifth wedding anniversary. Yay!

3933

Congrats on all three: wedding anniversary, getting The Witcher 3, and having a wife awesome enough to buy that for you for an anniversary gift!

3934

Enjoy! Tell her you’ll see her in a couple months :-)

3935

I know they said they found the problem but the statements they have made about the bug have not been accurate. They said it only affects grey quests 6+ levels below your own…but that is not the case. They said they knew which quests were affected, but if you read their forums (and take posters at face value…) you will see two people discussing the same quest, one saying he got xp the other saying he didnt. Based on all of that, and the fact that, to me at least, not getting xp in an RPG is a pretty big deal, and that they still have not fixed the bug almost a week after it was reported…I think something else is going on beyond ‘Let’s roll this up into a larger patch for convenience’

Leveling goes hand in hand with RPGs for me, and, I think, most RPG gamers. Not you? I will say that leveling in the Witcher 3 is really underwhelming in general and that gear upgrades are more impactful, but it still feels weird to me, to the point where I stopped doing the main and secondary quests until they fix it, to not get xp for quests.

3936

Quests 6+ levels below you are not affected by the bug. They were never intended to give you experience in the first place. It’s a band-aid to prevent extreme overlevelling.

3937

Also made it to Skellige tonight, and I must have easily over 50 secondary quests and witcher contracts to do, plus well over 100 question marks.

3938

Imo, it was a small mistake by them. As it’s clear now, lots of people loathes the idea of doing a quest without gaining XP knowing that under some other conditions the quest gave it.
They should make these quests give half of normal xp, and in exchange reduce the xp obtained in the main quests which is a bit too much (and if in the balancing process you reduce the xp gained in hard and very hand difficulties a little bit more, eve better)

3939

Agreed. I get what they were trying to do with it - allow people to skip side content and still reach high level, but I don’t know of (m)any RPG players that see the value in that, I think most of us obsessively check if we’ve done the side quests before we move on with the main quest. If there’s one genre that attracts completionists then it’s probably RPGs.

3940

I’m still thinking in how Alchemy is a big part of the problem with the difficulty. Because it doesn’t matter if you play in Easy, Medium or Very Hard (Death March), even in Death March you still have alchemy exactly the same, in both quantity (almost infinite potions that replenish after each combat) and in quality (great effects in superior potions, +50% extra damage in oils). So even at its hardest it isn’t really difficult, it just make you use one of the three main systems more often (I suppose in Normal is so easy you don’t even need to use potions).

I’m going to give a concrete example, there is a potion that heals you at 100% of your hit points. It has even three uses. It doesn’t matter if you play at hardest difficulty, it still heal you at 100% (ideally, maybe it should scale, heal up to 75% in Broken Bones and 50% of hp in Death March).
It’s a big change from The Witcher 1, where I remember noticing how interesting was their choice of not having a normal health potion in all the game, unlike so many RPGs, despite having a focus on potions. The only one was Swallow but it was just a slight health regen. bonus for 15 minutes, useful in a series of fights, but it wouldn’t save you in a concrete fight, it was too slow. It was clearly a conscious design. Here they just threw their hands into the air and let people heal.

This example is important because in Broken Bones and Death March you aren’t supposed to heal for “free” between fights with meditation, it’s turned off. Except… it isn’t. With this potion you can do the same, recover 100% health using it (outside or in combat, whatever), and then meditate to replenish the potion number. Now, you can only do that a limited number of times instead of infinite times as you can do meditating in Normal, but in practical terms the “limited number” is around 900 times. 3 doses for each strong alcohol, and I had like 300 strong alcohol in my backpack. So basically enough to be infinite.

3941

I’m thinking of starting a new alchemy only playthrough while I wait for the patch - does the game keep track of different profiles or are all the saves in the same place? Would hate to lose the one I’ve put 150 hours into since I often delete the old save game files.

3942

It’s funny, if you think about it.

In the end, it’s related to the old debate of doing auto-leveled content. In other words, making the level of enemies and treasures of the areas you explore be dictated by your current level, Bethesda style.

It’s an idea disliked by tons of old school gamers, I also prefer having “static” content in a more handcrafted design. It kills some of the emotion of exploring as wherever your go you know you are going to find, content of your level, not higher, not lower, and it’s cool to find a very high level enemy you have to run away and 20 hours later return and kick his ass, something you can’t do with this model.

But you know what, I understand Bethesda’s train of thought. One of their main features is freedom to explore whatever you want in an open world. Start a new game, and start walking South, to see what you find. Or North. Or East. You can’t really do that with static content, if North has level 5 enemies, East has level 10 and South has level 15, there is a clear “order” of exploration, and the south area is too much for level 1 players, making the option of going South at first “wrong”. They don’t want any of the options in their open world to be “wrong”.

In The Witcher 3, they use static content, at least for enemies and quests, and part of the loot. Like old school gamers want, yay! A real crowd-pleaser.
Except, they have made a design decision which is very much modern and very little “old school”: they wanted their game to be beatable by everyone. By people who cleared the map, but also by people who ignores a good part of the side content. Old school games didn’t work like that, you had to put some real effort to beat them, and you had to take all the possible advantages, and that meant doing whatever content you had to gain a extra level or an extra spell or armor.

And that’s the funny part, the fact they could have fixed it using auto-leveled content. If a player does 40% of the content and level up to 20, the game scales to level 20, if he is a completionist and level up to 30, the game scales up to level 30. But how they didn’t want to use leveled content, and they also wanted their game being beatable by everyone, they made the difficulty low enough that you don’t need to do much of the side content, even if that means that the people that actually completes everything gains too much xp and too much loot and makes the game less enjoyable for them. Because if the design is static, it has to be designed for one type of players, it can’t be both.