I’m sold. Day 1, well probably day 30 purchase for me since I rarely ever remember to buy any game the week of release.
Spot on.
So, the second person on a horse - Ciri ? Please say yes?
The landmass will be bigger than Skyrim. But I think the stellar point of Skyrim is the amount of content, not how big is the world, which is big but there are bigger worlds out there in videogames. I doubt TW3 will have as much content as Skyrim, because it has several hundreds of quests, tasks, dungeons, etc.
More information and images :
http://gamingeverything.com/39177/witcher-3-confirmed-is-next-gen-featured-in-game-informer/
- The team felt it missed the huge freedom of open-world games like Skyrim
- Proper mounted combat still being tested
- Currently not a definite part of the game
- Horses will be in, though, since they’re important for navigation
- Ships float on the water in true physics interactions
- Team has doubled in size
- No chapters, acts, or any artificial break-points
- Geralt can seamlessly cross from one end of the world to the other thanks to REDengine 3
- No loading screens while traveling in the open world
- Can explore on foot, by horseback, and via boat
- Pursue yor long-lost love, play the game of empires on behalf of the northern kingdoms that still claim independence, and thwart the nefarious Wild Hunt
- Fast travel: instantly revisit any discovered location
- Director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: “A huge goal is to keep the high quality o four quests, with all the cinematics and impressive events and moments.”
- Point of interest will always be in sight
- Players will be beckoned to explore dank caves, embattled villages, decaying ruins, etc.
- Over 100 hours of hand-scripted quests
- Quests: help villagers, engineer the succession of the Skellige kings, etc.
- Use monster hunting for adventure, incoming, and unique rewards
- There are mini-games based on the area of the world
- Ex: Skellige has knife-throwing
- Gain exclusive rewards from mini-games
- Don’t have to complete mini-games to proceed in the story
- Monsters, bandits, traders, animals, and more will attack anyone they deem hostile
- Enemies don’t scale to the player’s level
- Slaying monsters, fighting hostile humans in the different forms they come in, collecting items, leveling up are in the game
- World 40 times larger than the last game
- Three different aspects to narration
- Lowest level: free-form activities like monster hunting, crafting, individual standalone quests
- Second step: political situation and Nilfgaardian invasion is resolved through the core plotline of the major areas (Skellige, Novigrad, No Man’s Land)
- Each land has its own storyline
- Can abandon the storyline, but will have repercussions later
- Not doing a plotline is a choice the player has
- Main narrative: search for Geralt’s loved ones and conflict with the Wild Hunt
- Multiple branches of narratives that feed into each other
- Don’t have to do anything outside the main storyline to beat the game
- Could have help in a main-line encounter from an ally you gained in the Skellige archipelago if you’ve completed certain quests in certain ways
- Major events in the main storyline are “gates” for the state of the world
- Ex: village threatened by bandits might be abandoned after certain events if the player doesn’t help
- Weather effects are dynamically generated and fully modeled as real volumetric clouds rather than being simply painted on the skybox
- In contrast to the last game, Geralt encounters communities and individuals with monster-related problems that need solving
- There aren’t contract-like assignments this time
- Press the left trigger to turn on Geralt’s witcher senses
- Can glean information from a crime scene upon discovering it
- Within range of a scene of interest, the mechanic conveys clues to the player through the witcher muttering to himself and/or visual depictions of past events that represent Geralt’s reasoning
- Time of day and other conditions determine where monsters appear and their abilities
- Can strike critical areas in combat based on how much you learn about monster anatomy and tactics
- The team is deciding between using a handful of in-combat special moves for particular attacks and a slow-motion quick-time event style
- Monsters you defeat leave otherwise unobtainable alchemical and crafting ingredients needed for making of unique items, potions, mutagens
- These allow Geralt to gain special powers and upgrades in the new mutation development tree
- These kills serve as the witcher’s primary method of income
- Moving more toward romance and away from shallow sexual encounters
- “We want to treat it maturely like we did in The Witcher 2. We are not bringing sex cards back.”
- Witcher 3 doesn’t have completely different environments based on singular choices due to the open world, but there are similarly impactful decisions
- You’ll be involved with mutually exclusive storylines and situations based on certain momentous choices
- Won’t be on the same level as Witcher 2, however
- Game mechanics based on previous games, but the team is revisiting many details
- Backward difficulty curve being addressed
- Reworking the flow of combat
- 96 animations for Geralt’s combat moves (last game had 20)
- Game has a “weighting” system for the camera to help keep the biggest threats in frame at all times
- Combat system: three big changes to solve the problem of being locked into long animations
- Every button press mapped to a single strike
- Each move takes a roughly equivalent time to perform
- Can always interrupt your current action to immediately dodge or block
- Can block/dodge when out of stamina, but you’ll be staggered
- Team wants to make the combat “more intimate”
- “You don’t run – in the Witcher 2 you were running constantly. You walk, but your attacks are very fast. Your opponents also walk but they have charges and things like that.”
- Geralt’s dodge roll replaced by a pivot move
- It retains its defensive utility without game-breaking mobility
- Attacks faster than in The Witcher 2
- Enemy AI completely rebuilt
- No scripted boss encounters
- One boss: ice giant
- Roughly a dozen types of interactive objects
- Ex: Can irritate a wasp with the telekinetic Aard sign to make a damaging distraction for his foes and disperse the swarm with the fiery Igni sign once the wasp swarm becomes a problem
- Magical signs are retooled
- Each of the five signs has a basic form such as Igni’s new flamethrower effect
- If the player advances down the magic tree as Geralt levels up, can unlock a second form of the sign
- For Igni, would unlock a 360-degree blast that immolates anything close
- Yrdren’s small trap can be changed into a bigger field that slows enemies
- Player retains the use of the basic form
- Other two trees are based on swordsmanship and alchemy
- Swordfighting: can unlock new strikes and boosts such as improved stamina and parrying
- Alchemy: mutation mechanic moved off to a separate development path, independent of the level-up process
- Alchemy specialization is based more on potions
- Improvements available for the horse and boat
- These aspects are still in development
- One idea: players could access their long-term storage stash from their horse as well as from inns
- Team knows about frustrating inventory management in Witcher 2
- Crafting still important for enhancing Geralt’s capabilities
- Can customize crafted items
- Some components are can be substituted for similar things
- Ex: monster scales instead of leather in a piece of armor
- This affects the properties of the final item
- Can find unique components as part of monster hunts or questlines
- Combine these with special recipes to make artifacts of immense power
- Each armor piece has a unique appearance
- Armor has improved presentation and new cloth simulation
- Can visit a barber to change Geralt’s hairstyle
So how do they know its 20% bigger than Skyrim?
Maybe they played it? Skyrim is a “known” quantity, everyone can play it and see its size.
Me, too. I played up to the first village, but enjoyed it much less than the first game and got to playing other things, so it joined the backlog. :D
I liked the smaller scope. Their niche was building a better Bioware game. I don’t really need them to build a better Bethesda game. But say they want to. Making a non-linear and seamless world is one thing. Making it take a long time to ride across on a horse seems superfluous.
With more information, it might make sense. One of the new bullet points mentions a game of empires, perhaps like the Stormcloaks and Imperial Legion in Skyrim. You’d need some space for that.
I wouldn’t count on the same content density if one of their goals is to keep content quality high. (This is a good thing.)
If this comes out in 2014, I’ll be amazed.
I finished the first village in Witcher 2, then made it to the second area and realized I was just at another Quest Hub. It felt too much like WoW and I put it down. I tried a few more times over a few months but could not get past the whole quest hub / WoW feeling and uninstalled it.
Quest Hubs structure are used in RPG games since… the 80’s?
Why? It can be “late 2014”. And it’s not like they started the development just now, it surely started at the end of Witcher 2 development.
It’s a whole new direction for the series. New engine, new non-linear progression. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible. I’ll just be amazed they’re organized enough to switch gears and get it out in less than 4 years from the last game.
I don’t know how I feel about this. More Witcher is good, but I don’t know if I like the shift to open-world.
Oh god, yes. I’m still playing Skyrim almost daily (new expansion today, woot!).
Isn’t the Witcher 3 supposed to come out late this year or next? If this is a launch RPG on the consoles…it could be huge.
There can never be too many quality open world, sandbox RPGs. Never!
Really? I do not recall them in any Elder scrolls game, Fallout games, Baldurs gate games, or the Planescape torment game. I am sure there are other examples as well.
I do not simply define a quest hub as a place that simply has a few NPCs with a quest, but it also has to lock you in an area. This can be a soft lock, which simply means other areas a way above or below your level, or a hard lock, which is what the witcher 2 does, that you are trapped in a area until you do the right quests.
Scans look like Witcher 2, more or less, I doubt it’s going be another graphical jump.
Their engine already allows for some streaming, that’s how there wasn’t loading screens when you entered in a house, or you went out to the forest from the town, I suppose they are just souping up the streaming tech.
Even gameplay wise, I don’t expect lots of radical changes, just imagine Witcher 1 or Witcher 2 but without loading areas between zones, it’s all connected in the same, bigger, map.
This is either faulty memory or selective parsing on your part. The acts in The Witcher 2 are actually bigger and more available than any of the diorama boxes in an infinity engine game
This thread reminds me of why I would hate to work in the gaming industry.
“I hate that they’re going open world!”
“I hate that they’ve never gone open world!”