I’m buying armour recipes just for the hell of it, but to be honest I haven’t really used anything but the various stages of Griffin armour since I first found the set. Other individual pieces may have better stats at a given level (especially just before the next level becomes wearable), but the set bonus is just too strong. I presume the same applies for cat and bear armour.
In that case I’ll just focus on all the other aspects of the game for a while, before looking into crafting again, and rely on what I find for upgrades. Allthough the first found armor that was better then mine looked so dopey (albeit probably historically accurate) that I refuse to wear it…
jsnell
4305
That’s silly. You should always buy stuff first before playing Gwent, in case the merchant is selling cards!
Unfortunately the Penny Arcade strip for Witcher 3 (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2015/05/25/) is an accurate depiction of my Geralt :-(
That’s silly. You should always buy stuff first before playing Gwent, in case the merchant is selling cards!
My deck’s strong enough at this stage that it doesn’t really matter which order I do it in.
But you have to collect them all! :p
All the talk about Skyrim and TW3 has me thinking of one major difference that I feel is more prominent than most any other: ambient sound. Walking alone in a forest at night with all the creaking of trees and the sounds of hidden creatures in TW3 had me spooked when it first happened. I thought something was about to attack before I realized that this was the normal noise of a dangerous forest at night. What a way to set the mood. I don’t remember that from Skyrim (and that’s a game I loved).
New DLC seems to be available.
Hah, if potato landscape is amazing then yes :)
Something must not translate - I’m not sure why an intentionally compressed landscape is like a potato’s surface. Potatoes are not covered with exaggerated peaks and valleys, at least where I’m from. : )
That was a fun read. Idealistic indie dev learns the challenges of implementing what he thinks he wants. (Videogame consumers would do well to learn that lesson too.)
I think compression can work as long as there is intent to do right. TW3 is probably compressed when you sit down and think about it, but it flows naturally and feels about right.
TW3’s landscape is just as crazy compressed as Skyrim’s. Think about how long it takes to walk/run from any village to a monster den or Witcher Contract boss. Would you want to live there?
The only places that TW3 has less “compression” is in the urban areas. I can walk through Novigrad and believe that it’s a city that people would actually live in, unlike say Riften or Windhelm. When you really think about those places, they’re the size of suburban neighborhoods.
Yep, TW3’s landscape is highly compressed. It’s just that Velen’s landscape features are a bit more to scale than Skyrim’s. There’s good and simple reason for that - Velen is all farmlands and swamps, terrains without much in the way of large geographic features. So TW3 can afford be more realistic than Skyrim, with gentle slopes, bigger fields, wider rivers, etc. But things are still nowhere near as spread out as in real-life, as you can verify by walking from Novigrad to Oxenfurt.
(Coming a generation later than Skyrim, TW3 can also rely on foliage and individually placed trees to block your line of sight, something that was prohibitively expensive in previous generations. So they need fewer steep slopes to block your view of things that are supposed to be distant or hidden.)
Skyrim, on the other hand, is set in the mountains, and mountains are frickin’ huge. If Skyrim were built to a real-life scale, they’d have room for a couple of large mountains … and literally nothing else. So they use a very, very artificial scale, where their tallest mountain would just be a largish hill in the real world. The amazing thing is not that the result looks a tiny bit fake, but that it works as well it does. (When TW3 goes to the mountains in Skellige, they do a similar thing and turn the compression of landscape features way up compared to Velen.)
It is compressed in that sense, but the lack of “interesting things to do” actually makes the landscape more reasonable. You don’t have a mystical superdungeon 100 meters from the local village. You have some fields, then some forest, and a river, then another town.
The natural flow is what keeps the illusion going.
TW3 is compressed, but a bit less compressed. Sometimes I need to gallop for 40 seconds to go from one village to another. That would be like, 3 minutes walking around. In Skyrim it would be 2 minutes, instead of 3. :P
I also love how much care is actually put in the landscape. Two examples off the top of my head are hills I’ve seen that appeared to have a side where it became a bit undercut and collapsed so that side was loose looking slope with a overhang at the top edge, and I found a tiny runoff/creek bed that was mostly dried up and full of weeds and pebbles.
The way those were situated is a small detail, but when I thought about it I couldn’t recall another game that has such amazing attention to detail in that way. It’s easy to miss things like that because of how ‘right’ it appears that I didn’t always spot that stuff immediately.
The one terrain detail that actually wound up taking me out of the game was the broken wagons. There are busted down wagons and wagon parts everywhere, but I didn’t see a single wagon actually traveling anywhere - at least not that I can remember.
Its because they are all broken! It would have been funny if there was a “find the wagon repair guy” quest.
Somewhere, someone at CDPR is having a heart attack at the idea.
