4363

I wish I could reduce the HUD to nothing but a compass.

4364

And this is different from a place like, for instance, where there’s some remote burned down house way out in the wilderness, where you find an unsent letter from a woman to her husband who’s at war, about how shady looking men have been hanging around and she’s afraid they’re up to no good… and there are bandit corpses, who apparently burned down the house and murdered the woman, only to then be killed themselves by the Bog Hag who showed up?

I mean, what precisely is the difference here, because I’m not seeing it. I mean, other than the fact that the location in the witcher generally seems to have had more thought put into it.

4365

I keep using Morrowind as an example because it’s the game of the 3 that I remember most fondly (or at all).

Morrowind had sprawling cave systems with easy to miss secrets and even vertical exploration through levitation and these places weren’t necessarily connected to any quest. The location itself was often easy to miss and sometimes it had no reference to it, not even coordinates. You could walk right past it and never know.

You could run around deep underground and find nothing and you KNEW that you missed something, something HAD to be there. Sometimes you left empty handed. Sometimes that epic sword was right in front of you and you damn near missed it because you didn’t look up. Sometimes you DID miss it.

In TW3 you won’t leave empty handed, ever. Locations pop up with text when you are near them. Secrets are HARD to miss, you’d have to be blind to miss them. Right click and everything is revealed to you. Every item is in a crate, chest or bag, there’s no epic sword or shield hanging on a wall or hidden behind a door. Locations are linear: Go to the top of the tower, there’s the “boss chest”. Location done. It’s exploration for beginners, imho.

4366

In TW3 you won’t leave empty handed, ever. Secrets are HARD to miss, you’d have to be blind to miss them.

In virtually all of the elven ruins and cave complexes, especially the underwater ones, it’s actually pretty easy to miss loot if you aren’t trying to exhaustively explore the complexes. There are virtually always side passages which do not require exploration at all to find whatever is in there for whatever quest has you visiting the area, but which tend to contain stuff if you bother exploring them.

4367

That’s simply not true.

I was exploring a ruin the other day. Climbed to the top of a fallen tower, discovered a nest of harpies. I was low enough level and low on potions, so I fled at low health. Went and got some supplies to re-build my potion stocks, and went back. Killed the harpies. There was a monster nest there, though, and I didn’t have the ingredients for a grapeshot bomb. So I left.

Came back two days ago since I was traveling through, and at a higher level and easily dispatched respawned harpies. Then I destroyed the monster nest. Got some loot for that, went on my merry way.

Last night, without realizing, I wandered back into this general area. It was dark out and I was turned around so I didn’t notice that the ruin I’d found was the same one I’d just described. I set about exploring it, and realized pretty quickly “Oh hey, I’ve been here.” Just as I’m turning to leave, though, I notice something I hadn’t seen: a rickety, beaten up ladder against the wall. I climbed it. I notice that there was a jump up to a loft on the next landing. Took that.

Found a decayed body. Found some great loot. Found two notes that lead into a quest. Found some schematics.

Had I not wandered back in there a third time, I’d have surely missed that. I may have found the quest again just by chance, but probably further along, and would have wondered about the bits I’d missed.

4368

I know exactly what location you’re talking about, it’s also part of a scavenger hunt for witcher gear.
That you won’t be able to tell me about a single location I haven’t also been to should help establish my point about the differences between this and Morrowind exploration.

(Guy is dead because he drank a witcher potion, right?)

4369

I think on some level we’re just gonna have to agree to disagree. Some folks seem to enjoy the exploration in TW3, some seem to find it lacking.

4370

Heh, I knew this example was coming :D. Yeah, it’s different because the situation you described above is just a text flavor to the find corpse -> read letter -> use witcher sense -> loot ‘hidden’ treasure (that’s 20 meters away, tops) mechanic that about 50 if not more POIs in the game have.

4371

I agree, but I find the discussion interesting and I want to stress that I think TW3 is outstanding overall. My beef is with exploration and loot, two parts of open world RPGs that I’m terribly fond of and I think they could have done better without compromising their main story focus.

4372

Perhaps what you’re trying to say is the exploration depth in each game is different. In Skyrim we could both visit all the locations. It would just take a hell of a lot of time. It might even be hard to remember them all since there are so many and they are all so similar to each other.

I never played Morrowind, but maybe the dungeons are even more intricate (and maybe they don’t show up on the radar like Skyrim?) That’s probably what you’re talking about.

The whole sidebar about each of us finding the same locations as everyone else is kind of misleading and confusing.

4373

Well, but it’s also basically exactly like what you described from Skyrim… The letter is IN ADDITION to what would be seen in Skyrim.

4374

So who sailed around Skellige and got all the question marks? I tried, I really did, but it’s hugely un-fun. I really wonder what CDP was going for there.

4375

Thanks for the heads up. I was thinking about skipping them. It’s hard for me to focus on a slow burn game right now and I’m very interested in the story.

I left a bunch in the very south of Velen. I haven’t explored enough there. It’s an excuse to check out the nice landscape.

4376

Good sales in pc.

4377

lol, ya, I got kind of the same way.

I was taking the main story real slow early on, scouring Velen for every single thing I could find.

But then once I started going through the northern region near novigrad, it started getting harder to do that, because the main storyline became interesting to the extent that I wanted to keep pushing forward with it.

Skelliga is a little annoying from an exploration perspective, since if you don’t use fast travel, it’s much more of a pain to get around. You’re either dealing with tall mountains that you can’t easily get over, or you’re dealing with tons of water that requires a boat… This ends up pushing you more towards the fast travel option, which had the effect of limiting my exploration compared to Velen and Novigrad.

4378

Is “all other PC platforms” Steam?

4379

4 million total sales as of the beginning of the week.

Approx 1.3 million on PC according to that.

So, consoles made up the majority of sales. Interesting.

4380

I guess we have to grudgingly thank consoles for the other 3 million copies sold. I just hope they roll the profits into better gameplay and quality control in their next game.

4381

This is pretty much standard at this point, isn’t it?

4382

Yes. Don’t want to mention the competition, you know how it’s this.