4383

Thanks to Steamspy, we can get a pretty accurate figure for Steam.

About 572k owners of The Witcher 3 on Steam, so there’s something else going on there.

4384

It’s not confusing if you played Morrowind. We could both “complete” Morrowind, as in gotten our fill of exploration and finishing all the quests and still have several places that only one of us found and even several neither of us discovered.

If you turn off the question marks and the minimap a flavor text is still gonna pop up alerting you to the presence of a location and you’ll get a “quest complete” when you explore that location. Back to my point on it being a theme park, now entering RPG roller coaster #123. Ride over.

4385

That kind of surprises me, to be honest. Hopefully they don’t go “console first” with Cyberpunk 2077. :)

4386

I thought The Witcher 2 sold much better on PC - even before the deep discount Steam/GOG sales. At least, I never saw much traction on it in console sales figures.

4387

BTW, Steamspy is then lowballing steam numbers by 40k (it says 572K right now, so 7%).

edit: TF did a similar post before me.

In any case, Steamspy uses a statistics approach, it doesn’t give 100% accurate figures. Though in this case the error is bigger than I thought, I imagined a error under 5% for these big games.

4388

XCOM 2 is PC exclusive, not-so presumably due to low sales on other platforms.

4389

Yeah, I think something is messing them up. 40k is a pretty large gap and I know the site owner doesn’t do much manual editing of the stats. He just pulls data and spits it out.

Maybe 40k people are offline?

4390

Witcher 2 had way less marketing, from E3 shows to release (it never was in Conan’s program for example, big adverts on buildings, etc), and more exactly the marketing was mainly directed to pc gamers, not to console gamers, as the game was released on pc at first. In fact that’s another factor, the console version was released only almost a year after, in those cases the games usually have less popular “second” releases.
In general terms it wasn’t pushed as a “big AAA multiplatform game”.

And of course it was only released on one console, not two, like now.

4391

I wondered about that Conan appearance, it was excellent exposure and highly entertaining to boot. What does a thing like that cost?

4392

That part was probably farmed out to Ubisoft interns, it’s the only plausible explanation.

@Timex: as I said, those locations in Skyrim feel more varied and organic. It’s not a note on dead body or a note next to dead body every time. If you don’t see the difference between the two games then I really don’t know how else to explain it. But, to each his own, agree to disagree, etc.

4393

According to the guide The Witcher 3 has 268 quests

There are 89 main quests (including secondary quests that fit with the main story, like Tower of Mice)

118 Side quests (not including secondary quests mentioned above)

26 Witcher Contracts

7 Gwent Quests

7 Treasure Hunts

11 Races and Fits of Fury quests

None of that counts for the hidden treasure or other points of interest quests

The number of side quests by location are:

White Orchard: 5
Velen: 33
Novigrad: 37
Skillege: 37
Kaer Mohren: 6

So if you’re looking at your quest log and you don’t have 268 quests there’s still more questing to be had ;)

4394

Taking into account that a few quests cancel other quests if done “out of sequence”.

4395

I think most of us understand there’s a different feel to the exploration. It’s just that everyone is struggling to explain why. Not that there’s any shame in that. Game design analysis is difficult and I don’t have any better ideas.

We’re definitely getting bogged down debating misleading terms. Like varied and organic. :) And the whole concept of whether two players will see the same thing or not. That only makes sense in one person’s head. Sorry, KingNee.

I suggest terms like depth, breadth, and exploring abstract spaces vs. following quest lines, some of which you have to find by riding around.

4396

While I have been a proponent of Skyrim’s exploration feeling very different, very much more “sandbox” in a way than that of W3 (though I’m really not far enough through W3 to make definitive statements) I do disagree with the concept that turning the question marks off in W3 somehow is “cheating.” The option is there in the official options, just as various difficulty options are there, etc. I actually, on my second play through in Skyrim, used a mod to turn off the POI markers on the compass and it improved the experience for me; that certainly was not an option provided by the developers.

If you keep the question markers on, the difference in exploration is, in my opinion, huge. There will be no real surprise when you run across something, because you are specifically going to that marker on the map and you KNOW something is there, just not what it is. It would be as if every POI on the map in Skyrim was revealed from day one. Even with the markers on the compass on, you still don’t know until you get close whether there is something on the other side of that hill. So yeah, with the question marks on, it is a very different experience.

I get, I think, where the comments are coming from about a big announcement and horns blowing when you run into a minor POI in W3. If you spy a shack in Skyrim, and you wander into it, find some interesting clues about what happened here, dig around and figure out more, find a hidden chest with something appropriate in it, there’s no big proclamation on the game screen that you just completed XXX. You just quietly wandered in and found it. No one else in the world knows you did. It was a remote lost place that you somehow accidentally discovered. It is indeed hard to articulate, but it doesn’t feel as “gamey” as it would if a big announcement popped up on the screen proclaiming “YOU JUST FOUND THE FORGOTTEN WIDOW’S CABIN!” and then “YOU JUST COMPLETED THE FORGOTTEN WIDOWS QUEST!” Perhaps that what someone meant when they said the exploration in Skyrim felt more “organic” - it was there, you stumbled into it, there’s no game system congratulations. It results in some “quiet moment” type of exploration that you don’t get in W3, where you find a dead guy in the shallows and get a big game announcement, 30 seconds later find his chest in the water right next to him and get another gamey congratulations. I’d much prefer no announcements popping up giving me some kind of “score” or credit for that.

The other piece I will have to discover is the density of discovery in W3, with the ?s turned off. The map of Skyrim with all the POIs revealed shows a world extremely dense in POIs. Which is why I could play all the way through, walk every inch of the map, and my brother do the same and yet we both would describe things to each other afterwards the other never saw.

But again, as small a thing as it is, I do think (with the ? turned off in W3) one thing that makes the exploration feel very different is the way W3 is more “gamey” feeling on many of the “little” discoveries.

Does that make Skyrim a better game? Nope. I will continue to proclaim the two are very different games by design. ;)

4397

Of course, my terms are the only misleading ones. That’s racist.

Since a lot of the points I make aren’t being addressed but instead elegantly skipped when quoting me, here’s a handy list:

  1. No matter what UI / feedback changes you make, every location will announce itself to you when you are near it and every location will give you a quest complete when you have finished the main goal of it.
  2. Every location of interest is referenced through quests, combined with the above it makes it near impossible not to find a location unless you actively avoid the area. The developers went to great lengths to make sure that all of the game’s contents did not go overlooked.
  3. Several huge areas of the game, such as those in Skellige and Velen have 1-3 locations to be found, these locations are simple “monster nests” or the very simple “hidden” chest areas. This does not lend itself to blind exploration as it is not rewarding in the slightest.

I could go on but those are the 3 main issues that should tell people that this game was not designed for blind exploration. Plenty of people here and on the official forums have already stated that if you spend enough time only doing question mark locations you simply burn out. They’re not interesting enough and they’re not challenging in any other way than having to, sometimes, defeat a higher level monster. Now imagine you spend half that time just trying to find those few uninteresting question mark locations in the first place and you will sour on the experience even faster.

Hidden locations in Morrowind were actually hidden, some of them had you leaving empty handed, sometimes you couldn’t even find the damn entrance to a place you knew were supposed to be right underneath your feet.

Points 1-3 are evidence of the developers streamlining exploration, others would call it “dumbing down”. Secret locations in Morrowind had depth, breadth even. In stark contrast to many of TW3’s homogeneous locations and quests. :P

I’d choose no quest and having my imagination fill in the blanks over quests that are essentially take two steps to your right and open chest. That’s not a fucking quest dammit and it really doesn’t reward exploration.

Anecdote purely from memory: In Baldur’s Gate, when it was still brand new, I had 3 friendly ghosts spawn at one point. I got the silly idea that I would try to pickpocket one of the ghosts. Turns out a developer had actually placed a valuable item in the ghost’s inventory. The next 50 guys that encountered those ghosts probably didn’t get that same stupid idea and thus not the payoff. This made the game world so much bigger to me.

If you came to me after having played Morrowind and told me of places I had failed to uncover, loot I had missed… Well, you should have gotten the point by now.

4398

I was under the impression that locations announced themselves when you were near them in Skyrim. It’s been a while since I played, but I thought that was now the norm in the Elder Scroll series.

As for homogenous locations, I think you’re remembering Morrowind too fondly. The homogenous look of caves and other locations has always been a complaint against the series by many users. The stories were always great though.

4399

Didn’t we have a thread of exploration in video games? You could… I don’t know… like, continue in there. Not that it’s going to serve for anything, as I don’t see any of you moving from your own positions.

4400

Not in the slightest? Like, at all? I remember you get something for clearing that stuff.

4401

Exactly Jeff, this guy gets it.

4402

Truly organic? Because that little slider bar version of a mini map would show when you were getting close to something in Skyrim.