Yeah, I don’t get the loot problems at all. Perhaps it was because TW1 and 2 did so poorly with it that frankly I’m gobsmacked that loot has any effect at all.
Like Reemul, I sort of look at it now and then, but mostly I wait until it gets up there and then go find a local smithy and break stuff down and sell off junk.
jsnell
4464
I’m maybe 80 hours in at level 30, probably very close to the end, and used witcher gear for maybe 2-3 hours of that. Went through a lot of trouble to get a Griffon set together, stopped using it an hour later. Went through a lot of trouble to upgrade 3 of the items to enhanced. Swapped 2 of those back to normal items within an hour. Chasing around for the quest starting points, the schematics and ingredients is too much of a chore for gear that’ll be obsoleted by random loot within an hour anyway.
Playing with a controller, the movement really doesn’t bother me at all. But agreed on the inventory system, it’s just garbage and it’s a total mystery to me why it was left in that state. Probably just requires 5-10 small tweaks to fix. For example:
- Allow reading items through the loot window, rather than require a full round trip through the inventory.
- Move readable items from the consumable tab to a new separate one (at least on a controller it’s just painful to scroll through all the readable items to reach the food)
- Allow switching gear while interacting with a vendor.
- When selling / buying the last item on a row, wrap around to the start of the next row rather than seemingly randomly jumping to the end of the next or the previous row.
- Add some way of figuring out why you’re overburdened. Sort by weight, for example. Though this stopped bothering me as much somewhere around level 20 when I discovered the existence of saddlebags… Oops.
- Allow marking items as important, and prevent selling important items. (For example for that full set of Griffon armor that I still carry around just in case).
So on the previous page, I’ve got Turin and a few others talking about how Witcher gear is completely superior to other loot in the game.
Now I’ve got jsnell telling me Witcher gear isn’t worth the bother.
This is why I am glad I am not a game designer.
Is it possible to continue playing the game after the ending? So many quests…
Yes. You can continue fooling around and mopping up side quests.
Timex
4469
Well, witcher gear is generally than other gear at the same level. But there are points in your progression where you are higher level than the witcher gear, and thus can use something else.
Generally though, if you upgrade the witcher gear, it will then be better again.
The level 30 witcher gear, for instance, is pretty much better than anything.
Bateau
4470
Witcher gear also has unique bonuses that you don’t generally see on other gear - attack power, adrenaline gain, sign intensity (only other gear I’ve seen this on was some crafted high end relic armor).
BTW, I have exactly two pieces of Witcher gear at level 11. I was hoping that tracking that stuff down would be a big part of questing for me going forward. Glad to hear that’s definitely viable.
Witcher gear looks badass, and Geralt needs to look as good as possible all the time because ladies might be watching. Fuck off with your random gambesons.
I’m concerned they’ve assembled crack teams of landscape artists, schooled in dashing off Turner and Constable lookalikes with the lighting moods of those Monet timelapse paintings… and now they’re going to say, Right, do some cyberpunk :(
That might actually be really cool. Romantic cyberpunk landscapes. I’m more concerned that they’ve shown and revealed nothing since the now clearly premature teaser.
BTW, I finally ran into an old redheaded “friend” (with benefits). I love the way she and Geralt exchange pained looks that have regret and longing through that first meeting while the King of the Beggars is monologuing is amazing.
It does seem to have an obvious application to alien landscapes. Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease. But not urban ones. Oh look - dark. And rain. And neon. Yawn.
jsnell
4478
:-)
Definitely not arguing that the Witcher gear is useless. Just that it’s in no way essential and a lot of trouble to get and keep current as you level up.
Timex
4479
Eh, well finding it is kind of part of the fun. It’s fun to go search out the diagrams.
You totally can get comparable equipment without going through that though, if you want. It won’t look as awesome though!
jsnell
4480
Skellige is a real dump. I think it has two problems. First, it’s a pain to traverse since sailing is sloooow and boooring, the mountains block a lot of paths in the interiors of the islands and sometime require taking very circuitous routes, and even if you happen to have a fast travel point somewhere in the rough vicinity of the destination that won’t help unless there’s also a boat available there. Can’t summon a boat the way you can summon a horse… It’s a huge difference compared to the fluidity of moving around in Velen / Novigrad.
The second problem is that there appear to be basically no interesting characters on all of the islands except Yen, and the boring characters don’t even have a lot of quests associated with them. Again a stark contrast to both Velen and Novigrad, where you had this massive haul of important characters with elaborate and kind of intertwined quest chains.
I’m not sure what I should do next. I can continue my current game to complete the quests I missed, start a new game on hardest and try to make sure I do the quests I missed, or wait until the rest of the free DLC comes out and then start a new game.
I just finished too. About a quarter of the way in I thought I’d do another playthrough with different choices where available, and leave a good selection of quests for that. But seeing how long the critical path for this game is, realistically i don’t have it in me. So I’ll go back and do the couple of side quests that look like they might be good based on the description. And then see if there are any curated lists of “must do” side quests :-)
Bumping up the difficulty certainly won’t carry a replay by itself, the exact same tactics work but mistakes are just punished more. I did the first 10 levels at second hardest, then went to hardest except for the wild hunt boss battles (which I was finding more tedious than difficult).
Timex
4481
I kind of wish they had a permadeath mode. That might be interesting.
olaf
4482
Hmm I don’t think it looks badass at all. The starting Witcher gear is probably the best looking armor in the game but unfortunately its not upgradeable more than once. Cat and Griffin armor look like absolute shit. Bear is ok, certainly the best of the three sets and the later stuff approaches ‘badass’ to me. I agree with you that all the dropped light armor in the game looks terrible (so incredibly bad that it is hard to see how it made it out the door) but if you really stop to equip the dropped stuff to see what it looks like, I think you will find a lot of the medium and heavy armor looks better than the Witcher stuff.
I agree overall with the sentiment that ‘Witcher gear’ is generally better than drops but its not game breaking by any means. Also for the first 2 of the 4 tiers of Witcher gear, dropped stuff generally has more sockets in my experience and that can easily tip the balance in favor of the dropped stuff.
