Razgon
5763
Indeed. Which is exactly why we don’t want Bethesda to start making witcher style games, as we discussed in the fallout thread.
My experience was just the opposite, almost exactly so.
I found when I was playing The Witcher 3 that I learned more about myself, and looked inside my own memories and experiences more often than I have with any other videogame I’ve ever played.
Absolutely. There are so many life-like situations in this game, despite being set in a fantasy world…it is amazing. The books are like that too.
This again ? Gonna have to repeat myself I guess. I don’t want Bethesda to start making witcher style games. I want them to start making WELL WRITTEN WELL DESIGNED Bethesda style games.
MMDuran
5766
To me, it’s about heart. I’ve played about 15 hours so far (not much, I know) but each sidequest actually feels like it bothers to tell a story that’s interesting and that involves choices that make significant differences in the lives involved.
It’s strange because there’s not THAT much that separates a sidequest in FO4 from a sidequest in W3 – except, you know, interesting writing, engaging voice acting, and sometimes a set of choices where killing a guy or delivering a good is actually the suboptimal choice not because of the quest reward but because of what it makes you think and feel afterwards.
I let a monster fooling some villagers into paying it tribute live and even continue its extortion (albeit at a more reasonable rate) because doing so seemed to give the villagers hope in a pretty crappy world. In FO, I’d’ve tried to kill and loot it without so much as a second glance. It’s a very nice contrast.
This. I actually surprised myself by how I reacted to the moral/emotional ambiguities of the Bloody Baron sequences. For the first time in many many years, I felt like what I did in a game actually mattered. Is this the opposite of roleplaying? Or roleplaying’s ultimate goal?
Exactly.
Years and years ago I read an interview with Phil Collins of all people, talking about his song “In The Air Tonight,” and how he almost didn’t release the song. He’d written it about the breakup of his marriage, but decided there were all these details in the lyrics of the song that were so singular to his situation that they wouldn’t resonate with anyone else. And of course, what he discovered is that it’s those weirdly specific details that MAKE it resonate, that create the evocation of a time and space and feeling.
For instance, my favorite Chills song, bar none, is “Don’t Be-Memory”, a song about saying goodbye to a longtime girlfriend. There’s this awesome bridge lyric in the song:
Cozy in the North wing
Taking turns at Swamp Thing
Listening to The Byrds sing on the tape recorder
I haven’t done those things, or at least perhaps not all of them together at once. But when they’re laid out like that, you picture the individual in that moment as captured, and you lay it like a tracing paper over your own life and realize how easy it is to fit your own experience and memory and emotions within someone else’s sketch. And it resonates and feeds back strongly and you connect with the original work deeply on a variety of levels, from emotional to intellectual.
The moments I connected with The Witcher 3 will likely not be the moments that other people connected with The Witcher 3, and vice-versa. (I’m sure there’s also plenty of commonality as well.) But those moments are there, and they are there so strongly and so sharply drawn that it does become as much my story–or at least the story of my experiential reaction to the game story–as it ever was Geralt’s.
Editer
5769
I’m playing Fallout 4 right now and while there are parts I love, every time I get a generic Fed Ex or go-kill-everything-here quest (BORING), I just pine for more Witcher 3.
I’ve been debating restarting the game and doing a completionist run, to catch all of the side-quests I missed and maybe see the outcome of making some different decisions. But I don’t want to do that and then screw up having a character ready for the expansion when it comes out later this year.
The funny thing is that some up-and-coming lead designer could read those bullet points, implement all those things, and still not achieve the same feeling.
I think it’s because the characters feel like real people rather than Cool Videogame Characters that are overdesigned to be interesting.
I haven’t thought this all the way through, but perhaps it’s because many of them come from novels where they’ve had a chance to breathe, rather than a desperate desire to shine as brightly as possible before the end of a videogame (at which point they cease to exist).
That still doesn’t explain the excellent writing for minor NPCs and quests.
ShivaX
5771
Fallout feels like a Monty Haul campaign.
Witcher feels like a player-driven campaign that’s been going for a decade.
Each has their appeal, but I strongly favor the latter.
It is both the basis in novels and simply the fact that CDP has outstanding writers, actual writers who published novels and have Oxford degrees and shit.
Probably the most acclaimed questline (Baron) is completely original.
Tyrion
5773
As someone who hasn’t played Witcher 3 or Fallout 4 (but was a big fan of New Vegas), I’ve heard a lot about how Bethesda RPGs bring a level of openness and freedom that W3 can’t match. My question is: how? My understanding is that, in W3, you can’t pick up as many items in the world, factions/enemies don’t fight each other, and you can’t kill any NPCs. Is that it? What else makes W3 less emergent/open?
In a Bethesda game, there’s a story and large quest lines that may run to the end of the game…but you feel really unconstrained if you want to blow them off completely and just do other stuff and not be connected at all to the main story.
I think you lose some of that sense of freedom in W3 because of something it does really well–many of the side quests and contracts and other peripheral things all connect back to bigger quests in some way or another, or reference them, or feel like they feed into other quests in some way. Even when you feel like you’re simply abandoning the main story quest for five or seven levels, elements of the main story quest keep popping up in other quests you do.
So, I think that has something to do with the feelings of constraint that W3 has that Bethesda games don’t. And I’m not saying either approach is correct, necessarily. It seems like two different ways to approach an open world to me, and some folks will prefer the one, and some the other.
I don’t think it’s true that most of the sidequests feed back into the main quest, at least not for me. I find that I love the lovingly crafted sidequests but I’m levelling too quickly and finding myself having to decide whether to do the main quests or side quests over levelled and I’ve decided to go with just completing the main quests first and do all the side quests in my next playthrough.
I can totally get behind the side quests being awesome. Still it remains that I always feel like I am playing a different character then what I would like. So often I feel : “why not just kill this annoying asshole” towards some of the “bad” guys, and that is simply not an option. Some times a dialogue leads to a fight where you had no idea that would happen. I feel while I can make choices they are intransparent to me and often binary. Witcher 3 just does not let me play my way but only the designers/writers way. But I see I am in the minority so it may be something with me and not the game. For me it is vastly overrated and I have no connection to any of the characters, they are all boring or asshats. Except maybe Triss and Dandelion. And that makes it really jarring to me when Geralt has this deep connection to some I just can’t follow,for example Ciri. I just don’t get why everyone is all wound up about her and drops everything to help her. While she feels like a superhero when you play her. But yea, it may just not be the game for me.
Shamelessly stolen from gaf (thx eatchildren), this is beautiful, world from above
Nice maps there. Especially like the last one.
Just fired up GOG Galaxy and I saw that it was 7 months since I played Witcher 3… time flies.
Nixxter
5779
Geralt needs a bit of advice. He’s liking Witcher 3 big time (more so than 1 and 2, and he liked those too).
He’s a game completionist, really enjoying the quests and wants to do as many of them as possible. Hates looking at spoilers too so came here for some general advice.
Here’s the question - in the second main area I am in (Velen) there are SO many places to visit, quests to do, etc. that he’s (I mean I’m, ok!) wondering if he’ll outlevel the game.
None of the quests I am doing have gone grey, but, I’m level 10, and there are several below my level. Plus, there are SO many places to visit, etc. on the map that I could see spending, um, like another 50 or more hours just on this map to clear everything.
I’d like to do that, before I move on to another map. Will I ruin the game by outleveling it?
Thank you for the help, wise ones!
No you won’t. Just play the game the way you want and have fun your own way. If you want to keep it challenging (even overleveled), just stay away from the crafted witcher gear and you should have plenty of challenge. ;)
What difficulty are you playing? I had to increase the difficulty at some point, and yeah doing everything will make you outleveled. I think there is a mod that increases the xp needed to level up.
You will inevitably out-level the quests in the game. In my opinion, out-leveling the content in The Witcher 3 doesn’t ruin it because I was playing it for the roleplaying choices and story more than the combat. You can’t “out-level” roleplaying.
That said, I understand when people complain about this aspect of the game design. If you show people levels and XP, they expect a certain kind progression and The Witcher 3 doesn’t conform to that at all.
