The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Yeah, that was a problem for me in 90% of the game. It was only near the end when I finally got some good cards. Until then I had crappy cards, and the only deck I could play with was Northern Realms. All the other cards I’d been getting, good cards, were all for decks I couldn’t play because you need 10 cards in order to play with a deck. So the only cards that matter are Northern Realm cards for much of the game.

The best spy is the Elf at a 0 that can’t be used against you again.

Oh hey, I was just doing the quest for the guy who gives that card. Because I got blocked from playing him until I fetched a bunch of crap for him.

Right, the Mysterious Elf can’t be decoyed.

I tried a bunch of different decks, but always ended up going back to Northern Realms with spies, decoys, the “tight bonds” cards (well, except Poor Fucking Infantry), and the hero cards. The “draw a card when you win a round” faction perk is useful, too.

I didn’t explore the commander cards much once I’d settled on Foltest’s cancel weather effects.

Jeez, I’ve got so many of those damn things.

XboneX and Pro support will be in. Good decision by CDP.

So 5 days later and still no Ciri. Turns out those Brothers in Arms: Skellige quests? not so short after all. Just finished the last for Craiche, siding with Cerys ultimately. So tonight I’ll go to Ciri, for real.

Don’t mind though, the quests for Hjalmar and Cerys were top notch. Also I got sidetracked when I went to go get the Bear upgrades, and wound up chasing down some mysterious teleporting tower, and doing a climbing puzzle to collect some trinkets from a place of power on top of the mountain.

I am not good at staying on target, is what I’m saying.

This game is an absolute joy to play. I’m level 18, just wrapping things up in Novigrad and about to head to Skellige. I love just about every single thing in this same. The one exception is the color contrast and brightness settings which are driving me nuts.

I have the graphics set to full screen so that I can adjust the gamma because on the default setting things looks like midnight even at noon on a sunny day. The gamma slider is slid as far to the right as possible and it’s still pretty dark. I’ve done a lot of reading about others having similar issues and I’ve tried everything I can find and it still looks bad.

I can manually set the gamma higher than the slider max of 1.9 in the user settings config file and it does make things brighter but is also looks very washed out and color flat. Just ugly. I also tried playing with the gamma setting in render.xml but no real improvement.

It’s weird because everything looks fine when the cuts scenes play but just as soon as they end, everything gets dim again. It’s not sudden but a transition over about a second. Same thing when I’m inside looking out though a doorway, everything looks nice and bright outside, but when I walk outside, everything dims dramatically. Same thing when I’m looking inside from outside. It’s like I’m walking around with a cloud of darkness over my head. Maybe there’s some brightness setting somewhere that dynamically adjusts the light in whatever environment I’m moving into.

This was not happening up until yesterday. It was still somewhat dark but not this bad and I noticed no difference between the cut scene brightness and when they end. Something apparently changed somewhere but I don’t know how or what. I’ve spent about 5 hours trying to fix it and it’s greatly diminishing my fun with this game.

Anybody got any ideas that I could try to fix things? My card is NVidia and I’m on Win7 64.

That sounds like a bug. If you’ve tried everything the Internet suggested and it still doesn’t work, then I’m not sure what to do.

That sounds bizzare. 550 hours and I never encountered this issue. I would try the usual - deleting game settings files from My Documents\Witcher 3 folder, verifying files, reinstalling the game completely (deleting its folder remains) - but I assume you already tried this :/

I’ve got it fixed for now. It seems to occur sometimes when alt-tabbing. I guess I’ll have to avoid that since it sometimes seems to mess up all the brightness settings.

Okay. I’ve played a lot of this game on the PS4. I feel like I have to get this off my chest, because I feel like a terrible person given the love seemingly everyone has for this game.

My god, I find it boring and kludgy. The controls feel clumsy. The load times are terrible. But worst of all, it just seems so boring. Cut scene after cut scene. Generic Geralt/Wolverine voice (“Hrmmmmph, Grrrffmmph. Yen.”) Ugly babies. Oh gee, Ciri got into a scrape but narrowly escaped again in yet another flashback, now I have to play Ciri again for 20 minutes. I feel like I fight and advance less than I lurch from dialogue tree to dialogue tree.

I’m so sorry - I feel like there is something defective in me for finding this very mediocre at best. I can see the love that went into it, but ugh, I just don’t get it.

You don’t have to apologize. Lots of people are defective!

Well you can’t do anything about load times and clunky controls on PS4, so if you’re not liking the characters and adventuring, then there’s no point in continuing.

I’m just going to have to learn to live with my deficiencies. :)

Don’t compare it to “other games”. Compare it to Skyrim. It’s pretty superior to Skyrim in almost every way (Skyrim is superior in the atmospheric Northern Lights and stars competition).

Massive single player open world is its oeuvre. And if you think the controls on the console are clunky you haven’t played the PC version! Electric golf cart combat sums it up.

Huh. That is bizarre, because I was actually thinking of starting Skyrim again, having preferred it. I liked the random dungeons, character stat system, etc. much more. And Skyrim does not have those interminable cut scenes (at least not to the same degree).

Maybe there really is something wrong with me.

Well Skyrim does one thing right in that it feels like a modern version of those Big Game Hunter “sims”; stand and enjoy the view. W3 is perhaps more beautiful but it is also more flat, more “Eastern European”, muddy and oppressively small. And because the narrative is much more voluntary it’s kind of easier to jump into and out of. The combat and inventory are much easier to use and perform in Skyrim even if they are less well organized. Arguably while the actual random quests are more elaborate in W3 there’s nothing like the random spelunking you get in Skyrim.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you. I think when we get older even well crafted fictional world all start to seem samey - you’re still the gruff hero slicing and dicing, Pulitzer level writing or not. I will say the best part of W3 are the crones, a very Slavic fairy tale personified.

That was the one really satisfying part of the bad ending I first got when I finished the game, because I didn’t think busting up some random elf’s lab was a productive thing for Ciri to do. In that ending, you hunt down the final Crone, which I always thought was a big loose end in the main game. Geralt and Ciri might have had a sad ending, but at least I got to go after that crone.

Then I went back in time and encouraged Ciri to vandalize the lab, and got the best ending instead.

Yea the Ciri thing doesn’t feel especially organic honestly. It’s kind of an aspie guys vision of parenting.