Did you enable alternative movement response in menu options? Removes the clunkiness.
As for the rest I cannot help you, I find this universe fascinating and characters endlessly fun to be around, and have since I read the books some 18 years ago.
As a HUGE Skyrim fan it took me a while to like W3. At first I posted about how it just didn’t do what Skyrim did, etc. My brother was the same way,
Then I turned off the POI question marks. That made a huge difference. And thus I started just wandering the world rather than running from ? to ?. I turned the music on (I usually play open world RPGs with no music.) And I just kept playing.
And the deeper I got into the game, the more caught up I became in its game world. The writing is amazing. What would be a simple “Someone took my horse, can you go find it and bring it back?” fetchit quest ends up being a moral dilemma. A simple “Go convince the witch to do this for me” has a haunting result. There’s a point where you think you have a simple quest to kill monsters who are raiding caravans and yet everything you’ve done and every choice you’ve made to that point comes back into play.
Witcher 3 is not better than or worse than Skyrim, it is an entirely different game. I was reminded of that when I jumped into Fallout 4 after W3; Witcher 3 and Skyrim, for me, are all about creating my own story and doing whatever I want whenever I want and they give me a huge active sandbox in which to explore and role play. Witcher 3 is open in terms of all of the choices and more sidequests than you will ever finish, but it is ultimately about placing you in the central role of a truly epic story.
I’ll be the one to throw that gauntlet.
Witcher 3 is better than any game Bethesda has ever made. There is a depth to the writing, and a verisimilitude for character actions that no other RPG I’ve played touches. Bethesda games are plain boring for me, open world is almost a four letter world with my gaming time, and I have nearly finished the game. I’ll ultimately top 100 hours, and will span 7 months of near exclusive gaming time.
I wouldn’t spend more than 10 hours on anything Bethesda made these days before wandering off to do something else.
I know that may ruffle some feathers, but understand this is a highly subjective opinion. Skyrim must do something right as much as people love it. I find it boring. But some of you heathens hate EU IV, so let’s call it even ;)
Having played 180 hours of Skyrim when it came out (and enjoying most of those), I would also say Witcher does most stuff much better, BUT Skyrim simply offers things Witcher doesn’t, and if someone values those things (freeform play, creating own character, becoming leader of ALL THE GUILDS…) then I can understand them liking Skyrim more.
Coming to this game with nothing at all invested in the first 2 Witcher games or the books, I have to say that it’s been an uneven experience. I loved Act 1 and the open nature of the game. I love the writing and the nature of the quests. I love the skills system and equipment upgrade hunts. I liked Gwent a lot (though Arcomage is still my favorite all time card mini-game in RPGs)
On the other side of things, starting with Act 2, I felt like I was mostly watching a really long cut scene or movie. I didn’t really feel like I was playing the game nearly as much as in Act 1. Kaer Morhen and the battle there in particular was an almost uninterrupted hour of cut scene after cut scene. The cut scenes are really well done, almost movie quality, but in general, I’d rather be playing and making my choices, not watching a movie.
I still don’t like cutting back and forth between Geralt and Ciri. I’m well practiced at combat using my witcher skills and it was jarring to switch back and forth to someone I wasn’t that sure how to play, especially so in the same battle such as Kaer Morhen and Bald Mountain. Just didn’t like it and I still don’t see the point of it.
The gear in this game has issues. By that I mean that since the Witcher gear from the different Witcher schools is so much better than anything else you can find, it really takes the excitement out of finding everything else. Relic sword? Gee, I wonder how much I can sell that for? In fact, I ended up selling and not using every single piece of gear I found with the exception of runes, glyphs and crafting/alchemy stuff. It really takes a lot of the fun out of finding stuff since basically it’s just sold for cash.
Skill scaling. At first, getting new skills happens so frequently that you’re constantly getting that buzz from playing with new stuff. Toward the end of the game you only get them every 4 levels and by that time you have pretty much everything you wanted slotted already so you talking about 1% gains to adrenaline or stamina. Not a lot to look forward to for the last 10 levels. I understand why they did what they did but it does make thing drag a bit.
So, I’m on the expansions now and have 130 hours in the game so obviously I like it an awful lot. I don’t think it’s one of the greatest CRPGs ever made though.
Interesting. The gear is very much not my experience. Sure it is usually better than equivalent gear by a few levels, but there has been probably 75% of my game where I used relic swords instead of crafted. Even now with the end game crafted swords available, I am using relic swords instead of Superior Ursine swords.
For most of the mid game I was using Tir Torchir steel swords. In fact I got two, one slightly higher than the other. They lasted me a good 8 levels.
Now I’ve got a sword with a 10% burning chance that I’m rocking out. My armor is Superior Griffin, my bonus sign power is about 160, and mostly since I got to Novigrad my armor has been Witcher armor. Even for a few more armor points I’ve kept the Witcher gear because those bonuses are usually worth it. But non Witcher gear tends to have more rune slots for comparable levels.
Do you have to use the set’s swords to get the set bonus, or is that just for armor?
You need to use the swords for second set bonus (one at 3, one at 6 equipped pieces). 4 pieces of armor + 2 swords.
So here’s an example of why I’m so underwhelmed.
I’m doing the part where I’m gathering allies before a big Act II fight. I go to see the An Craite old guy. I get what feels like five minutes of cut scenes and dialogue screens about how he can’t go, but is going to give me this badass sword that is epic, been in his family for centuries. More cut scenes of him making some open handed clumsy attempt that I think was him taking it down from the wall.
I excitedly open my inventory, and what do I see? A level 18 sword. I’m level 24 at this point. The quests I’m doing are all level 22-24.
So why is this game going through this epic, long-winded wind up to give me useless shit 6 levels below where I am (and worse than the random sword I already have from somewhere out in the world)?
It’s that sort of thing that just makes me frustrated as hell. A lot of blather, but the actual gameplay itself is borked.
I could keep nodding vigorously at you for all of this, but I don’t think it would help, and it won’t change that it’s still one of my favorite games ever.
Yeah, getting Crach’s sword winter was… underwhelming. Like it should really be better than that. Same for Hjalmar’s sword. I feel kinda bad betting him for his sword that I turned around and sold within 5 minutes.
And it’s official, Witcher 3 is in the books. Now I sleep, because it’s very late. But tonight I thought I could finish when, at 10:30 I was chasing down boss fight.
Positive impressions, I’ll think and put a longer post mortem later.
Is the loot really that important in a storydriven game like this? I mean I was disappointed with that sword too, but it’s definitely not something that would impact my enjoyment. I just put it into a chest (didn’t sell it, have some respect!) and continued playing. Neither loot nor XP points are why I play and enjoy the series, eventhough I agree both should have been done better.
I think handling loot better would have elevated the game to even greater heights, but it wasn’t central to my enjoyment for sure. I loved this game so much.
The DLCs made loot better, but yeah it wasn’t really a big draw most of the time.
Ok let me lay out some thoughts.
First off the game is great. I can pretty comfortably say this is a top 10 RPG I’ve played. I don’t think it takes #1, but anything fantasy is going to have an uphill battle for that (I have a strong sci fi preference). But it is great, and I would not have finished it over the course of 6.5 months and 100 hours if it was not. I didn’t do every side quest, just most of them. Got about 10 undone quests when I finished.
So first off what does the game do notably well?
Writing and the story, obviously. There’s a reason I completed nearly every side quest, and it isn’t just my completionist tendencies. Sprinkled throughout are a bunch of quests that bring character moments to the front. Sure sometimes it is simply painting a plausible reason for you to go kill a thing. Nothing wrong with that. But even the quests that ask you to just simply go kill some wyverns usually give a reason to go do so. Not simply ‘because they are there’. Mechanically it doesn’t change much, but it does a good job of grounding things to the world and giving things more life.
The writing also tends to be a cut above. Sure there is a lot of rote dialogue and unispiring prose, but over the course of a 100 hour game it’d be unreasonable to expect everything to be novel quality. No what I was impressed by is the relative paucity of head slappers, of lines that land harder than the pirate I pushed off a cliff with Aard. There weren’t any major breaks in character for Geralt. No instances of follow the bouncing idiot ball. Which is something that, as much as I love Mass Effect, Commander Shepard has this grating tendency towards. In fact Bioware, as a whole, has gotten notably worse with this the last few years. Simply having a consistent character who responds intelligently to most situations is one of those praises that is really more of a critique of the rest of the industry.
But what was best was how distinct the setting felt. It was notably Slavic in some key ways. The Crones in particular were something that felt lifted out of a different cultural background than our Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage of Arthurian legend and Tolkien fantasy. Not that there is anything wrong with either! I love me some Tolkien, I’m one of those crazy cats who has read The Silmarillion. Multiple, 3+, times. But so often the fantasy stories we see are rote retellings without the vision or understanding of why those stories resonated. The conflict between dwarves and elves exists because that is what fantasy stories do, not because their creation and origins as beings created by different gods, each trying to be the one to bring forth the will of Manwe, cast them into conflict as their haste and jealousy created imperfect and fallen beings who would be jealous of the others gifts. No, we get them fighting because they are ancestral enemies. So worlds created exist as simulacrums of these touchstone stories, but dressed in different clothing. Very rarely do they bring something meaningful into their world building. Sure genre blending and gender swapping can be interesting, but it doesn’t say something about that world.
And sometimes that is enough. Sometimes playing a inversion, diversion, subversion of a story type we know is worth it on its own. Malificent was, I though, a fantastic film for how it turned a story we all know on its head. And it used those subversions to say something. But other times you get steampunk Norse gods because it sounds cool. The stories that make the cannon of the English speaking fantasy have been deconstructed, reconstructed, remixed, pallate swapped, and had the serial numbers filed off in thousands of ways, so much so that they’ve become cliche. Rote. People can do interesting things with them, but it is harder so few try.
Perhaps the Witcher is the same, for those steeped in Slavic legend. Perhaps the imagery and repurposing of various legends and myths of Eastern Europe feels just as tired and played out to a Pole as a trite retelling of the conflict between elves, humans and dwarves feels to those reared on Tolkien. Perhaps the Viking/ Rus analogue in Skellige is no more inventive. Perhaps. but I wouldn’t bet on that. It is certainly true that I am probably more lenient on the world due to the lessened familiarity. But that’s ok. There is a world of legends and myths that we could mine for inspiration. Why be beholden to one archetype? Lets see some Celtic inspiration that goes deeper than leprechauns and a pastiche of Irish or Scottish culture. Let’s pull the tales of Gilgamesh and the mythology around that. Indian legends about the worlds creation are endlessly fascinating, how about having Shiva be more than just a summon in Final Fantasy. And I dread to see how they completely botch using Egyptian mythology in any meaningful way in AC: Origins.
But that’s the writing and narrative. Later mechanics and choices.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts CraigM! That was an interesting read.
Now go to the spoiler thread and share your thoughts on what you thought of the ending, if you get time today, while it’s still fresh in your mind.
As someone who grew up completely unfamiliar with Tolkien, I was extremely frustrated with the first Baldur’s Gate in how much they assumed I knew, and how little they actually explained within the game about the fantasy world itself. They assumed I knew about Elves and Dwarves, and Kobolds and such. And honestly, they didn’t do much with those races either. As far as the game was concerned, the only difference between an elf, a dwarf and a human was basically the difference in stats.
It’s funny how people always excuse that when I bring up other games. Well, people are already familiar with all those races, there’s no need to explore them or explain them to the player in any detail. It’s not fair to bring up Planescape Torment, because people aren’t familiar with Dusters, and the various races in Planescape. So of course the game had to spend time and effort and lovingly detail things about them that the player could absorb.
I guess in the case of The Witcher, I suppose you could say, well people aren’t as familiar with Slavic cultural background, so of course they had to spend time and effort in fleshing out that world and exploring the Crones, and the cultures and discrimination against elves and dwarves and the religious cults in Novagrad, and the Norse-like warrior culture of the islands. People aren’t as familiar with them, so of course they had to it.
Meanwhile I invert that and say ‘if you’re just using generic assumed racial traits, why?’ Anymore I am super critical of any game, book, or movie that uses the triad of traditional fantasy races in their default way. Why do it then? If you’re just using elves to tick off the box, why bother doing it at all. Do something meaningful with that, or don’t do it at all.
Baldur’s gate I think gets some slack because of its origins with the D&D systems. Because I think that forces their decisions at some points. But that’s as much slack as I give them. Generic is still generic.
I think that a lot of you just get a lot more out of story telling in games than I do.
I like the story to be meaningful, but I want to play more of the game. I want the systems to make more sense - when I get the big bad sword, I want it to actually be a big bad sword. That’s far more important to me than another 15 minutes of cut scenes and dialogue trees. I played again last night. After I got the “allies” rounded up, I went through what felt like a literally half hour of uninterrupted dialogue and cut scenes. I would rather read a book than sit through that in a game.
Just different strokes for different folks.