The hype may be real. The cake, on the other hand…
(sorry)
HRose
1803
Well, at least a reviewer confirms some of the doubts:
Tricky one, this. A great game, undoubtedly, but a different game to the one many were expecting. And in an industry that places such enormous emphasis on pre-order sales, the manner in which a game presents itself in the months prior to launch matters. CDP RED did previously state that Skellige wasn’t accessible via real-time travel, but have referred to The Witcher 3 as an open-world game from the start. It’s been equally keen to draw Skyrim comparisons, and was sonorously vocal about games releasing in a sub-optimal state following its most recent delay. It is, simply, hoist by its own petard.
Also the positive reviews, like Kotaku, don’t avoid being critical.
Especially Kotaku points out being able to finish the game and lots of sidequests in 60 hours. So, again, we aren’t so close to the 200 hours claim, neither to 100 hours. The 60 hours is pretty much the standard for this type of game people expect, no mor no less.
Is that from your own blog, HRose?
Now that I think of it, why are you trying to confirm doubts? Oh, right, because that’s more fun for you than dispelling them.
Perfect, that makes sense. Thanks!
We’ve been told for about a year now that there are regions that are separated and must be fast-traveled to.
Troll somewhere else.
http://www.gamesradar.com/witcher-3-wild-hunt-review/opm/
It’s a rather poor review, but not for the score, which seems personally reasonable. I think it’s the writer’s expectation that having three major areas segregated from one another is a bad thing, even as we’re told by every review–including this one–that the size is so massive that they don’t feel like individual dioramas and that Velen by itself is the size of Skyrim. And…it pre-supposes that a reader who has been told about the scope of the game and cares about it a great deal also wouldn’t know about the separations of regions. I think that’s a bit of a stretch to make.
That’s the sort of thing an editor should’ve asked him to clarify a bit. Justify the statement, as my editors would tell me to do.
HRose
1807
If you read it then you’d know that the comparison he makes to Skyrim isn’t limited to the split in areas.
But reading honesty from you who are ready to jump at my throat at a first hint of criticism about an hyped game? It’s like being back in kindergarten.
Grow up.
There was a image floating around for awhile now that showed how loading would work with the regions, I think was on reddit.
What are we discussing here? How much the broken-up open world did not impact the review? It’s a 4/5 and the guy heaped a bunch of praise on the game.
Reemul
1810
No mate it’s realy time you grew up, all you do is shit over everything even though you don’t play most of the games you shit on. You must lead one sad life spending it pissing on everyone and everything. Nothing I have ever seen you post is without a whinge, a whine or a complaint. It’s a very dull and sad life you must lead getting very little joy out of anything and sapping the happiness out of everyone else that has to read the crap you post.
Really if everything is so bad and shite etc etc go and do something you really enjoy and makes you happy and stop wasting your time on this sort of crap really you get one life and you are pissing it up the wall.
No, I read what the reviewer wrote. In fact, it was the first review I read in full, mostly because it’s at the bottom of the current Metacritic list (or at least was at the beginning of the day.)
That full understanding doesn’t change my approach. I think that most people will enter this game knowing it isn’t Skyrim. You play a specific character here, and throughout development from the very, very beginning CDPR has been quite clear: they’re trying to balance the storytelling chained narrative of the first two games with an open world ethos.
I think the problem is that the simple might blunder into a black and white assumption that the freedoms of Skyrim are representationally good, while any iteration based upon that approach is not if it is not equally free. That’s why there’s always been an almost painful bit of deliberate explanation coming out of Poland for 2 years. They’re not making Skyrim. They’re making a Witcher game in which the open worlds of Skyrim or Red Dead were clearly an influence. Thus, tradeoffs are to be expected. That so many reviewers have discussed and marveled at the way the game uses it’s side quests to feed the state of the world and main quest situation in The Witcher 3 tells me that they likely did a good job of managing that balance.
If you had “doubts”, well, I don’t know why you would. Those “doubts” about what CDPR was aiming for were confirmed over and over again. It would take willful ignorance of spectacular heights to have expected otherwise.
And, as Telefrog notes, the reviewer in that article is quick to temper even his own expectations by saying that the game is fantastic.
By all evidence, this is what he truly enjoys.
I actually thought the GamesRadar article was intriguing not for the conclusions but the assumptions it makes. It pre-supposes the answer to questions like “what is an open world RPG?” I’ve said since the beginning I thought (hoped) CDP was building a better Bethesda game. But when the author says he encountered few distractions while traveling the world – I suspect he means something like the carefully placed mini-stories in random caves and dungeons in Skyrim, or maybe the minigames found in Ubisoft’s catalog – I had to step back and ask myself if that’s what I’m really looking for. After all, how many games make that truly compelling? In a similar way, do I need to be able to walk from one end of the map to the other?
To me, an open world is about natural breathing space between pockets of excitement. Call of Pripyat may be the greatest open FPS-RPG ever made even though it doesn’t technically fit within the modern definition delineated by GTA clones and Bethesda games. It’s odd that we’re so loose with genre terms like roguelike – to the point where we lose the heart of what makes roguelikes great – and yet we’re suddenly protective of the term “open world.”
I don’t think you have to structure a game like Bethesda to make it a Skyrim-killer, just like CDP didn’t have to structure The Witcher 2 like Bioware to create arguably the best character-driven RPG.
I won’t say the GamesRadar author is wrong. I just never would have thought about it like he did. I simply didn’t see it the same way.
Keep in mind that expectations are powerful things. If you’re going into this looking to play Skyrim, you’d do well to read the review and set the right expectations. Because it seems like once you do, there’s a lot to be excited about here. “Believeable and intelligent world” has been a consistent message from reviewers, including this one. PS4 technical issues as well, so buyer beware.
It’s funny, I never thought of “open world” as a technical term, but more of a conceptual one. You have an entire world to play around in, go nuts! If there’s a loading screen or two in the process is that really so detrimental to the process? Not optimal, I get that, but a price worth paying for the experience surely?
Good post Tim!
I myself will cling to the hope that this is Red Dead Redemption : Witcher Style.
Great post, and that little bit I quoted I think is the main caveat emptor I’m seeing in PS4 reviews. I think a lot of reviewers have a built-in jankspectation, and thus are willing to overlook some stutters and framerates and a glitch now and again. I think, though, there’s also a bit of heavy faith being placed on a corrective patch too, and I’m not sure that’s faith too well-founded. Perhaps, but I’d say that the reviewer who noted specifically how many points they were downgrading based on those issues had a clear-eyed view of the situation and reviewed the game in front of him, not the game he might get.
I just…
I just can’t imagine sitting at work working knowing I have Witcher 3 ready to be played at home. It will be torture.
I will say it. He is wrong and that review is moronic. Especially this part:
White Orchard – where you’ll spend your initial hours with the scarred huntsman that is the White Wolf, learning the basics of many complex and involving systems – is a self-contained area. You can return to it after you’ve slain the Griffin and triggered your passage onto the main quest line, but not via real-time travel. Skellige, an archipelago full of seductive Northern Irish accents, clan politics and bracken-bordered Instagram opps is also a self-contained area, accessible only by ship – and again, not in real-time. The same goes for Kaer Morhen, and the Royal Palace at Vizima. All these areas are inaccessible from The Witcher 3’s primary setting, Velen, except by fast travelling. TL;DR – it isn’t an open-world.
By this logic, Skyrim is not an open world. Loading screens everywhere!
He reviewed a game he wanted it to be in his head, not the game it is.
Not to mention, Skyrim may be a nice sandbox in which Dragonborne can be head of mage guild, fight guild and thief guild while being greatest assassin in the world while also its savior all at the same time, all that set in story that is generic with forgettable dialogues and characters, but that all makes it worse, not better, than Witcher 3.
I spent 186 hours in Skyrim and loved it. But it is about as deep as a puddle.
I say live and let live, you need a south pole AND a north pole and for the north we have BleedTheFreak.
Agreed on the expectations of the magic patch. I doubt there will be a fix for all the stuttering on the PS4. I think people will need to understand that it’s not going to be a GTAV style improvement on consoles.
Social graces would help though.
I do think the dogpile is noisier than the original splashing sounds when the turd hits the punch bowl. I’m guilty of that sometimes.
One thing fascinating to me about the reviews.
I think the two most critical reviews of the game have come from IGN (9.3 of 10) and the UK Playstation Magazine/GamesRadar review quoted in such detail above.
The biggest beef the GamesRadar guy had has been spelled out well here: he didn’t find that the game delivered on the whole open world thing, but as a single-player RPG, the story was tremendous and the game utterly succeeded.
IGN? The single player RPG aspect didn’t work for that reviewer at all. However…the open world and ability to explore it more than won him over.
So.
There’s that. Vive la difference.
