The Witcher series

[Chuckman]

Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. I don't think I can go back to Skyrim.

Also I'm surprised this game doesn't have a thread of its own.

[THEN MAKE ONE. Must I do everything around here? - Monk, after creating this split from Currently Playing.]

[Chuckman]

Still playing Witcher 3. This game is amazing, blows Skyrim out of the water. Even fetch quests and escort quests are funny. The game has a really irreverent sense of humor about itself without being obnoxious about it and Geralt is a really fun character.

Also this game has the prettiest ladies.

[Monk Ed]

Still playing Witcher 3. This game is amazing, blows Skyrim out of the water. Even fetch quests and escort quests are funny.

Dude. Really? Wow! That's some high praise! I have that game and have had it for months but haven't even touched it because I still haven't beaten 1 & 2. I didn't realize it was so different, in large part because I've read extremely little about any of the games.

[Chuckman]

Dude. Really? Wow! That's some high praise! I have that game and have had it for months but haven't even touched it because I still haven't beaten 1 & 2. I didn't realize it was so different, in large part because I've read extremely little about any of the games.

Gameplay wise, Wild Hunt is like Skyrim with 200+ mods plus a bunch of amazingly clever or convenient shit and much, much more complex and interesting combat. Story-wise... it has a story.

Most interestingly, it's the most immersive open world, choice wise, that I've ever played. Everything you do, even stuff that's not part of a scripted event or cutscene, affects the world and the way characters react to you.

You can pretty much skip 1 & 2. I lost interest in 2 after playing it for a while thinking I wanted a save to import into 3, and ended up watching story recaps on YouTube instead. Witcher 3 is so far beyond the other two. It's not the perfect open world RPG but it's close to it.

The writing and voice acting is amazing. I feel stupid going to bat for all the dumb shit in Skyrim arguing that this and that isn't possible in a free roaming RPG.

They even came up with a really clever way to handle consequences of choices that would be too big to show in the game world and make it feel like things have actual consequences.

It's a really morally complex game, too. They like to throw really insane dilemmas at the player and force you to make snap decisions based on limited information, but in a way that's actually entertaining and logical.

Also people who didn't actually play this game gave it a raft of shit about violence against women apparently but the game definitely doesn't objectify women even if you can fuck like ten different girls in graphic, fully animated sex scenes. It takes a very humanist view and treats women like people instead of making them barbie dolls or putting them up on a pedestal.

The one thing you lose is freedom to create a truly unique character, but that's traded for a fully voiced protagonist with a personality of his own, and the voice acting and writing are incredible, as are the animations during conversations and such.

I'll give you an example of one of the choices I'm talking about:

SPOILER: Show

Early in the game I visited an inn while looking for another character I needed information from. My conversation with the inkeep was interrupted by a group of thugs who came in acting rowdy. I had the option to react peacefully, flip out and murder them, buy them a round, or warn them that I was a Witcher. I picked the nonviolent path and just let them be.

After the cutscene ended I caught a snipped of conversation and listened in; they were having a jokey conversation about raping someone. Naturally I flipped out, whipped out my sword and killed them all and a bunch of their friends who were still outside.

Unlike Skyrim where you can basically murder anybody effectively consequence free, this action had both small and large repurcussions later. It majorly inconvenienced me, adding a complex dungeon crawl and fighting to access a place I could have just strolled right into otherwise, and later on I announced that I was a Witcher in the presence of a group of thugs who then attacked me after they realized I was the same one that killed their friends.

The game is pretty dark and frequently offers you a choice between trying to be a hero or being a proper Witcher who is detached and neutral and only interested in destroying harmful monsters for a fee. There are consequences to both.

The world is pretty unique in that it's more high medieval/early renaissance than most fantasy stuff and if you pay attention to what's going on it becomes clear that it's not a standard fantasy world. (This isn't really a spoiler, so, example: All of the various races came to the unnamed planet through some kind of multiversal conjunction that periodically dumps elves, or dwarves, or monsters, or humans on this planet. There's a very subtle hinting throughout that the humans that occupy the setting did not themselves come from a "fantasy" world, especially as the mages seem to have an anachronistic understanding of things like biology and genetics)

[NemZ]

...well shit, that sounds awesome. When I have more free time I'll have to check that out.

[Chuckman]

One more thing: The game has a feature a lot of like the detective mode in those Batman games but frequently requires you to engage in actual thinking. I don't mean, like, solving a logic puzzle either, I mean listening to dialogue and deciding who to trust among two or more unfavorable options, whether or not a ghost is trying to trick you by telling you how to lift its curse, etc. etc. The 'right' choice is never spoonfed to you, you must make a decision on your own and the game doesn't hold your hand and throw IMPORTANT CHOICE ARE YOU SUUUUUUUUURE YOU WANT TO PICK THAT ONE? warnings at you. The only contextual clue you'll get is that some choices are timed.

For a game about a guy whose job description is "Go to X and kill Y" there's a surprising lack of "GO GET MY SHIBBLEDIBBLE" feel to the quests, even the ones that are literally go here and kill that.

Oh and

SPOILER: Show

Ciri... is this a spoiler? I think she's like in the box art and game descriptions and stuff. Anyway Ciri is my new waifu oh my god she's gorgeous. Hottest video game character ever.

[Monk Ed]

Inspired by Chuckman's raving about The Witcher 3, I picked up my playthrough of The Witcher 1 again, beat it, and have moved on to The Witcher 2 and am 12 hours deep as of tonight.

As a long-time player of The Witcher (because the game was just boring enough for me to keep dropping it but just entertaining enough for me to not drop it forever) and fresh off my experience with it, I've noticed everything its sequel does differently in stark relief, and I find that its pluses and minuses are not what I was expecting based on what I'd heard about it.

The much-vaunted improved combat of the sequel seems anything but so far -- when I'm not button-mashing I'm hit-and-running the way I do in every game that doesn't have its combat house in order. Witcher 1's click, wait, click, wait melee was boring to be sure, but there was a higher level of strategy in play that seems to be gone in the sequel -- there's no more sword styles, you can't drink potions in combat, many potions that were much more useful in the original now come with significant downsides, and you can drink only a specific number at a time (3 to start, but I predict that can be upgraded), whereas the original's toxicity system was more organic, allowing you to drink as many potions as you dared with consequences for reaching high levels of toxicity by imbibing too many. In this game? I haven't yet been able to tell what the toxicity mechanic even does, because the 3-potion limit is far more the bottleneck.

Signs (witcher magic) that were a lot more impressive in the original have become laughable shadows of themselves in the sequel. Igni has such a pathetically short range (at least right now) that I find myself repeatedly launching fireballs that stop inches short of their target. Even low-level Igni in the original was an impressive wave of fire that could engulf multiple targets in an arc in front of you, or be charged up for a long-range fireball; the sequel's Igni is, thus far, a single small fireball that can strike only a single target and cannot take out even a lowly bandit except with several tries. Aard in the original was an impressive wave of force that could knock down everyone in front of you; Aard in the sequel, thus far at least, is a little ball that affects a single target and makes them stumble.

This is just a tease so that I'll really appreciate it when I can power these abilities back up to their heights from the previous game, right? Right?! But why were they depowered in the first place? No explanation is given whatsoever for why Geralt is suddenly so much weaker than he was. Where previously I could defeat entire groups of foes with the group sword style, I must thwack away at them individually now. This unexplained weakening even extends to equipment: I imported my save from the first game with all the best equipment and one of my swords was but a single point of damage better than the default starting equipment and outclassed by literally the first new weapon I picked up after it.

The game is buggy too. The original was a bug-ridden mess, but at least its bugs were largely limited to presentation problems (such as glitchy animation); by contrast, in just my first couple sessions alone of the game I had it hang at least twice on me, and I don't recall the original ever hanging.

On the plus side, the game has updated a few other little odds and ends that add up to a much more fulfilling experience. Collecting items and herbs and such is as simple as a single button press, and your inventory is now limited by weight instead of slots, which prevents variety from being your enemy and removes the need to manage inventory. These all may seem small, but they are literal game-changers; the tedium of collecting materials as you run about the environment has been reduced to near-trivial levels. And when your inventory gets full from all that picking up, it's nearly as easy to sell it off, because all merchants purchase all goods; the truly useless stuff is even conveniently filed for you under the heading of "junk".

These are early impressions yet -- I fully expect them to improve over time, and some of them improved just today.

[Monk Ed]

Just 47 gameplay hours after starting it, I beat The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.

My opinion evolved as I expected, but much less than I would have hoped -- at least until the end, when my opinion of the game ticked back up again.

Certain updates on my first impression read better in list form:

• Changing the inventory system to limit based on weight instead of slots proved not to be the solution I'd hoped it would be to Witcher 1's inventory problems. Variety was still the enemy, but in a different way: Equipment, alchemical components, and crafting materials all share that same weight limit, and the game did not make it easy to figure out what was worth keeping on and what wasn't. I spent most of the game near the weight limit and often having to decide what to keep and what to drop.
  
• The swordplay never really got better for me. In fact, it arguably got worse, because as the game got harder its little quirks became more consequential. Depending on how far away you are from your target when you press an attack button, Geralt will perform different attacks, but I never felt like I was fully in control of which one. By game's end I still had not determined whether the particular type of lunging attack Geralt performs when you press the button was deterministic at all.
  
• On the other hand, my experience with Signs did improve, but only right near the end and only as a result of discovering a secret person who will rearrange your ability points for you (accessible only if you make a certain choice hours earlier that has no obvious connection to the result). Thanks to that I was able to rebalance my abilities to put more of an emphasis on Signs than I had before, amping up the critical effects rate to an actually reliable one but more importantly unlocking an area-of-effect upgrade to Aard and Igni I hadn't even noticed before. This changed everything -- the rest of the game, what little remained, was actually fun now that I had an effective means to combat the hordes of enemies the game loves to throw at you, when previously even the Whirl upgrade (which allows your sword to strike more than one opponent per swing) didn't help much in that regard.
  
• Potions never became particularly useful for me, and I didn't have enough ability points left over after my above-mentioned remix to explore that upgrade tree to see if they could be made so. The game only shows you half the upgrades available in a particular tree because in order to see an ability's second level (each has two) you have to purchase the first, and in most cases the second is drastically better so most of the good stuff is hidden -- so I was unable to see whether exploring the Alchemy path might have been worth it. I guess I kinda didn't want to anyway given how much of a hassle mixing and using potions is in this game, what with needlessly long drinking animations and being able to do it only between fights.
  
• Some of or perhaps the most fun I had in the game were the boss fights. Compared to how little fun I had swording it out with hordes of mooks (at least until I discovered certain critical Sign upgrades), carefully dodging large individual bosses and figuring out their patterns and timing was an experience comparable to Dark Souls (with all the same rolling to boot). I love that feeling of going from "How am I possibly expected to beat this guy?" to figuring him out and kicking his ass.
  
• The above did not apply to all bosses. The kayran was just a chore from start to finish. But the first fight against Letho, and Saesenthessis near the end (googling that name spoils what kind of enemy it is, which is half the fun), were fantastic examples of going through that curve, especially the latter.
  
• Chuckman's praise for how the third game makes you think is true of the second one as well. A number of quests and puzzles had me trying to figure things out on my own and left me extremely satisfied when I did.
  

This game does story-altering choice better than any game I have seen, and even implements ideas I have thought up while playing games that do it less well. There's at least one choice in the game that has such a dramatic impact on the entire rest of the game that the walkthrough I kept at my side divided its advice for the rest after that into two halves depending on which path you take. As a result of my choice there was at least one and probably several significant characters I did not even meet.

And that is exactly how I think games with story-altering choice should be done: Make the game shorter and divide what would have been 100+ hours of content if taken all in one playthrough into several shorter playthroughs. This increases replayability manifold by making the investment of a fresh playthrough lower and the level of actual freshness in it much higher. The Mass Effect series failed this by making you go through mostly the same content with usually not even changed window dressing, just a changed context; in Witcher 2, the team you decide to side with changes the middle chapter almost completely.

A final criticism, and one that's really off the beaten path: For a game about a monster hunter whose duty is to remain neutral to politics, you do very little of either of those and unless you want to turn down every other quest, you're going to wind up playing the game more like a typical mercenary or hero. In fact, there's only a small handful of actual witcher contracts in the game, just a couple per chapter.

Luckily for me, it seems the third game changes this entirely.

[xPearse]

Did you say somethin', or did ya just fart?

[Monk Ed]

One of many memorable quips.

One thing I forgot to mention that's truly worth its own post: The story is where it's at in Witcher 2. I could not say the same for the first game, even though it lays all the seeds of the trilogy with what winds up seeming like amazing foresight. By the end of Witcher 2 I was so enthralled with the story that I explored everything the final boss had to tell me about what was really going on the whole time, and the effect is doubled when you play the game in a short time like I did because then you remember the seemingly insignificant surface events that said boss's explanations provide the underlying motivations for.

[Monk Ed]

Just a few hours into Witcher 3 I've already encountered a game-breaking bug.

That story Chuckman told above, about the inn and those guys? I followed in his footsteps, and the thugs were bugged out standing still and unkillable, and although they registered as killed for questing purposes the result is that when I got to the baron's keep the guards there were similarly bugged and unkillable, making me unable to progress the main quest. It appears that unless I find a fix, the only way to continue is to let them get away with their crime.

Updating did not fix the problem -- I updated right before the scene in question, not to fix anything but just to be up to date. No idea if the bug would have happened in the version right before.

EDIT: So I reloaded an earlier save... and that's fucked too. The chamberlain who's supposed to lead you doesn't move. And the patch for the version I was using before is not available on GOG, and the only way on there to roll back is to reinstall the entire game and hope the bug doesn't exist in version 1.06 (I was 1.05 before the update).

[soul.assassin]

ameplay wise, Wild Hunt is like Skyrim with 200+ mods plus a bunch of amazingly clever or convenient shit and much

The difference between this and that game: true, W3 solves most of the problems that plagued Skyrim, thus living up to the hype and satisfying the RPG sweet tooth, but Skyrim's advantage is that me as a relentless tinkerer, I get to customize and personalize that game with a buttload of tools.

Nevertheless, if you need, there's a growing number of mods for W3:

http://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/?

Each to his own. :)

[Chuckman]

I was going to make a proper post with a detailed OP when I finished the game. :p I'm almost 30 hours in and still haven't completed Act II, there's so much to DO. As with Skyrim I do the big story pieces on weekends and focus on the tasks during the week for diversion.

Also yes there are a fair number of bugs with 1.10, unfortunately. Might be best to wait a bit for some hotfixes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/witcher/comments/3o3j0m/110_update_bugs_and_problems/

[Monk Ed]

Also yes there are a fair number of bugs with 1.10, unfortunately. Might be best to wait a bit for some hotfixes.

Yeah -- after spending way too long trying various fixes, I've decided to just roll the version back to the closest I can get to what I started with. I just lucked out that I was impatient enough to start the game without updating it first, so I got to play as far as I did before I updated and ran into trouble, so after the rollback I should be able to at least continue the game while waiting for an official fix. Gotta say I'm glad I'm playing on GOG where I actually can roll back -- another luck-out.

[Chuckman]

Today in Witchery, I

SPOILER: Show

Ran into a pair of witch hunters who demanded I surrender for interrogation. I handed over my weapons to them and oops, turns out they were going to try and murder me no matter what I said in retaliation for humiliating a priest. So I had to kill them with telekinesis and my bare hands to get my shit back.

Dear people of Witcherland: Stop making me murder you.

This trailer pretty much sums up how I play the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0i88t0Kacs

[Monk Ed]

The rollback worked, and I've been continuing my journey in peace (on 1.07). Praise be to the GOGs.

This trailer pretty much sums up how I play the game.

You, me, and probably a whooole lot of other people. It's oddly fulfilling -- I think the fact that you absolutely could turn your back on people in need makes your rescue of them feel all the more meaningful. I justify it to myself in light of the witchers' code the same way Geralt does in that video, too -- "monsters in human skin" is a term that passes through my mind sometimes as I do it.

It's hardly the only type of dilemma in the game, either, as was the case in the previous game. It's not even just about choosing to be a hero or a mercenary, but sometimes about which way really does more good in the head -- best illustrated by the Henselt decision in The Witcher 2, I think. That was such a hard choice to make.

[Lorkhan]

I'll be honest, I never really cared for the Witcher series much, despite the fact that I loved 2. While I adore the scale of the Witcher 3, there's something about the world that still comes off as lifeless to me. Oddly enough, I think the Witcher is a series that benefits more from its smaller world spaces.

So, like I said, the only thing I find really awe inspiring about W3 is the scale. The rest is...pretty standard I find. Can't say I see anything that shakes anything up about it.

[IronEvangelion]

Well I picked up a used copy of The Witcher 2 a few days ago, finally giving me a reason to dust off my long-neglected Xbox 360.

I'm liking the game so far, but it's really slow to get started. I think it's supposed to become open-world at some point, but right now it's still leading me along by the nose. I just got to a town called Flotsam, and I'm killing time while waiting for nightfall so I can visit the village big shot. I really like the 2-sword combat mechanic, even though I seem to have lost one of them (damn dragon flew off with it), so I have to make a new one. Also, this game has the ugliest clothing I've ever seen.

[Monk Ed]

At long last, months later, I beat The Witcher 3.

whole game  SPOILER: Show

Holy fucking shit that was awesome.

On the story and choice mechanics front, this game does everything right. Unlike Fallout 4, unlike Mass Effect, unlike any other RPG I could name that features story-altering choice, this series does it best -- so well that you forget how easy it is to mess up. I felt like my choices actually mattered, and like I could tell when they did. I was happy with this aspect of the game pretty much from beginning to end.

If there's one flaw I could name in the story department, it's that the main quest was so pressing that I didn't feel like I ever really had the opportunity to do the side content. I even made a symbolic moment out of it during my game: Before sailing with the party to Undvik prior to the final battle, I took a quick side trip back to Velen where I completed a job I'd left hanging since near the very beginning of the game, "Funeral Pyres", which I left behind at the time because, intense roleplayer that I am, I felt that it made no sense for Geralt to waste time on anything unessential to his pursuit of Ciri. The main quest had remained so persistent a spur in my side that I left it lying for the whole game, and only went back to complete it when I did because I wasn't sure whether I'd have a post-game chance to do so.

And, as often happens with games I've beaten, now that I've beaten the main quest I don't really feel like going back and doing things I missed. Of course, it's easy to say that right after beating the game.

I suppose another flaw I could name, though a dubious one, is that the main quest feels really, really long. Granted, I made it a heckuva lot longer than it actually is by endlessly replaying scenes to explore the different ways they can play out, but I still remember long stretches of the game that felt especially drawn-out and that I don't look forward to doing again, such as helping Hjalmar track down that ice giant and the endless slog of shit you have to do in Novigrad's criminal underworld.

Back on the positive side, the writing and voice-acting bear special mention. They are so utterly top-notch that it's easy to take them for granted. Indeed, I literally did not think to give the voice-acting special mention until just now because it just popped into my head, and that's about the highest praise voice-acting can get, when it's so seamless you don't even notice it -- and that's even with some of the exact same voice actors as the previous games. The writing, too, is fantastic, both of dialogue and story: The jokes made me laugh, and the scenes meant to be emotional genuinely were. Plot-wise, I was kept guessing right until the very end. One of the funny, interesting traits of the writing is that, even after I figured out that every quest has a twist or two, I kept forgetting that fact and thereby managed to keep getting surprised when it happened! The funniest time this happened was when I encountered the twist for "Funeral Pyres"; I was like... oh, right, here I am doing the last side quest I intend to do before beating the game, one I started way back at the beginning, and once again I forgot that they all turn out different from how they first appear.

The quality of storytelling is made more, not less, surprising by the fact that the series is backed up by a series of novels... that nobody has read. Normally, being an adaptation of an existing property is (expected to be) a boon to a product, but here it does the developers no favors, and they actually leverage that to turn the utter obscurity of the novels into an advantage. The storytelling, right into the final game, is written top to bottom with the expectation that the player has never read and will never read the novels, and thanks to that it manages to pull out surprise after surprise that I suspect would have surprised no one who'd already read them. You can see this right in the opening scene: The game leads you on to believe that the woman sharing Geralt's room is probably Triss with a new voice actress, but when she lets down her hair and it's black instead of red, it's accompanied by a musical sting that makes clear that this misdirection was intended.

On the gameplay front, I can't be quite as enthusiastic as I am about the storytelling. Don't get me wrong, at the big-picture level the gameplay is the best in the series, but it is so more for what it removed than for what it improved. I barely used any potions except for healing compared to how extensively I used them in the first game, for example, and the abilities you can buy with the points that you get at each level-up not only have an extremely muted impact on gameplay (we're talking about a mere +25% to the attack damage of a single type of attack when the ability is maxed out at 5 points) but also have to be equipped in a limited number of slots to be used.

But as I said, these changes aren't necessarily bad, because they come with natural upsides that do a lot to improve the bigger picture. Thanks to the reduced role of alchemy, for example, I did not feel compelled to hoard alchemical ingredients in this game as in both previous games (at least, not after I discovered that you need to put together each potion formula only once), and reducing the impact of potions and abilities made not having the right ones not matter. Although I did miss the almost Zen-like experience of putting together my potions before battle, I did not miss fretting over whether I was putting potentially valuable ingredients to their optimum use.

I think the single biggest, best change made to the gameplay was the effective removal of the inventory limit. Inventory space was a huge issue in both previous games, one I even delved into in quite some detail in my writeups of my experience with Witcher 2, but in Witcher 3 the entire issue is just gone, because they upped the weight limit so high that as long as you don't go crazy picking up every dropped sword you'll never hit it. I remember hitting it exactly once, and that was only because I got it in my head near the end of the game to give sword-selling a try because I'd once read that the game was set up so that you couldn't make easy money by selling shit just anywhere but could sell weapons for a good price in the right places. (I never actually got around to testing whether the prices really differed significantly between regions.)

I suppose I could summarize the changes to the gameplay as doing everything possible to keep the gameplay from impeding the player's experience of the story, which is where the real meat lies. I guess the developers figured out what product they're really selling and focused on that, and it shows; the step-up in quality in presentation and storytelling is quite drastic between entries, especially for a series that's really not that old (just 8 years at the time of Wild Hunt's release -- and that's rounding up).

Between all three, it's certainly the one I most look forward to playing again some time.

I have no total playtime to report, because I didn't always launch the game through GoG Galaxy, so a lot of playtime went "off the record" -- usually by choice so that I'd not fret about leaving it paused for long periods, which is something about which I fret with Steam games. But, even the amount of time I did log into the official playtime on Galaxy exceeds my entire playtime of the previous game by nearly 50%.

Short answer: It was really fucking good. Play it for the story and the choices.

[Dima]

At long last, months later, I beat The Witcher 3.


Short answer: It was really fucking good. Play it for the story and the choices.

I never played a Witcher game before. Do i need to play 1 and 2 in order to understand the story? I don't want to start the game and keep asking myself ''who is this'', ''when did this happen'', ''am i missing something here'' etc.