Chronicling my way through F***HUEG... I mean, Witcher 3

[bartholen_v1legacy]

It takes GTA-caliber writing
scope and exploration of the Bethesda sandbox

Don't get those two parts. How are bad puns and being afraid of real issues is compared to W3?
And it doesn't have anything in common with Bethesda's sandboxes. Especially the older ones. It's straight up Far Cry 3 open world.

And I don't understand your english.

I said "caliber", not "style". Whatever might be true, the GTA series is often considered among the best writing in games. I find GTA V's dialogue a joy to listen to, even when the story's plagued by aimlessness and character inconsistency. Bioware are also excellent, but I've found what I've played of their output a touch self-important and overly serious for my taste. Witcher 3 has the best of both: Bioware's penchant for crafting epic worlds, deep characters, and having proper weight to it, and GTA's snappiness, sardonic humor and capacity for lightheartedness. It's got nothing to do with bad puns. Also, how is worrying for your daughter's safety not "being afraid of real issues"?

And I mentioned Bethesda's sandboxes, because they're currently the most prominent example of the open world fantasy RPG. I haven't played Far Cry 3 enough yet to be able to say which one I consider Witcher 3 to be closer to.

 

[Nick Cave]

I said "caliber", not "style". Whatever might be true, the GTA series is often considered among the best writing in games.

They are? I always assumed people regarded them with the "wacky foul mouthed satire" brush, and calling it "among the best in gaming" would be akin to calling South Park "among the best in television". I mean it's occasionally clever and all, but it's aiming rather low.

I do know what you mean with the humor though, which WItcher 3 certainly does very well. It seems to be much mroe varied and actually befitting the tone and world much better than when Bioware attempts to be funny, which usually are just jokes, which often have the same tone as webcomics and internet animations and that terrible lot, and don't seem to match the tone most the time. The first half of the Citadel DLC is goofier than anything else in the trilogy combined, leading it be written like a DLC for Saint's Row rather than Mass Effect, but then it calms down in the second half, and resorts to either banter or "character appears in situation they're unprepared for or act in a manner you wouldn't expect them to". I mean sometimes it hits the mark, but it's the sort of humor which really doesn't age well.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Well, the main plot on Skellige certainly finished faster than I expected. Or maybe it felt that way because I was feeling fatigued by all the sidequests and wanted to move the main plot forward for once. But I'm thoroughly enthralled by this game right now, so basically nothing can hurt it. I feel there's few new things to say at this point: everything I've said before still holds true, and is showing no signs of doing otherwise. I especially liked the couple of nods to the books with Ciri in the sauna. I wonder what people who haven't read the books think happened to the person Ciri got her tattoo for, because what happens is essentially the series' equivalent of the Eclipse from Berserk.

I did a couple of sidequests just to clean up the log a little before becoming too overleveled, and then another subplot just took me in and I had to keep playing. The quests involving choosing the new king were simply majestic. After completing the quests with the children of what's-his-face I was given a mere prompt to go collect my reward, having no idea what to expect. I thought "eh, maybe it'll be one of those little jokey quests where Geralt gets shitfaced hammered and passes out in a wine barrel". I certainly didn't expect it to turn into an episode of Game of Thrones in the blink of an eye. I'm having trouble remembering the last time I was so captivated by the story of a mere sidequest.

A couple of faults have stuck out at this point though: this game has a problem with difficulty. Or maybe it's because I've been overleveled most of the time, but I thought that's what enemy upscaling was for. Anyway, combat rarely provides a challenge anymore, even when I've switched difficulty to Hard and turned enemy upscaling on. Though that proceeded to bite me in the ass in Yennefer's sidequest where you have to defeat the Djinn. After what must have been 8-10 attempts I googled it, and turns out that having upscaling on turns that encounter essentially impossible. Turned it off and boom, suddenly I wasn't getting insta-killed by unavoidable, unblockable energy blasts and getting killed literally within the first second of the fight by that ice spike attack. Who left that imbalance in the game needs to be slapped.

I'm almost 40 hours in, yet I haven't been able to craft any bombs throughout my entire playthrough. Or more precisely, I've never had the ingredients to do it. Since alchemy ingredients are essentially everywhere, and combat is already really easy, there's little incentive for me to even bother with them, which in turn leads to me ignoring a lot of the skills on the character panel. 15% time slowdown when aiming the crossbow, you say? Why would I ever bother with that since I only use the quickshot, and even that only on flying enemies to force them to ground?

 

[DoPo]

I'm almost 40 hours in, yet I haven't been able to craft any bombs throughout my entire playthrough. Or more precisely, I've never had the ingredients to do it. Since alchemy ingredients are essentially everywhere, and combat is already really easy, there's little incentive for me to even bother with them, which in turn leads to me ignoring a lot of the skills on the character panel.

I think the only bombs I used in combat are the ones that made spirits materialize (moon dust?) and even then, it was only if I had any on me. Other than that, the most I've used my bombs is to destroy monster nests.

I agree they are pretty useless.

15% time slowdown when aiming the crossbow, you say? Why would I ever bother with that since I only use the quickshot, and even that only on flying enemies to force them to ground?

I found the crossbow to be almost worthless. Like you, I predominantly used it to force flyers to the ground. It does too little damage otherwise to be really useful. Also, if you didn't know (it definitely took me a while), you can use it underwater on the drowners and it usually oneshots them. I think I was at least 20-30 hours in before I realized it. I thought it'd do the same damage as on land, so I just avoided the swimming drowners.

The special crossbow bolts are definitely useless, too - just sell them, otherwise they clutter up your inventory.

 

[kurupt87]

15% time slowdown when aiming the crossbow, you say? Why would I ever bother with that since I only use the quickshot, and even that only on flying enemies to force them to ground?

I found the crossbow to be almost worthless. Like you, I predominantly used it to force flyers to the ground. It does too little damage otherwise to be really useful. Also, if you didn't know (it definitely took me a while), you can use it underwater on the drowners and it usually oneshots them. I think I was at least 20-30 hours in before I realized it. I thought it'd do the same damage as on land, so I just avoided the swimming drowners.

The special crossbow bolts are definitely useless, too - just sell them, otherwise they clutter up your inventory.

Yeah, the water crossbow is so stupid.

Submerging it makes it super powereful and more accurate in the game. In real life, would make it way less powerful and super inaccurate.

It makes Geralt a god of death in the water, whereas it should be a serious weakness for him. Humans are very bad in water, humans with two 3' blades on their back and kitted out in armour head to toe even more so. Mutations be damned, he doesn't become a fish.

It is the one stand out thing in the game that really breaks immersion for me.

And using the crossbow on land is just meh, Igni does WAY more damage and Aard is more likely to hit (though at a closer range and requires a smidge of timing).

 

[DoPo]

And using the crossbow on land is just meh

What I find funny is how the game tries to pretend the crossbow matters - you can equip different ones with different stats and you even have the different types of ammo. Yet it hardly even matters - any other sort of attack fares better in terms of damage and general usefulness.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

The main quest is finished. Took me 54 hours.

That ending (which I got anyway) though. Boy howdy. The franchise is no stranger for things to end on a melancholic note, but this was straight up a downer ending, which I genuinely did not expect. It was bordering on flat out depressing: Ciri disappears and possibly dies in the White Frost, lightyears away from her friends and alone. Geralt and Yennefer don't get together. Yen's fate is left uncertain, while Geralt seems to end up embittered and hollow with a death wish. The image of him clutching Ciri's medallion in that godforsaken swamp while monsters swarm the house from every corner was very striking. Well, at least I chose to help (B)Roche to have Temeria regain its sovereignty, which was undoubtedly one of the toughest choices in the game. The toughest choices in the game being all on a timer definitely adds to the tension and their toughness.

The finale was without question the best in the series, which granted doesn't say much in a series with only 3 entries, one of which is total dogshit. But for such a massive game to have a genuinely meaningful, explosive and satisfying climax, both dramatically and in terms of gameplay, and also bring all the plot threads together in it, deserves applause. I would perhaps have liked more of the characters to have their moment in it, but people like Roche and Zoltan already got their hurrah in the Kaer Morhen battle. Eredin was a great final boss, and felt ideally difficult for a Souls veteran. In the end I chose to encourage Ciri with her final choice, since she'd spent the whole game wanting to be taken seriously, and demonstrated a capacity for it.

Another thing to add to the depression factor was Keira Metz's fate I ended up with. Impaled on a stake. I can't imagine ending up with a worse way for her to die. I felt a bit cheated by it, since her sidequest is available way before you're introduced to Radovid being a sadistic, psychopathic, megalomaniacal lunatic. They mention witches being persecuted, but it doesn't anywhere near imply the level at which it's happening. But then again, like so many times, I was left feeling rather ambivalent about her. She was nice and all, but she was a conniving schemer like all sorceresses, and insisted on going to Radovid. She knew what she would be getting into, and what would be at risk.

Well, those are first thoughts on the ending. I'll post more in case they pop up. On to the DLC!

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I knew you'd get the bad ending. Noobs always get the bad ending

You should now read about how to get the other ones, load up an earlier save and get the one that you like the most. The so-called "bittersweet" ending is the best ending to a video game in video game history as far as I'm concerned. In my mind it's the real happy ending.

Here it is:

Spoiler

 

[DoPo]

Eredin was a great final boss, and felt ideally difficult for a Souls veteran.

Wait, really? I found the boss incredibly underwhelming and I'm not even a Dark Souls veteran. He could teleport, which meant I would just have to run around a bit and I believe he had some telegraphed attacks that took very little effort to avoid. I never really felt challenged during the fight, quite bored, actually.

What difficulty did you play on?

For the record, I really liked the (I think) first boss in the Heart of Stone DLC - the gravedigger one. Felt much better, since it was more challenging and the boss did have interesting mechanics.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

I knew you'd get the bad ending. Noobs always get the bad ending

Oh come on, now you're just being an asshole. I just played the game the way that felt the most natural for the version of Geralt I'd been playing, and how I perceived the characters. I saw Geralt's final farewell to Ciri as the moment a father realizes he needs to let go of his child, and Ciri realizing that there is no normal life for her. The fact that the game seems to punish the player for it doesn't seem entirely fair. And since I've yet to look up any guides (and I'm not sure I want to) and don't know how many choices affect the ending, redoing it all in a way that didn't seem most natural to me just to get a good ending just doesn't seem right at the moment.

Also, now that I'm in Toussaint's brightly lit fields and lighthearted adventuring, the clash with the tone of the epilogue to the main story couldn't be any more profound. It makes his reversion to his dry sarcasm kind of morbid: I keep thinking that he's just playing it to hide having been torn to shreds on the inside.

Eredin was a great final boss, and felt ideally difficult for a Souls veteran.

Wait, really? I found the boss incredibly underwhelming and I'm not even a Dark Souls veteran. He could teleport, which meant I would just have to run around a bit and I believe he had some telegraphed attacks that took very little effort to avoid. I never really felt challenged during the fight, quite bored, actually.

What difficulty did you play on?

For the record, I really liked the (I think) first boss in the Heart of Stone DLC - the gravedigger one. Felt much better, since it was more challenging and the boss did have interesting mechanics.

Welll, yeah, since I've been playing nothing but this for the past two weeks, I maybe should have added "for this game" to the end. I've been kind of conditioned to expect fairly little from boss encounters in this game. It doesn't hold a candle to things like Ornstein and Smough, Slave Knight Gael or even the Reaper larva from Mass Effect 2. But for Witcher 3 it felt just right. I played on Hard difficulty (the 3rd out of the 4 options) with enemy upscaling turned on, and the challenge was just right in my opinion. The Dark Souls thing I mentioned because the boss requires rather precise timing to dodge the attacks, and Eredin's melee attacks hit like a truck. Towards the end I was out of both healing potions as well as stamina regen potions, and had to stay on my toes to the very end.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Oh come on, now you're just being an asshole. I just played the game the way that felt the most natural for the version of Geralt I'd been playing, and how I perceived the characters. I saw Geralt's final farewell to Ciri as the moment a father realizes he needs to let go of his child, and Ciri realizing that there is no normal life for her. The fact that the game seems to punish the player for it doesn't seem entirely fair. And since I've yet to look up any guides (and I'm not sure I want to) and don't know how many choices affect the ending, redoing it all in a way that didn't seem most natural to me just to get a good ending just doesn't seem right at the moment.

To get a better ending with Ciri, you need to constantly support her when she voices an opinion or encourage her to decide for herself as well as proving to her that you care about her. Examples include not taking the reward from Emhyr when they go to him and then allowing her to talk to him in private. I got the Bittersweet ending on my first playthrough and the game gave me a series of flashbacks to the important decisions that led to her surviving, which also included the snowball fight at Kaer Morhen. The thing I took away was "be a good dad and she comes out fine".

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Also, now that I'm in Toussaint's brightly lit fields and lighthearted adventuring, the clash with the tone of the epilogue to the main story couldn't be any more profound. It makes his reversion to his dry sarcasm kind of morbid: I keep thinking that he's just playing it to hide having been torn to shreds on the inside.

You shouldn't have started Blood and Wine before completing Hearts of Stone. There's a quest in Blood and Wine with a very awesome and important Hearts of Stone reference that you are totally going to miss. And because Blood and Wine is basically like a new game and there's a lot more new gear that you can get from Hearts of Stone that could be helpful in Blood and Wine. I suggest you go back and complete HoS first.

 

[DoPo]

Eredin was a great final boss, and felt ideally difficult for a Souls veteran.

Wait, really? I found the boss incredibly underwhelming and I'm not even a Dark Souls veteran. He could teleport, which meant I would just have to run around a bit and I believe he had some telegraphed attacks that took very little effort to avoid. I never really felt challenged during the fight, quite bored, actually.

What difficulty did you play on?

For the record, I really liked the (I think) first boss in the Heart of Stone DLC - the gravedigger one. Felt much better, since it was more challenging and the boss did have interesting mechanics.

Welll, yeah, since I've been playing nothing but this for the past two weeks, I maybe should have added "for this game" to the end. I've been kind of conditioned to expect fairly little from boss encounters in this game. It doesn't hold a candle to things like Ornstein and Smough, Slave Knight Gael or even the Reaper larva from Mass Effect 2. But for Witcher 3 it felt just right. I played on Hard difficulty (the 3rd out of the 4 options) with enemy upscaling turned on, and the challenge was just right in my opinion. The Dark Souls thing I mentioned because the boss requires rather precise timing to dodge the attacks, and Eredin's melee attacks hit like a truck. Towards the end I was out of both healing potions as well as stamina regen potions, and had to stay on my toes to the very end.

Hmm, I played on the same difficulty, but didn't have enemy upscaling on. Maybe that is the difference.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

With the hair and beard styling options, as well as all the stupid and plain crappy looking clothes in the game (I was particularly frustrated at one point having to look at a butt-fugly set of armor that was way better than anything else I had in cutscenes) one could make an absolutely glorious shitpost run with a deliberate aim to ruin the dramatic tension wherever possible. I found the long haircut on Geralt particularly stupid looking, and the fact that the hairworks physics can't seem to differentiate between indoors and outdoors only added to the silliness, with his hair billowing in the breeze while being 60 ft below ground level. The long hair and goatee+mustache combo make Geralt look like a washed up rockstar who's thinking of turning to porn as a career, while being clean shaven and giving him the short, free hair makes him look like an aged K-pop band member.

 

[Nick Cave]

With the hair and beard styling options, as well as all the stupid and plain crappy looking clothes in the game (I was particularly frustrated at one point having to look at a butt-fugly set of armor that was way better than anything else I had in cutscenes) one could make an absolutely glorious shitpost run with a deliberate aim to ruin the dramatic tension wherever possible. I found the long haircut on Geralt particularly stupid looking, and the fact that the hairworks physics can't seem to differentiate between indoors and outdoors only added to the silliness, with his hair billowing in the breeze while being 60 ft below ground level. The long hair and goatee+mustache combo make Geralt look like a washed up rockstar who's thinking of turning to porn as a career, while being clean shaven and giving him the short, free hair makes him look like an aged K-pop band member.

Armor only looks like shit between level 3-7 or so, before you get Witcher armor.

That said, there are peopel who do a naked geralt with bird mask/glasses Geralt.

On that note, I like how CDProject has some genuinely good looking armor and visual design in their games (Witcher 2 especially). Dragon Age: Origins, by comparison, is so disastrously butt ugly that I can't believe they were approved in the first place.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Well, since having to think of Geralt as a PTSD sufferer in denial for both of the expansions would have been too jarring and morbid, I went back and played the entire game from finding Ciri to the end, and got the good ending. Didn't look up a guide. Sensed a good dose of The Last of Us in it. I wouldn't say it's the best ending in a video game ever though, Chrono Trigger still holds that honor in my book. Though it's likely I was just salty about having spent literally an entire day to get to a different ending. I thought I could possibly speedrun the whole buttfucking affair in 5-6 hours by rapidfiring through the dialogue, but it took nearly eight. I didn't want to leave the Radovid assassination out of the epilogue, among other things. Though since the whole plot revolves around multiple worlds, it doesn't take much mental gymnastics to think of the ending I initially got as an alternate reality, Rick and Morty or Bioshock Infinite style, and leave the good ending as the "real" one in my headcanon.

If anything, the good ending actually highlights how lazy the bad ending is. It's just a quick, bitter, "then everything sucked" piece of depression that doesn't address any of the other characters. What happened to Yen, Triss or the lodge of sorceresses? It's rather easy to think what happens to Dandelion and Zoltan, but leaving them out of it entirely makes it seem like not that much thought was put into it. The more I think of it, the more it feels like a non-standard game over instead of a real conclusion. Bad endings are incredibly hard to pull off and make them feel satisfying in terms of the narrative arc (something which Yahtzee has talked about before), and sadly I think they didn't succeed here.

Well, onto the DLC in this brave new reality, now with Hearts of Stone as the first. You happy now, you tiny-brained wipers of other people's bottoms?

Oh, and I'd been wondering where Shani would turn up since I'd seen clips of Witcher 3 with her in it. Though I chose Triss over her in the first game, it's still a nice callback.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Hmm, I played on the same difficulty, but didn't have enemy upscaling on. Maybe that is the difference.

Enemy upscaling does add new AI behavior and attack patterns and increases their damage (see the djinn I mentioned earlier), of that I'm sure. I don't know how it affects Eredin, since I defeated him both times with it turned on.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Well, since having to think of Geralt as a PTSD sufferer in denial for both of the expansions would have been too jarring and morbid, I went back and played the entire game from finding Ciri to the end, and got the good ending.

Ah, good man!

If anything, the good ending actually highlights how lazy the bad ending is. It's just a quick, bitter, "then everything sucked" piece of depression that doesn't address any of the other characters. What happened to Yen, Triss or the lodge of sorceresses? It's rather easy to think what happens to Dandelion and Zoltan, but leaving them out of it entirely makes it seem like not that much thought was put into it. The more I think of it, the more it feels like a non-standard game over instead of a real conclusion.

I thought that even the worst ending was executed rather well. It's a story about Geralt and Ciri and since she's dead in that ending and he no longer cares if he lives or dies, giving you a glimpse of what happened to other characters would ruin the entire point and atmosphere of the ending. Other characters are probably not doing so bad. So the contrast would be quite jarring.

Well, onto the DLC in this brave new reality, now with Hearts of Stone as the first. You happy now, you tiny-brained wipers of other people's bottoms?

Yes.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

If anything, the good ending actually highlights how lazy the bad ending is. It's just a quick, bitter, "then everything sucked" piece of depression that doesn't address any of the other characters. What happened to Yen, Triss or the lodge of sorceresses? It's rather easy to think what happens to Dandelion and Zoltan, but leaving them out of it entirely makes it seem like not that much thought was put into it. The more I think of it, the more it feels like a non-standard game over instead of a real conclusion.

I thought that even the worst ending was executed rather well. It's a story about Geralt and Ciri and since she's dead in that ending and he no longer cares if he lives or dies, giving you a glimpse of what happened to other characters would ruin the entire point and atmosphere of the ending. Other characters are probably not doing so bad. So the contrast would be quite jarring.

I wouldn't need it to show me what happened to them, since you rightly point out that it would cause a tonal clash. I would want it to just involve them in some way even in the slightest degree. Like how Zoltan and Dandelion are seen in the tavern in the good ending. Picture this:

A small convent of the characters are gathered somewhere. Geralt has gone missing, and is nowhere to be found. Roche is of course there, since it's his job to know things, and who am I kidding, he's there purely for my sake because Roche the Broche is awesome and I want to marry him. The characters are arguing and worried. No one has seen Geralt in weeks, and no one knows where he could possibly have gone. Finally, amidst the ruckus, someone, possibly Yennefer, says "He doesn't want to be found." Cut to the scene of Geralt walking into Crookback Bog. Wouldn't that be just a tad better? It wouldn't disrupt the tone or take away from the emotionality of Ciri's loss in any way. It would even make sense within the story: no one besides Ciri and Geralt knew she'd lost her medallion to the Crones. That's an example of what I would have liked to see.

In other news, I'm already in love with Master Mirror. I love mysterious characters with seemingly unexplainable abilities, knowledge of everything, and who pop in at suspiciously perfect moments. That's why Regis from the books was one of my favorites, and what little I've seen Geralt does meet a curiously friendly and affable higher vampire in the DLC (no spoilers you fucks!). Such a character was one of the only things I genuinely enjoyed about The Wind Rises. Also, his name seems to be an obvious reference to another such character, Walter O'Dim, ie. the Man in Black from the Dark Tower series.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

A small convent of the characters are gathered somewhere. Geralt has gone missing, and is nowhere to be found. Roche is of course there, since it's his job to know things, and who am I kidding, he's there purely for my sake because Roche the Broche is awesome and I want to marry him. The characters are arguing and worried. No one has seen Geralt in weeks, and no one knows where he could possibly have gone. Finally, amidst the ruckus, someone, possibly Yennefer, says "He doesn't want to be found." Cut to the scene of Geralt walking into Crookback Bog. Wouldn't that be just a tad better? It wouldn't disrupt the tone or take away from the emotionality of Ciri's loss in any way. It would even make sense within the story: no one besides Ciri and Geralt knew she'd lost her medallion to the Crones. That's an example of what I would have liked to see.

That would work but I don't think that it's necessary. The thing that I like about The Witcher is that all of the characters have their own lives and they've probably moved on. Their lives don't constantly revolve around the main character like in Bioware games.

In other news, I'm already in love with Master Mirror.

He's absolutely amazing. If you love the writing in the main story you're going to adore Hearts of Stone. It's even better. It's a smaller and more focused story with fewer characters, but everything about it just clicks perfectly. The pacing is incredible. The stakes increase with each passing quest and you can feel the tension rising and the atmosphere getting darker and darker until the grand finale.

I don't know how far you are into the story so I'll ask in a spoiler tag. It's about what happens after you kill the frog.

Spoiler

When you returned to Olgierd to collect the reward for the frog, did you fight him? I know that a lot of players avoided that fight by being nice to those two executioners. But if you take an aggressive tone with them you get to duel Olgierd and it's an absolutely spectacular sword battle.

Also, here's a pro tip: When you're the auction, buy everything that's offered. It's your only chance to get those items.