I eventually found myself in possession of the entire Witcher series up to date and Iim not even really sure why. I'm fairly sure I even bought them in a strange order, starting from 2, then getting 1, and then 3. Presumably during various sales. I once spent literally six minutes on W2 until I found the ever present graphical errors that plagued my last computer some months ago. I am now free of that problem and will have to explore the first two games properly. The first is installing right now though Iim not sure how much attention I will give it considering it looks like hot garbage.
At best, I feel like I'm walking into a television series a few seasons in. W3 does little to nothing as a sort of catch-up, largely giving me a codex of sorts to read up on various characters.
Something similar happened to me with the Dragon Age games. I started with 2 to play a few hours, but it didn't have the pretense of recapping since you weren't playing the same character anyway. I did go to beat Origins but it was a boring and exhausting game mechanically, even if it had a ton of world building.
It became quite apparent that the game didn't give a shit about my lack of previous knowledge a couple hours in. I was being interrogated by a commander of a warring country that I can't even remember, it just looks like the name of a Lovecraftian old god. He quizzed me on some of Geralt's past deeds and I was bullshitting my way through dialog like "I killed that guy" and "I had to save this girl". It reminded me of that conversation you have at the start of Mass Effect 2 that was designed to reverse or override some previous decisions. I'm wondering if there's a similar mechanic here, but I have no idea.
Indeed, I get a big Bioware vibe here. There's plenty of world to look at, plants to pick up.
The problem is, it expects me to know the name of all the countries, people, and places. I keep hearing names that sounds like they'd hold some level of import but my mind blanks out and I can't care about who lives or who dies. At the very least there's three I care about: Yennefer, Ciri, and Geralt. In basically that order, to boot.
I don't enjoy the idea of playing Yet Another White Bearded Guy but Geralt did grow on me eventually. His "I'm surrounded by nonsense" attitude endeared me to him a little. Not so much a condescending aura or anything, just a sort of "Great now I have to deal with this". I can get behind that mindset.
Which is why I hope to play enough of W1 to get an idea who the multitude of these characters are, their motivations, etc.
Meanwhile I still have about four hours of W3 under my belt and the game is as solid as reviewers raved about. I am playing on the easiest mode (As I do) and I can't really safely say I have a handle on the combat beyond quick attacking and jump-roll-dodging in case the enemy decides its had enough of that nonsense to thwack me. I still don't even know how to heal properly beyond eating some bread and my entire alchemy menu appears to lack anything labeled a classic "Heal Potion - Heals You" thing. So I'm getting by on luck.
The combat is like a less smooth Kingdoms of Amalur, which also had a like of combo-attacking-then-jumping gameplay. Except W3 likes to hit me regardless, as I haven't quite mastered parrying and I've already forgotten if there was an actual dodge button, because the tutorial hauls all kinds of ass and I hate it when games do that, especially in recent years. As games get more complex, they need to find more seamless ways to integrate their tutorials with all these new toys. Instead they just vomit menus at us and I can't retain all the information in one go. And the tutorials continue to lock your screen in the middle of gameplay and I just want to play the damn game.
It could be improved that, once the game detects that I've been hit a few times, it should give me a subtle tooltip somewhere that says something akin to "Press [thing] as they swing or [Space]+[Direction] to jump-dodge" or "Hold [Right Click] to parry".
There's also the confused mess I ran into after meeting that Emperor I mentioned earlier where it sends me to an alleged level 5+ zone and I'm still midway into 3. I'm not sure how relevant this is considering I was able to defeat some level 7 wraith at 1 just by doing the jumpdodge-happy fighting style. It's still a bit odd and I'm not sure what to expect.
There's a learning curve to be sure.
At best, I feel like I'm walking into a television series a few seasons in. W3 does little to nothing as a sort of catch-up, largely giving me a codex of sorts to read up on various characters.
Something similar happened to me with the Dragon Age games. I started with 2 to play a few hours, but it didn't have the pretense of recapping since you weren't playing the same character anyway. I did go to beat Origins but it was a boring and exhausting game mechanically, even if it had a ton of world building.
It became quite apparent that the game didn't give a shit about my lack of previous knowledge a couple hours in. I was being interrogated by a commander of a warring country that I can't even remember, it just looks like the name of a Lovecraftian old god. He quizzed me on some of Geralt's past deeds and I was bullshitting my way through dialog like "I killed that guy" and "I had to save this girl". It reminded me of that conversation you have at the start of Mass Effect 2 that was designed to reverse or override some previous decisions. I'm wondering if there's a similar mechanic here, but I have no idea.
Indeed, I get a big Bioware vibe here. There's plenty of world to look at, plants to pick up.
The problem is, it expects me to know the name of all the countries, people, and places. I keep hearing names that sounds like they'd hold some level of import but my mind blanks out and I can't care about who lives or who dies. At the very least there's three I care about: Yennefer, Ciri, and Geralt. In basically that order, to boot.
I don't enjoy the idea of playing Yet Another White Bearded Guy but Geralt did grow on me eventually. His "I'm surrounded by nonsense" attitude endeared me to him a little. Not so much a condescending aura or anything, just a sort of "Great now I have to deal with this". I can get behind that mindset.
Which is why I hope to play enough of W1 to get an idea who the multitude of these characters are, their motivations, etc.
Meanwhile I still have about four hours of W3 under my belt and the game is as solid as reviewers raved about. I am playing on the easiest mode (As I do) and I can't really safely say I have a handle on the combat beyond quick attacking and jump-roll-dodging in case the enemy decides its had enough of that nonsense to thwack me. I still don't even know how to heal properly beyond eating some bread and my entire alchemy menu appears to lack anything labeled a classic "Heal Potion - Heals You" thing. So I'm getting by on luck.
The combat is like a less smooth Kingdoms of Amalur, which also had a like of combo-attacking-then-jumping gameplay. Except W3 likes to hit me regardless, as I haven't quite mastered parrying and I've already forgotten if there was an actual dodge button, because the tutorial hauls all kinds of ass and I hate it when games do that, especially in recent years. As games get more complex, they need to find more seamless ways to integrate their tutorials with all these new toys. Instead they just vomit menus at us and I can't retain all the information in one go. And the tutorials continue to lock your screen in the middle of gameplay and I just want to play the damn game.
It could be improved that, once the game detects that I've been hit a few times, it should give me a subtle tooltip somewhere that says something akin to "Press [thing] as they swing or [Space]+[Direction] to jump-dodge" or "Hold [Right Click] to parry".
There's also the confused mess I ran into after meeting that Emperor I mentioned earlier where it sends me to an alleged level 5+ zone and I'm still midway into 3. I'm not sure how relevant this is considering I was able to defeat some level 7 wraith at 1 just by doing the jumpdodge-happy fighting style. It's still a bit odd and I'm not sure what to expect.
There's a learning curve to be sure.
