The Witcher 3 discussion and nitpicking, and praise

[DemomanHusband]

Seeing all this talk of Gwent and giving up on it, I have to ask. Does anyone know how it works? I thought I had a good idea of what was going on in the tutorial, but then my opponent and I all used our "return certain row power to 1" cards, and just when I was about to pass on my turn to see what happened, my game crashed! It's almost as if the game itself understood that we were in a pickle and just scattered the table before we could call a draw.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Seeing all this talk of Gwent and giving up on it, I have to ask. Does anyone know how it works?

Yeah, I know how it works.

What specifically are you confused about?

 

[DemomanHusband]

Seeing all this talk of Gwent and giving up on it, I have to ask. Does anyone know how it works?

Yeah, I know how it works.

What specifically are you confused about?

I'm not really sure where to start. How do you determine the winner, I suppose? Like I said in my previous post, my tutorial match ended with every row power dampening card being played and it crashed when I finally passed to see what happens. Does passing earlier on before I play my effect cards do anything? Is there any way to prevent the game from becoming "smack down all your cards and hope you had more"?

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I'm not really sure where to start. How do you determine the winner, I suppose? Like I said in my previous post, my tutorial match ended with every row power dampening card being played and it crashed when I finally passed to see what happens. Does passing earlier on before I play my effect cards do anything? Is there any way to prevent the game from becoming "smack down all your cards and hope you had more"?

The winner of a round is determined by score (which is determined by card power). The winner of the game entire is determined by whomever wins 2 of 3 rounds. Nilfgaard decks win ties.

The best way to try and secure victory is to have at least one throwaway round where you try and gain card advantage, usually by playing spies (who give your enemy attack power, but draw you two cards). As you are only ever playing with a portion of your deck, card advantage is extremely powerful. One trick is to use decoys (return a card on the battlefield to your hand) on enemy spies so you can play them again yourself. AI loves to do this.

It seems like you already understand how weather cards work. There are other abilities that can directly remove cards, bolster rows. Some cards have abilities that call other cards into (or back into) play.

Generally speaking you want high card strength (10 is the maximum), good synergy, good variety of card type (so you don't get neutered by a single weather card), and good special abilities like medic. Hero cards cannot be affected by buffs or weather (they have a gold sun around their power).

Whenever you pass, you basically indicate you are done playing cards. You cannot take another turn after passing. If the AI does it, they are either completely out of plays, or they are conceding that round. If you're planning on throwing a round to gain/maintain a card advantage, it can be fruitful to try and bait the AI into playing some good cards, then either clawing your bait back with a decoy or dumping a bunch of spies on them to make their advantage crushing, and then just conceding.

 

[DemomanHusband]

I'm not really sure where to start. How do you determine the winner, I suppose? Like I said in my previous post, my tutorial match ended with every row power dampening card being played and it crashed when I finally passed to see what happens. Does passing earlier on before I play my effect cards do anything? Is there any way to prevent the game from becoming "smack down all your cards and hope you had more"?

The winner of a round is determined by score (which is determined by card power). The winner of the game entire is determined by whomever wins 2 of 3 rounds. Nilfgaard decks win ties.

The best way to try and secure victory is to have at least one throwaway round where you try and gain card advantage, usually by playing spies (who give your enemy attack power, but draw you two cards). As you are only ever playing with a portion of your deck, card advantage is extremely powerful. One trick is to use decoys (return a card on the battlefield to your hand) on enemy spies so you can play them again yourself. AI loves to do this.

It seems like you already understand how weather cards work. There are other abilities that can directly remove cards, bolster rows. Some cards have abilities that call other cards into (or back into) play.

Generally speaking you want high card strength (10 is the maximum), good synergy, good variety of card type (so you don't get neutered by a single weather card), and good special abilities like medic. Hero cards cannot be affected by buffs or weather (they have a gold sun around their power).

Whenever you pass, you basically indicate you are done playing cards. You cannot take another turn after passing. If the AI does it, they are either completely out of plays, or they are conceding that round. If you're planning on throwing a round to gain/maintain a card advantage, it can be fruitful to try and bait the AI into playing some good cards, then either clawing your bait back with a decoy or dumping a bunch of spies on them to make their advantage crushing, and then just conceding.

Hmm, okay. I think I understand it better now, the AI must've just been pretty stubborn in the tutorial. Hopefully the game won't crash if I decide to play it again, thanks!

 

[Aetrion]

My biggest nitpick is how unruly the menu system is on PC, it's never just clean in and out, you press back or escape and it dumps you in another screen, or you have to awkwardly scroll around between different screens by clicking tiny buttons.

The other thing that really grinds my gears about the game is that it just throws a thousand items at you without any indication of which ones you need and which ones you don't. If you're worried about not having the right crafting materials when you need them you will very quickly have an absurdly cluttered inventory.

The fact that you can't just walk up to a fire and cook meat before eating it is a bit wonky.

Not being able to get your health back by resting on hard difficulties is just stupid. I wanted harder fights, not lose half the functionality of meditating.

The crossbow is IMO absurd. On land it does what? 20 damage? Underwater it does 800. I mean I get why it's weak on land, there are tons of monsters in the game that won't leave their spawn area and you can kill them with the crossbow very easily if you're willing to take the time, but

Lastly, the invisible map edge is a pain when monsters are hiding in the out of bounds zone.



Those are all pretty minor things though compared to all the stuff the game does well. I'm having a blast with it.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

My biggest nitpick is how unruly the menu system is on PC, it's never just clean in and out, you press back or escape and it dumps you in another screen, or you have to awkwardly scroll around between different screens by clicking tiny buttons.

Odd...I always manage to back out of menus by hitting ESC.

If you're finding scrolling awkward make sure to turn on hardware cursor. It's (weirdly) under video options.

 

[Silence]

The fact that you can't just walk up to a fire and cook meat before eating it is a bit wonky.

CAN you cook meat? I ate all my raw meat and raw livers, but I don't know if it was that healthy (well it did nothing, but maybe cooked meat gives more? If it exists).

 

[Aetrion]

No, you can't cook meat, which is why I'm saying it's weird. That should just be a basic alchemy recipe or something.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Mostly, I am digging the game but there are a few things that bothers me, so in no particular order:

1. Graphics. Overall it looks great, but foliage looks like garbage on my computer (sporting a GTX 780) with constantly flat textures, as if the game never loads the proper hi-res textures as I get closer to the bushes/trees/flowers. It is alright as long as I move, but if I ever stop and look around every piece of vegetation looks, in the words of my wife, like paper cut outs. This is with most graphic options maxed and foliage distance set to high by the way.

2. Equipment degradation. In some games it works (ie. Fallout, due to thematic reasons). In the Witcher 3 it made me spend 10 minutes to get to a quick travel point, travelling to a town, getting to a blacksmith, repairing my swords, getting back to the quick travel point and resuming my exploration/question. It isn't a good feature and all it served to do so far is to pull me out of my immersion due to the god awful MASSIVE icon that shows up on the entire left side of my screen to indicate that my sword ain't feeling too good and forcing me to do something about it. I've taken up just carrying my previous set of weapons around and swapping over to them when my swords get too damaged, to minimize the time getting too and from blacksmiths.

3. Map layout. The maps themselves are fine, a little empty on stuff to find between PoIs maybe but fine. What's not fine is the ridiculous decision to intermingle level 7 bandits with a level 27(!) griffin, level 14 deserters and level 23 ghouls. More often than not I go from facing off some pathetic level 4 drowners to walking into some ruined village where I get jumped by level 20+ enemies. I was literally riding the shortest route between two places that hand out quests that are below level 10 when I ran into level 23 ghouls ON THE ROAD.

4. The odd and inexplicable difference in level between similar enemies. So the first major Witcher contract is for a Griffin. That Griffin is level 5. The next Griffin I encountered was level 20-something. The first was fairly easy to fight, the second one shotted me through Quen sign and blocking. I've encountered level 6 ghouls and level 23 ghouls. My suspension of disbelief is sorely tested when I tear up half a dozen ghouls in one village then proceed 200 meters down the road to the next and get curb stomped in 2 seconds flat by a single ghoul that is 4 times their level and is double my level. This ties into 3, in that it feels as if the map has just been randomly sprinkled with enemies of various strengths, with no real thought being put into creating "zones" for different levels. That ghouls can go from "gibbed by 3 light attacks" to "can't be hurt even with maxed out damage buffs" without even area transitioning or moving across the map is just silly.

On the upside, no crashes for me, the game is really fun and Gwent is as good as mini-games are like to get.

 

[Silence]

You can carry Repairkits also, by the way.
I never had a problem.

 

[Kwak]

Is there a weight limit to manage?

 

[Elfgore]

Is there a weight limit to manage?

Seems to be. I had a "you are overburdened" message pop up. I think it just prevents you from running, I'm not sure if it effects horseback speed. My game locked up shortly after the message appeared, so I didn't have time to experiment. But the weight limit is pretty high. Geralt was holding about twenty swords and a dozen pieces of armor as well as all of my alchemy and misc. items.

Personally, I'm enjoying the game. It does fall victim to the Inquisition trap though. We get a decent size world with really nothing to do in it. Quests are fantastic though, as each is its own little story and some may make the world a better place if you just skip them. Combat is a little meh at the moment, most likely my fault though. The main story has yet to pull me in completely, but I will continue playing it for now.

 

[Pr0]

This is probably one of the most finely crafted games of the modern era. There is literally no comparison.

All other game development companies that call themselves RPG developers need to get on this level or get out.

I honestly don't think I could accept another Bethesda bug fest after this, or a BioWare game either for that matter, unless they can get on this level they are now pretty much pretenders to the throne that CDPR has quite confidently usurped.

 

[Silence]

Two words:

Bloody Baron.

Spoiler: Major Bloody Baron spoilers here

How did that particular story line end for you? For me... Not so good. I felt pretty fucking depressed after I finished it. He was a bastard, but a poor bastard.

I already read what happens if you don't kill the tree (after I chose), but I did kill the tree. So here is my ending:

Spoiler

Baron and Tamara meet in the Swamp, we fight together versus some monsters the crones send against us. Anna gets found, is completely nuts and not talkative. ... Because the children got eaten or at least taken from her (see tree spirit kill).

Only hope to save her is some weird healer. Baron takes Anna there, Tamara has to fulfill her duties to the Eternal Flame. But Baron is not there and therefore the henchmen can pillage some folk ...
At least these were my choices, there were some to make (like saying to Tamara that her father hasn't changed (I did say it) or that this healer probably won't do anything (I did say it's worth a try).

So not that much of an emotional impact at the end, but when I found out I doomed these children ...

Perfect? No. Best damn triple A single player title released in the last 5 years? Can't even think of any other game that comes close to challenging TW3 for that award. If anyones interested I might go through the trouble of writing a review in the User Reviews section on this site.

It's not even really triple A. It's major independent studio (Indie is probably not the right definition) with government funds.

And yes. It's so much better than Skyrim, and anything else I played for that matter. Most parts of the game set the new gold standard for RPGs for me. Not all, game is not perfect, but most. Especially writing/quests.
Helps that these people take some fairy tales, bible stories and some other stuff and rewrite it into this game. Always funny. I met some students of a Friedrich ... (Nietzsche) who blabbered about "the gods are dead". I beat them up.

 

[aozgolo]

I'm really enjoying the game so far, overall I like it though there are some nitpicks of my own:

-Killed a rabbit and Geralt made an overly aggressive comment about "Die you piece of filth", I just wanted the meat dude, I don't hate the rabbit.

-If you skip ahead to areas before the main quest leads you there (I went to Novigrad the second it let me) then the load-in cutscenes presume you've already got there in the story. It makes me worry they didn't spend enough time testing out how to break their own questlines.

-While I like having the crafting system there, I'm ending up keeping TONS of what will probably be junk because I don't know if I'll need it down the line instead of selling it for very much needed gold.

-Gold: I need more of it!

-I can't play Geralt as the womanizing seducer from the first game. That Herbalist in White Orchard would have totally given it up but never was given my chance... 16 Free DLC don't let me down on this one!

-Enemies and gatherable plants spawning outside the limits of the map that I can't get to? C'mon now!

-Gwent is a bit confusing, I see no incentive to not go all out in the first hand (every time I don't I lose?)

-No First Person view: I don't want to play in 1st person, but some of these breathtaking vistas beg to be taken in first hand.

-Underwater movement is a bit clunky and hard to get the hang of.

-The "interrogation" where you fill in the events of The Witcher 2 is incredibly vague if you haven't fully played the game, leaving newer players unsure if their choices coincide with how they are playing the character.

I really enjoy the game, I've had some surprising experiences, things I wasn't expecting. The size of Novigrad was a nice one, I love how it feels like the size of an actual city. I like how you use signs to interact with the world, blowing doors open with Aard, collecting beeswax by hitting hives with Igni, or riding wild horses by casting Axii on them.

 

[Milata]

Lotta people complaining bout the fall damage, which for the most part can be negating by rolling as you land.