The Witcher 3

Just got the GOTY version on Steam. Is it better with a controller or keyboard/mouse?

I did fine with a mouse and keyboard. Controls were way better than 2's.

Went with a controller. More comfortable in long sessions, and I prefer them for third person games. Pretty good so far. Combat is much easier than its predecessor. Less clunky, and Geralt doesn't feel like wet tissue. Plenty of busywork on the map, which I'm fine since that's what I wanted. Having to repair weapons and armor is annoying. I don't quite get how potion and bomb regeneration works, though it does make things less of a hassle.

NECRO.

Even though that magic is banned...

Got my wife playing this. I have now lost all control over the TV. Never seen someone get as addicted to a game so quickly. She tends towards playing Tank like character so it's amazing seeing her adapt to Geralt's dodge style really well.

Also, she's finding out alternative ways of getting through the story compared to me, but she still wants to avoid the "bad choices" (The Tree, Keira Metz etc) But I'm being really good at not spoilering.

On NG+ for me, this time I saved Letho! which made me happy. He's cool.

I am still using Aerondight, though I'm never sure if other silver swords are better or if it's improved Damage is actually included in it's number or added on to it. But it does SCARY insta kills occasionally - I have slaughtered enemies 10 levels above me with it.

Yay, new Witcher fan!

Made me mega happy too! Was worried she would be like "meh, too big and assassin's creed like" as she can get really bored and overwhelmed by massive open worlds and icon collections.

Doesn't hurt that the characters are bloody brilliant.

Was trying to see if there's a way to save Gran and the kids, but apparently there isn't... even if you find the Tree early. just spares her.

Yeah, it really sucks.

You can complete the Tree's quest early, eh? Interesting. Didn't occur to me to try.

edited 14th Dec '16 10:59:58 AM by Fighteer

Did some digging... apparently you CAN save Gran and the children. But Dunwarren gets wiped out. So there's no way to save all 3

Admittedly the villagers deserve it, though, as they are making a Deal with the Devil RE: the Crones.

Wait, I thought siding with the tree killed Gran while saving her killed the children.

If you side with the tree in the normal course of the quest, the druidess saves the children, but the Crones take revenge on Gran (who the druidess makes no attempts to protect). If you kill the tree, the Crones eat the children and Gran's brain breaks, but the Baron takes her to get healed. If you find the tree before you meet Gran and the children and save the druidess, then the druidess saves the children, and the Crones take revenge on the village instead.

I think. It's been a while since I tried for the golden ending of that quest. There isn't one, but I know that the key to saving everyone but the village is doing the tree quest early.

Skellige seems like Swimming Simulator 2015 to me. And not in a good way. So much stuff out in the water that's annoying to go out to and back. I know I should just ignore most of the ocean loot, but it's annoying seeing so much stuff out there that's a pain to get to.

The sea of question marks. It is a pain. And most of it is smuggler's caches. It feels like a LOT of filler there. And the sailing element stretches Skellige as a location as well. It'd be nice if there were large ships or large monsters to fight at sea to spruce things up.

I'm too far through my run to want to re-do for the "golden" end - as it requires a lot of meta knowledge to set up.

I'm wondering about shifting to a new silver sword still. Aerondight is scary powerful when charged, but a lot of the other swords seem to have higher base damage... so I'm feeling a tad conflicted.

Level 70 though, so that's something!

I bought the GOTY edition a month ago. But I just can't get into this game. Neither the story nor the gameplay have me hooked. :/ A shame, but what can you do?

It isn't for everyone. Did you play any others in the series? And is it anything specific you're bouncing off, or does it just not "feel right" (Which hits me in some open world games - I really wanted to like Just Cause 3 but... yeah)

I haven't played the others. I only watched my brother play parts of the first game.

And it's a combination of gameplay, worldbuilding and story. I had similar problems with Skyrim and Fallout 4 at first (also the first of their series I played). But after two weeks and one week respectively I became addicted to them nonetheless. Not so with this game. It just doesn't manage to suck me in.

I can't really warm up to Geralt. I prefer creating my own characters and he is premade yet he still is rather... generic and boring. The worst of both worlds.

The world is too violent and gritty while staying quite generic. The people actually have a medieval mindset. I don't want a historical game, I want a fantasy game. Their the same reasons I lost interest in Game Of Thrones.

The gameplay isn't for me either. I dilsike alchemy. I hate repairing stuff. And I also needed to go for the lowest difficulty. I don't have the reflexes for blocking. Now I still manage to die in some fights while the rest is boring. And repeating fights over and over again is a death knell. Especially in a game that can't hold my interest in the first place. And I have to meditate between every fight, it's tedious.

Then you need to get your money back. This is probably one of the more "realistic" fantasy games out there; Alchemy and blocking are vital because despite being an augmented human Gerald is still just a dude, the world is dark and gritty because it's filled with amoral nobles that constantly war against one another, a Fantasy Kitchen Sink of monsters, and more.

I think you should sell the game and get something else. It's obvious you don't like it. Try something else.

That's what Gameplay and Story Segregation is for. I don't have to go poop either in the game. Like, why do I have to repair stuff? That's just tedious and adds nothing of value.

You could have all that and more and still be more lighthearted. Fallout 4 is a post apocalyptic wasteland dominated by bandits, slavers and mutated horrors. Humanity has gone to shit. And yet it isn't as cynical and bleak in tone.

The sheer amount of cynicism really invokes Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy in me. Other games mentioned to invoke this, like Dragon Age ][ or Kotor 2, never had this effect on me.

Sadly I can't sell a steam game.

To be fair, Blood And Wine severely reduces the Crapsack World aspect of the game. It's far more lighter in tone.

Apparantly all the nice people in the setting are French.

Can't you delete the game then?

The game is cynical, because it's set in a fairly dark world. However, Geralt brings hope to a lot of people — or can, if you play him that way. A big part of the game is choosing between two morally grey options, knowing that helping some people may hurt others, or that doing the right thing may alienate people whom you would like to support.

A specific example of the latter is the arsonist in the starting town. Turn him in and he's executed by the Empire's soldiers in a manner that can only make the oppression of the war worse. Let him go and you're helping a blatant bigot get away with a hate crime.

Frankly, I find this sort of thing refreshing. It was off-putting at first, but only because I've become accustomed to RPGs in which there are obvious "sweetness and light" vs. "soul-crushing evil" options, not grey vs. grey. The latter is far more... realistic, for lack of a better word. I became much more invested in Geralt as a real person with both heroic and anti-heroic tendencies when I knew that not every choice I made could be neatly slotted into the ends of a good-vs-evil axis.

Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy is much too strong a term here. That might be the case if Geralt were played as an emotionless murderer for hire whose only claim to moral righteousness is the fact that he's superhuman and gets to make his own rules. (You can play him that way, but if so it's on you, not the game.) But that's not the case — he can make a significant difference in the world and improve the lives of the people he meets if you make the best choices. The world can be saved, the people he loves can be rescued, and the overall nastiness level can be pared down substantially. DIAA is only applicable if the characters make no difference no matter what they do.

But, like I said, I found it refreshing that I wasn't playing a paper cutout of a protagonist with a "good/evil" graph where his personality ought to be.

edited 10th Jan '17 1:10:17 PM by Fighteer

It really is not. Honestly, Geralt's relation with Ciri is much of what kept me going through the core game's main story. I couldn't give any shit about the people of Velen or Novigrad, and honestly, killing monsters often felt like I was doing the world a disservice coz those monsters were only killing douchebags. Like, when you got random NP Cs openly bragging about hitting their wives as you run by, you wonder why you bother.

"Oh no, X has killed an entire village" "Well going by the last three village I visited, they were all douchebags, so good riddance."

Skellige also is better for this. But Toussain for me is the counterpart. I was invested in Toussain and wanted it to thrive and its people to be safe, coz the game didn't make them all fucking awful human beings.

edited 10th Jan '17 1:18:06 PM by Ghilz

Well, that's part of the thing about the monster killing quests. You can make a choice in some of them to leave the monster be, since they aren't harming people and are in fact "doing the world a service". And yes, I found it hard to become particularly invested in helping the people of Velen, since they all seem to be dipshits, but it's not really their fault that they are ignorant, nor that the war has put them in desperate poverty.

In Novigrad, the main thrust of the story is fighting the Church's pogrom against mages and non-humans, which can have a positive (well, less horrible) outcome in the end if you assassinate Radovid, with the implication that eventually the Church's power will fade without its leadership. And hell, it's not like this sort of pogrom always has a happy ending.

It's a matter of taste, maybe, but I really appreciate it when a story doesn't insult my intelligence with obvious Good and Evil choices.

I enjoy the moral ambiguity in a lot of the quests, but it really gets tiring when half the population are douchebags, and the main reason Geralt would do these kind of quests (money) becomes obsolete a few hours in. Geralt himself is supposed to struggle on how much he should play hero vs just doing things by himself, but the hero part becomes irrelevant if it doesn't feel like you're making the world a better place. Now that's not all the quests, but there's a lot of them.