Yakoob on 24/5/2015 at 23:30

---

Protip: Hear those crying women around villages? Actually try to talk to them. I was getting sucked into the game and seeing no quest markers that it was a bit of breaking the suspension of disbelief since I couldn't ask why they're crying... turns out you can! I got a whole story and a quest from it too. Pleasantly surprised.

I gotta say, the random NPC quips are great and often hilarious, getting some chuckles from me. Especially spoken in the peasent-y, somewhat "lazy" Polish :p Some of my favs (translating):

"What am I to warm my hut with now, shit? Can't even burn manure because they stole the cows!"

"We have too many mouths to feed, I sent the little ones to find mushrooms in the forest."
"By themselves? What kind of a mother are you??"
"It's alright, we have more food for everyone else now"

"Why's he carry two swords?"
"I wonder, do his pants carry two dicks too?"

And my absolute favorite: "Co tak lazisz? Krecisz sie jak gowno w przereblu." - dont even know how to translate it (maybe the ther polaks can help), it's a vulgar polish saying and don't think it would have the same feel to it in English tbh :p

@Malf - I'm actually curious how they translate those and maintain the Polish peasnt-y vibe. Got some favorites you can share?



I haven't gotten a single one except the tutorial at start, but good to know they're coming. Still, I think they could've done a better job of showing more of that before setting you on the quest.

But I did just watch the flashback where the Wild Hunt burns down the village where you're supposed to meet the Nifilgard agent Hendrik which was really well done (if pretty trop-y). Did a good job of making me want to go after those bastards



Agreed, I cant seem to swim straight, he always tries to go diagonally towards the bottom, ugh. It's managable unless baddies swim around and then it's just annoying. Dont think there is a way to fight underwater?

I really like horse-riding though, speeding through the valleys and villages, feels so nice and relaxing. But I agree navigating through burnt villages or rocky terrain is a pain, getting stuck on the most inane shit.

Briareos H on 25/5/2015 at 06:16

---

I'm playing in Polish w/ English subtitles, been doing that since the first game as I don't recognize the canonicity of any other version of the characters >:[ Made the international trailers somewhat weird to watch.
I'm fine with the stiff tone of Geralt, although I think it gets better as the game progresses. One thing I really don't like though is the sounds he makes on horseback. Neither the orders Geralt gives to Roach, nor the shouts or the grunts sound convincing, almost as if they were recorded as an afterthought even though you'll be hearing them all the time. Weird.

Anyway this game is an absolute blast and I'm so happy it runs rather okay using medium settings on my shitty computer (Core2Duo E8500 / 4GB RAM + somewhat recent 670 GTX). The storytelling --not the story itself, although it's great too-- blows any narrative-oriented game released recently out of the water, which is pretty much an unprecedented tour de force for an open-world setting. Main quest-wise, I'm halfway in and feel like I can probably put the main quest on hold for a few dozen hours while I discover the world. It already has been so much better than the fun but unmemorable Witcher 2 ; Bar a few repetitive treasure side-quests and the over-reliance on tracking using Witcher Vision™ (although I secretly can't get enough of it), it has shown a variety in what there is to do and how to approach things that is more common to RPGs in a closed environment. And combat is fun! And the interface is a huge step forward from the awful, awful GUI of TW2.


There is, for some reason the crossbow becomes really powerful when you dive.

EDIT: Oh yeah and the controls. Man. They need some time to get used to and still, riding a horse or navigating a city is more tedious than it should be. Imprecise, loose, with too much inertia, call them what you want but even 15 hours in they remain annoying and sometimes outright immersion-breaking, especially when navigating coarse terrain on horseback -- although that's the bane of pretty much any open-world game I suppose. And it doesn't help that my brain is mapped to GTA-style gamepad controls, with Y to mount and dismount. I can't remember how many city guards I've angered in TW3 because I pressed Y at the worst of times...
Strangely, the combat controls don't seem to suffer from any of this, they're quite precise and I haven't yet found myself dying because of them.

Briareos H on 26/5/2015 at 06:07

---

And let's not talk about finding a barber :(

Malf on 26/5/2015 at 08:10

---

You on about Triss' quest Renz?
If so, I just completed that last night, and yeah, it was epic. To be honest, I would have been happy if that were the main quest, the quality was so high.

I'm also stunned by how interwoven all the quests in this game are. That quest weaved in and out of the main one and spawned at least 5 other quests, which in turn wove in and out of others and spawned even more. That the game manages to pull this off with few to no quest bugs is nothing short of astonishing. I'd been chasing checkpoints in the wilderness for so long by the time I got to Novigrad, I thought I had the game nailed. But nope, it goes and surprises me constantly with new things to meet and people to do around every corner.

On top of that, the characters are all incredibly complex and deep compared to the average videogame fare. Two highlights of this for me so far have been the Bloody Baron and Dijkstra, who are much more than they first appear.
I didn't want to sympathise with either, but both won me over with their circumstances and charisma.

I've completely avoided Gwent mind you. Confuses the fuck out of me, and I just wish they'd brought back the implementation of Dice Poker from the first game, which I could happily play for hours.
Gwent feels like it's mimicking other, real world card games, and for that reason, the player's expected to have prior knowledge of how those card games work. I've never played a game like Magic my entire life, and so the ephemera of Gwent elude me, leaving me cold. I have no interest in putting the time in to learn it, especially when the tutorial game didn't explain the rules and gameplay basics clearly.

I think tonight I may finally take the boat to Skellige. But every time I intend to, I look at my quest list and see something in Velen or Novigrad that's at or below my level that I haven't done and get sucked back in to the intrigue and backstabbing of the city.

Utterly spectacular, and the best game I've played for ages.

Oh, and anyone who doesn't kill Whoreson Junior, you're a heartless bastard :D
Seriously, at that point I just needed the catharsis and the simplicity of fighting outright evil dudes. Menge suffered a similar fate. No way was I going to let him torture Triss :mad:

Renzatic on 26/5/2015 at 17:24

---

Yup! It and the resulting quests that branched off it were the very definition of epic. As you well demonstrate, nothing in this game is truly standalone. There are only a relatively few quests that don't connect either to the main story, or to one of the bigger side quests at some point. More often than not, doing something for one person or group will more than likely effect something else, making some things easier, others more difficult, or sometimes making something outright impossible to do later. Even the smallest gestures can have unforeseen boons or repercussions a little ways down the line.

Case in point, when you arrive in Novigrad, you'll tend to hear chatter among the NPCs about the watch "finding another body" while running about town. When you check one of the notice boards, you even see a plea for help. I ignored it, and I'm fairly sure my indifference on the matter ended up getting a close friend hurt terribly. I could go on about the quest springing form this tragedy, and the amount of fine details that were thrown into the background, but never outright stated, that make you realize things aren't quite the way things seem, but...damn spoilers.

As for The Bloody Baron and Dijkstra, I agree with you completely. You come in believing these people to be utter bastards, but end up seeing that they're good people driven to do terrible things due to their circumstances. It's not so much that they do these terrible things as why they do them, and how they own up to them that separates them from the truly reprehensible people that surrounds them.

Quote:

Utterly spectacular, and the best game I've played for ages.

It really is.

Quote:

Oh, and anyone who doesn't kill Whoreson Junior, you're a heartless bastard :D
Seriously, at that point I just needed the catharsis and the simplicity of fighting outright evil dudes. Menge suffered a similar fate. No way was I going to let him torture Triss :mad:

That was a difficult scene to play through. I did my part though, never broke character, and watched as Triss ended up being the one to dish out the just desserts.