GhostofAnakin

I thought they could have done a lot more with the keep. It seemed just more like a base of operations to hang out and chat with your companions between missions, than an actual keep that needed tending to. All the upgrades you do don't make a lick of difference to the actual keep (and very little difference in the actual game), and at no point do you "defend" it.

I decided to get Jaws of Hakkon. Damn, though, is the latest update taking forever to download. Slightly over 2.6 GB and even when I leave my PS4 in standby mode to finish updating, it's taken the past two days to finish.

What handicap is that? The only games of gwent I lost were when I had really crappy cards. As soon as I started finding/buying/winning some hero cards, as well as special cards, I was unstoppable. NPCs have already a good deck but I'm still trying to find how to build one, I buy a whole bunch of cards but merchants don't seem to carry more than 5 and from different decks. So at this point of the game I'm still playing with the damn temerians because I haven't been able to build a proper deck. I stuck with the Temerian set because they seemed to be more plentiful. I'm done the game, and still don't have complete sets of the other factions. Best way to build a strong deck is to play against those players who will play for special cards (it's given as a quest), starting with the Baron in Velen and he'll have a list of other players who also will play for special cards. That's how I got started with finding strong enough cards to compete with the better players. You don't seem to get that in order to beat the strong players you need a better deck which is the sole purpose of beating them in the first place. There is no upward scale just a bunch of random spikes. The worst part is that this could all has an easy fix, sell basic deck in the game aside from individual cards. You know, like in RL. That's why you do that quest. It doesn't put you up against great players to begin with. It just puts you up a player who, if you beat them, will give you a special card. Again, I didn't exactly have much difficulty accumulating a strong deck. Between playing those players outlined in the quest(s) you're given, as well as buying the odd card here and there from shopkeepers/inkeepers, it didn't take that long to build a strong enough set of cards that I could take on the better players. I honestly don't know what to tell you, though. I treated gwent as an afterthought until I finished the game, so I didn't exactly go out of my way to search for good cards. I just built up my set of cards by buying random cards in shops or by beating "low level" gwent players who gave good cards when they lose.

What handicap is that? The only games of gwent I lost were when I had really crappy cards. As soon as I started finding/buying/winning some hero cards, as well as special cards, I was unstoppable. NPCs have already a good deck but I'm still trying to find how to build one, I buy a whole bunch of cards but merchants don't seem to carry more than 5 and from different decks. So at this point of the game I'm still playing with the damn temerians because I haven't been able to build a proper deck. I stuck with the Temerian set because they seemed to be more plentiful. I'm done the game, and still don't have complete sets of the other factions. Best way to build a strong deck is to play against those players who will play for special cards (it's given as a quest), starting with the Baron in Velen and he'll have a list of other players who also will play for special cards. That's how I got started with finding strong enough cards to compete with the better players.

What handicap is that? The only games of gwent I lost were when I had really crappy cards. As soon as I started finding/buying/winning some hero cards, as well as special cards, I was unstoppable.

Wasn't Ciri described as plain looking or average/nothing special in the novels? Apart from that scar, she's one of the better looking females in the game.

Finally finished the main story for the Witcher 3. Definitely one of my favorite games in recent memory. I need to replay it and make different choices before I can comment on how much those choices actually seem to affect the game. At a guess, it won't be near as much as TW2, when it was almost like two different games depending if you side with Iorveth or Roche.

Yennefer's just not a likeable person. Everything she does is self-serving, and she's as cold as a fish. Unless Geralt's a glutton for punishment, I don't know how anyone can choose Yennefer over Triss.

Oh, Triss and Yennefer. That was a cruel thing you did.

Fallout 3 wasn't that bad, guys. Okay, the story wasn't very good, but the world they created was pretty fun to explore. I never buy Bethesda games for their main story. It's their world building ability that draws me in.

Wait, this thread is about Torment: Tides of Numenera now? Anyway, killed my first few High Dragons in DA:I in hopes that challenging fights would result in less boring combat. Yeah, no... I did have to use the "tactical view" (which I hadn't really used prior) to keep dumb companions from standing in pools of water (while fighting a lightning dragon, YOLO and all that I guess), but I spent more time fighting the companion AI than the enemy AI. So yeah, combat isn't something I'd consider DA:I's strong point. Boring at best, tedious/frustrating at worst is my experience so far. That was one of my bigger annoyances with combat. My companions were often brain dead and wouldn't even adjust to the most glaringly obvious of things. Aside from your example of standing in water when fighting something that shoots lightning, there's also the charging right into a dragon shooting fire and not even attempting to move out of its line of fire as their health goes down to zero, there's standing in a pool of toxic cloud without moving two feet to the left where there is none, plus a variety of other things. You'd think they'd be able to do even the most basic of stuff (ie. you're on fire, so maybe move out of the way of the fire breathing dragon's breath).

So Basically what you are saying is, if it is The Witcher WITH GUNZ! That is all you want? That's about as simplistic and saying that all you want is Fallout 1 in a Cyberpunk setting. Not every single RPG made has to be a clone of FO/PST in order to be good.

Yennefer is such a bitch. Why Geralt would ever choose her over Triss is beyond me. I did end up romancing both of them, though. I am a guy, after all.

Damn, finished Triss' quest already before tackling another quest. I came across an item in that other quest that I need her for, but she's no longer available.

Can anyone direct me to the Dragon Age Inquisition thread? This forum seems to be glitched. Every time I click on the DA:I thread, it re-directs me to a discussion on religion.

Triss is managing to look younger with each new game. She looked rather old (not old, old. Just kind of nearing middle age) in TW1. In TW2 she looked younger, and in TW3 she could pass for early 20s. One thing that I'm not liking. There's no marker on the map for where some of these characters are. Triss, for example, told me to visit her some other time (after finishing a quest with her), but there's no indication on the map where she is. The only time her place becomes visible is when I got a quest from her and the yellow quest arrow directed me right to her.

I never brought Cole along in my party. I found him rather useless. Maybe it's because my main character was a duel-wielding rogue, himself, so Cole was kind of redundant to have in the party. The big floppy hat looked silly, too. Half the time I talked to him in the tavern, the hat would glitch and cover half the screen.

So I'm in Novigrad and doing one of the main story quests (about the stolen treasure). I felt like a complete jerk just sitting there listening as , so I kept telling myself it was for the greater good. I needed the information, damn it!

I'm not really sure what you'd consider "anything special", then. What more do you want from sidequests than what W3 offers? The companies you mention (Ubisoft, BioWare, Bethesda) don't do any more with their sidequests than what's in the Witcher 3. In fact, they often do much less. Straight forward "talk to person to get quest -- kill bad guys who stole ring -- return to quest giver" routine, with very little actual story behind each. DA:I was littered with quests where you literally click on a person with a bubble over their head, they give you a short description of what they need and how they lost it, and you go fetch it, which consists of maybe fighting a group of bandits, picking up the item, then bringing it back for reward. IMO, it's the extra detail, extra bit of story/lore that have impressed me. Obviously if you skin them down to their bare bones, all sidequests (all quests, even) are "fetch quests". It's how they're presented, the detail they're given, that make them interesting. So I'm really not sure how someone can play through the ones in the Witcher 3 and think they're not anything special compared to what we usually get from your typical RPG game. Each sidequest feels almost like its own self-contained story attached to it. Typically, you don't see that from other RPGs with regards to their sidequests nowadays. Main quests, sure. But sidequests, rarely.

So are any other story-based DLC planned? Or is Jaws of Hakkon (sp) the only one?

I'm amazed at how much depth is put in to each of the sidequests in Witcher Wild Hunt. Yes, at their heart they're all "fetch quests" where you're given a task by someone and a reward for completing it, but they're all their own individually contained stories with way more than your typical fanfare of "find my ring, fight the monsters that have it, then return to me for a reward" type paint-by-numbers (I'm looking at Dragon Age Inquisition). They also can be completed in different ways, with vastly different results. I just finished the Keira Metz sidequest, which turned into a quest as long as you'd find from a main story quest. It had 3 or 4 different "parts" to it, and each part had choices where I could do one thing or another that would result in various different outcomes. All that depth and it was merely just a sidequest that only partially had anything to do with the main quest (right at the beginning of the quest), yet felt like a main quest because of its depth and length. Another thing that amazes me is the sheer amount of dialogue there is for even the minor-est of quests. I think that's another reason for why each quest feels so fleshed out and detailed. You don't just click on a character and have a short little "go find me my missing shield and I'll give you 100 gold". There's usually a detailed backstory behind the quest that you can learn about before even undertaking it. So far, it's living up to my anticipation.

Playing some Witcher Wild Hunt. Nice. Just ran in to . I loved how it happened as I was undertaking a completely different quest, too. It wasn't just a "got an email from an old friend to meet at a tavern!" thing.

I've come across a bounty quest on a billboard in a random village that suggests I wait until I'm level 33 to tackle. I'm currently at level 4. I guess that's on the backburner for a little bit. The detail in the game is just awesome. A lot of the time, the character models in simple conversations look as good as you'd see in most games' CGI cutscenes. Geralt's current armor, which I just crafted, looks really detailed, down to the buckles and stitching. I finally reached the part where you supply answers to your "what happened in Witcher 2" dialogue with that guy. I wonder how big of a difference my answers will actually make.

One thing I've been impressed with about the Witcher Wild Hunt so far: during cutscenes, the character models actually move realistically as they speak. If they're distraught, they'll pace anxiously or rub their hands while they talk. If they're explaining something, their hands move in gestures that us normal folk would move our hands about when explaining things, etc. In comparison, with some games the character models don't move in sync with what they're saying. They'll be begging me to save their daughter with a trembling voice, yet the character model is just standing there scratching the back of their head.

That's a long loading screen, then. :/