The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [2015]

[HoonDing]

Yrden, Quen, roll.

Oil is useless without significant investment. +10% damage isn't going to do much.

[Malcador]

The fight against that Aen Elle dude with Keria gave me WoW flashbacks, have to burn through his healing phase.

[Lexx]

Ah, Yrden... Totally forgot about that one. Will try later.

[HoonDing]

Found Addan Deith in a chest in the middle o' nowhere.

Err... wasn't this a W2 endgame silver sword?

[Gorgon]

I use a controller and I cant be arsed to change signs in mid combat. That's one movement and two button pushes , for some reason there is a confirmation push. So I have been sinking all my points into igni, just because it looked cool. The rest will probably go into other diciplines, not signs.

 

Why not just hold r-'whatever its called' and navigate to what you want and release, presto, done. And why arent consolers bothered ny not being able to remap their device. Swimming is really wonky for instance, you need both hands on the left side to operate the buttons and the analouge so if you need to fight something that gets complicated. 

[Lexx]

Also, why do I bump into everything with Geralt all the time. Feels like I can't walk around a corner without running into something, then reverting, running into something else until I maybe manage to turn around. Same applies to swimming. Feels very unprecise to me.

[Gorgon]

Bombs sounded nice but then you find out you can have a maximum of two at a time then you have to go into the inventory and/or the labourious quick menu to load more up.  I have a feeling I'm never going to bother with that either. The crossbow is too feeble. Maybe it's because they couldn't be bothered with counters for ammo so the just made it a pea shooter with unlimited ammo. Just not really satisfying at all.

 

They should have had aim slowdown on automatically for consoles seeing as they notoriously can't aim worth ****. Instead it's a skill that you buy.. mehh. Not going to spend anything on crossbow I think. 

[Gorgon]

So that's a lot of complaning, but that's what we do. Doesn't mean it's still not a good game. 

 

It's definitely less raunchy than Witcher 2 so far. Not really bothered by that aspect one way or the other but it does seem like they were trying not to get in trouble and cut out the one nighters in favor of long grinding JRPG progression romances with a handful of central characters.

[Lexx]

Holy bananas, this botchling quest stuff I just experienced is quite creepy.

[Nonek]

You can acquire more bomb slots in the alchemy tree, which personally I find counter intuitive, it should be linked to armour as it was in the first game.

 

Strangely I find that though the raunch has been toned down the challenging content has not, the Bloody Barons quest and dealing with his offspring was probably as raw and boundary pushing as any game ever has been.

 

Nice to see Avallach making an appearance, as in the books i'm still perplexed about his motives.

[HoonDing]

I understand CDPR had to fill their "open world" somehow so there are packs of monsters right next to villages. It feels even more glaring than in Bethseda games because the world is so much bigger.

 

In the lore, monsters are almost gone along with witchers. I would've prefered if only monsters fought by Geralt were the unique ones from the contracts. Those fights are unique and good.

 

Anyway, killed griffin in lighthouse. It bugged out and somehow ended up from outside in the small circular room Geralt was in. It couldn't move and I hacked it to death.

Edited May 24, 2015 by HoonDing

[Lexx]

I agree on the amount of monsters in the gameworld. Hoping for a mod that will tune them down... Meeting stuff every 10 meters is more annoying to me than anything else.

[Nonek]

Keira Metz has a respec potion, expensive however.

[mkreku]

I do not find monsters every 10 meters (and even if you do find monsters, they are very easy to run around). Stupid exaggeration.

 

I do agree that the controls are horribly imprecise. But for some strange reason, I don't care. They just don't get on my nerves as much as in other games with sloppy controls. Weird.

 

The crossbow can be upgraded, like every other item in the game. Also, only the standard ammunition is endless. The good ammo (the ones you obviously haven't tried yet) are finite and they do make a difference. I usually only bring down flying foes with them, but I've also killed packs of things with it.

 

The bombs can take out 3-4 enemies at once when aimed right. Not the most useful, but definitely not useless. Also upgradable.

 

I'm absolutely loving this game, btw. Whining about having to press three buttons instead of two sounds so ridiculously petty to me. But to each their own.

[Sakai]

Finished the game. Never felt the same emotions playing any other game... Witcher 3 is by no means perfect, but it just blows everything else out of the water completely. Dragon Age? Never heard of it. Though i would suggest reading the books before you play. As good as the game is, it'll be 10 times better.

[Humanoid]

There seems to be a good response to the following tweak to adjust gamepad movement sensitivity.

 

 

 

To increase the responsiveness of in-game movement using a controller, go to "The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt\bin\config\platform\pc\", open the "platformgameplay.ini" file with a text editor and tweak the following variable:

LeftStickSensitivity"=1.0

 

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Meanwhile I'm still in the starting area, having reloaded my save from when I inadvertently progressed the plot (which in itself feels pretty goofy), and after having to borderline exploit the game to kill a level 10 drowner at level 3, end up encountering dozens of level 3-4 drowners elsewhere. Weird, but not the main point I'm trying to make: drowners are super, super glitchy.

 

I see a bunch of red dots in the water showing where they are, so I try to get them to come ashore, but they ignore me. I take some random potshots at them with the crossbow, but I'm not sure they can hit under the water. No good obviously, so as I make to leave, a drowner just swims to the shore ....and keeps going. Swimming in the air. So being totally outclassed, I prepare for a super cautious fight. Well, it just runs around in a circle of about 1m radius. I stand about 2 metres away and plink away at it with Igni (~100 damage/hit) and the crossbow (<20 damage/hit), It has several thousand hit points, but doesn't even try to approach me. I'd have won this fight by default in time, but then.... a Nilfgaardian soldier on horseback rides by. A very slow dance starts as they circle each other and swing for very low damage to each other about once every 15 seconds, and as their movement becomes increasingly irregular, end up moving the fight to a small settlement where the peasants all cower. Eventually the drowner dies, yay. No brain, nooooo. Well that was an incredibly stupid encounter.

 

As for the monster density, eh, my opinion is somewhere in between. I think without the stupidly aggressive wolf trope which is in extreme effect, it'd be about right.

[Nonek]

There's a good chance that the monsters made a resurgence after the Catriona plague arrived, Ciri caused that by bringing a Bubonic plague flea from our world into the Witcher world, which hopped on a rat aboard the Nilfgaardian ship Catriona. With sickness thinning the population and the dead left to rot, well the post Conjunction creatures might have taken advantage and thrived, because of the sudden scarcity of humans.

[Calax]

There's a good chance that the monsters made a resurgence after the Catriona plague arrived, Ciri caused that by bringing a Bubonic plague flea from our world into the Witcher world, which hopped on a rat aboard the Nilfgaardian ship Catriona. With sickness thinning the population and the dead left to rot, well the post Conjunction creatures might have taken advantage and thrived, because of the sudden scarcity of humans.

Also I get the feeling only the bigger monsters like Dragons and such are the rarities. Everything else can be dealt with by Peasants (who don't really know everything but wahey!

[Gorgon]

Is there any point in picking up ingredients since you only need to craft one of everything. I've got huge stacks that I think I might need down the road.

[mkreku]

I was trying out the replay function of Raptr. It actually works very well. It runs in the background and doesn't seem to take much resources at all.

 

I recorded a fight against Jenny o' the Woods:

 

http://plays.tv/video/556209fe7c171a977b

 

http://plays.tv/video/556209fe7c171a977b

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKUzuCJ2EA4

 

Unfortunately the media tag doesn't work for plays.tv, as it does with Youtube. Oh well.

[Nordicus]

Is there any point in picking up ingredients since you only need to craft one of everything. I've got huge stacks that I think I might need down the road.

The tier 2 and 3 recipes tend to not only require harder-to-find stuff, but bigger quantities of the more common ingredients. So there is merit to always having at least a handful of everything. Not much more than 10 though at once, at least what I've seen so far.

 

Btw, Enhanced Dancing Star bombs are great. Completely locked down a werewolf miniboss with it. Regen, what regen? Only immolation.

Edited May 24, 2015 by Nordicus

[HoonDing]

Two levels lower than enemy miniboss -> cool fight for your life (ancient foglet).

 

Two level higher than enemy miniboss -> kill enemy in two hits (werewolf).

 

There must be really be some level based damage.

[Calax]

Two levels lower than enemy miniboss -> cool fight for your life (ancient foglet).

 

Two level higher than enemy miniboss -> kill enemy in two hits (werewolf).

 

There must be really be some level based damage.

There probably is. I set it to Story for my first play through so most of the enemies operate at two levels below me. The annoying thing is that no matter what they always seem to do the same damage to you no matter what. Some peasant with a pitchfork? he just nuked out 1/4th of your hp with two swings... unless they're higher level where they do double damage.

[Malcador]

Find it funny you can fight lvl 9 bandits then down the road there is a lvl 25 griffin. Just tidying up contracts here and there, those quests are pretty neat.

[Lexx]

I think I like how you have to craft items once and then replenish them with resting. At least with the potions and stuff... feels a bit weird with replenishing bombs. Though, it now kinda leads to me resting for 1 hour all the time to refill my stuff. Especially in harder dungeons. Time doesn't seem to affect quests, so even though everyone tells me "we have to hurry!" I can rest for an hour after every skirmish...

Edited May 25, 2015 by Lexx