The Witcher -- violence, sex, and alchemy as part of your daily balanced breakfast

I only seem to be able to apply ability points to one ability (fast action swordplay or something). How does this work?

can't remember how the ability system works, do remember it fucking sucks

you don't have to play gwent at all beyond that one time where they make you learn it. i certainly never played it again after that.

i'mstarting to wonder why i haven't leveled up more than I have. It's making it rather hard to defeat this Nithral character

i recall that one being a tricky one. any guide online could tell you more but use the roll away movement as much as possible. i also think i was able to back out of it or get a previous save and go back and load up on healing potions

smashed it! although afterwards I seemed to end up on the other side of the map with a bunch of tasks to do way way away

I'm loving this game, but there are a lot of glitches, which is to be expected in a game of this size. That said, I'm not a fan of Geralt suddenly forgetting how to open a door whilst in the basement of a rat-infested haunted tower.

Anyway, been playing lots of secondary quests and levelling up and I'm nearly ready to go visit Novigrad. Very exciting. Do you ever get to go to Toussaint in this game or is that one of the expansions?

it's one of the expansions, and is iirc even more sex-alicious than the main game

Ooh, I had some sexy sex last night. It was very sexual and uncannily like seeing mannequins grinding on each other

I take it it's normal to think 'Yeah I really ballsed-up that quest' on a semi-regular basis because you said the wrong thing?
No matter how hard I try, I seem to piss a lot of people off.
I really annoyed the Peller last night by not helping him, but I don't think the game actually gave me an option to help him at all.
Similarly, some quests just kind of end anticlimatically and I'm suddenly left to my own devices in the middle of a wood or whatever. Perhaps the consequences come back to raise their heads later on...

One of the good things about the game is that there are many, many quest situations where you don't end up doing the "right" thing however you might define that, or how hard you try. And yes, sometimes quests just peter out with no successful resolution, good or bad. I think it's a really good way of world-building, and gives the game replay value- things might turn out different next time. Of course it's still pretty "on rails" really, but it does give the player a real feeling of agency IMO.

I like:

'Right, we've gotta go and kill the evil witches who live in the wood, with not a moment to spare. Follow us'

*You meditate for 36 hours*

I think it's a really good way of world-building

Yeah absolutely. "That went wrong and sort of fizzled out weirdly" is the key mood of the whole game imo and what makes it feel distinct from everything else out there, it's definitely in the feature-not-bug zone.

I think it's a really good way of world-building

Yeah absolutely. "That went wrong and sort of fizzled out weirdly" is the key mood of the whole game imo and what makes it feel distinct from everything else out there, it's definitely in the feature-not-bug zone.

I lost a sidequest involving Gwent because the character I was supposed to play against died. Guess I'm gonna need to learn to play it or this'll keep happening and then I'll get a 'Great job, you suck!' ending.
It does seem like quite a complicated game. I started watching a gruelling 1-hour YouTube on how to play it but the guy was just bumbling through and not getting to the point. The images were fuzzy.

My main concern is that because I haven't played much, I only have the starter deck of cards. Would it be best to go back to White Orchard and play the yokels rather than trying to take on the people in Novigrad? Or does it not matter?

Honestly, I'd recommend getting used to having a few failed quests in your history rather than bothering to learn gwent, it's not a great card game at all.

I've had a few pretty major plot lines end up marked as failed (including one where I just didn't go back to help out the bloody baron in time and he ended up missing and never heard from again) but none of them have been game breaking and it's one of the things that ultimately makes your playthrough your own, imo. Agree that the red text etc does end up implying a level of "you suck" but learning to ignore that is easier than learning a dumb card game that you won't enjoy anyway.

I mean even if you do want to play a card game you're still better off ignoring gwent and just playing hearthstone or something instead.

tbf I didn't buy this game to play Magic the Gathering

as someone who likes MTG and other similar card games, i didn't find gwent fun at all and ignored it for the whole game

Honestly, I'd recommend getting used to having a few failed quests in your history rather than bothering to learn gwent, it's not a great card game at all.

i only played one game of gwent

however, i think it's worth noting that a ton of people seem to love gwent, and it spawned its own separate game

(a lot of people also loved/love the card game in FFVIII as well, so who knows)

right. I'm on Skellige now. Still very much enjoying this game although now I'm almost fully versed in the way the game works, I am starting to find the main quest a bit tedious. There's a lot of fetching and following the map to where it tells you to go.
Now I'm on a different map I'm starting to feel a sense of 'okay this again but with Northern Irish accents'.
Decided to go back to Velen for a bit and just ride around and explore. Found a LOT of nekkers and drowners and bandit camps which was okay.
Back to Skellige and whoa there are a lot of characters the game wants to assume I know all about. Had to spend a good while reading the character glossary and still don't quite get what's going on or why I'm doing the thing I'm meant to be doing.
Maybe I'd like to start a different game. I have Dark Souls 3 and RDRII that I'm itching to play but I'd feel a bit like I'm putting a perfectly good book down without finishing it.

for open-world games it's more like leaving a museum without looking at every exhibit imo

yeah OTM. I'm playing W3 through again and just doing what I feel like then progressing the main plot to level up. It's fun just to roam around exploring the huge world, and I think I'm doing mostly new side-quests this time round. The game is absolutely vast!

i feel like i should maybe try this again as i played for maybe 40 hours and then moved on to the next MIND MUSEUM

is there a way to tell how long you've played a game?

most games track playtime somewhere in the menus, not sure where it is in this game

if I've played about 5-6 hours since I got my PS4 that would be about 60 or so hours... but it would be interesting to know for sure

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-21/medieval-fantasy-warrior-is-key-to-21-000-stock-gain-in-decade

played well over 100 hrs of this according to the stats tab and only recently got to Kaer Morhen.

Does make me wonder exactly how big the game is and what the average completion time would be.

I've been doing a lot of side quests and exploration, plus I've probably left Geralt standing there while I make a cup of tea a few times.

Still not bothered with bloody Gwent and probably never will.

Something I'd like to know more about is the Skills Tree / Character Build thing. Once I've leveled to 5 on an ability, is it worth keeping in my tree or will it not matter if I take it out?

I've just finished the first two games, breezed the books and am ready for my first Witcher 3 play through. Question for you folks: how do you keep engaged with these massive open world games to the end? (I'm a casual gamer at best, mostly Civilization and two or three older games a year). I love the idea of these huge games -- got really into Red Dead Redemption but after playing intensely for a two months my passion fizzled out and it remains two-thirds completed. Should I space it out, take breaks to play or do other things and return?

i prefer to just quit when i'm bored

i have quit so many open world games when i'm 30-50 hours in. it feels bad for a second, but then it feels really good

when i start to lose interest i try to get through the main storyline and ignore as much side content as i can - basically try to beat the game before i fully lose interest. glad it worked for me with witcher 3. many games (any asscreed game, rdr, gta) i don't end up making it.

yeah the answer is i don't. i played witcher 3 for 40 hours and then drifted away from it unfinished. same with most open world games. the main story has to be really tight to keep me going until the end and usually it isn't by necessity since it has to be compatible with long periods of player meandering and side questing

I just stop playing for long periods and come back to it later if I like it enough, parcel it out over a few years

About to fight the Wild Hunt at Kaer Morhen. Still so many question marks on the map. looking forward to exploring Toussaint

ah what the hell.. that's not the end... not the end at all?? fuck me

congratulations on reaching the end of intro

now you can finally unlock the final skill trees!

listen - i refuse to believe that ANYONE has ever beaten the witcher 3

I was a bit worried I'd bugged the game last night. There's a part of Novigrad where every time I walked through I'd get started on by these high-level witch hunters.

they prevented me from talking to Ciri in one key quest.

eventually I was forced to just fight all of them as they pulverised me and nicked my coin again and again and again. think I lost like 9 grand killing them all.

thankfully they didn't respawn and I could continue my quest.

incidentally, what difficulty level did you all play on? I went for Story and Sword, although I'm starting to wish I'd put the difficulty level up a bit.

I've started the game the Broken Bones level, because I played the first two games immediately prior so felt I had a good handle on the concepts. I also did it counterbalance some mods I used to eliminate annoyances like gear decay and thus makes things slightly easier.

I usually switch to the lower level if it takes me more than three tries on an encounter, though, since video game difficulty tends to frustrate me more than reward me, and I'm supposed to be having fun doing this. Too many childhood memories of SNES games where I threw down the controller ("this is bullshit!") after missing some platform jump and consequently abandoning a game for weeks.

The most annoying thing in this game is swimming and horse riding.

Drowning because Geralt becomes a straight-up idiot as soon as he puts his head underwater is super frustrating.
Also I hate some of these horse races where you fail as soon as you err slightly off the track, mostly because riding Roach is more like steering a particularly impertinent cow rather than a horse.

But on the bright side I'm onto the expansion packs and after a mammoth Sunday session got to experience Toussaint in all its Mediterranean sun-dappled glory. Such a nice break from the gloominess of Velen which of course is where a lot of the Hearts of Stone action takes place. Blood & Wine is seriously thrilling so far, HoS slightly less so but that's far from faint praise considering the high bar set by this game.

okay so the DLC stuff is perhaps better than the main game in many was. Hearts Of Stone started off as 'more of the same' but got genuinely creepy by the end. Blood and Wine is FANTASTIC in every way. Manages to mix camp high fantasy with some of the most unsettling moments in the whole game, and Toussaint is a wonderful area to explore.

Managed to get into a mutliple glitch scenario last night though. There's a quest I happened upon called 'Extreme Cosplay' that involves fighting a bunch of tough-as-nails 'living statues'. After dying a number of times, I was suddenly given a cut-scene that made out I'd won the fight. As soon as the cut-scene ended, the baddies (who I hadn't killed) just started whooping my arse, so I ran up some steps to get away from them, meditated to regain precious vitality and stock up on potions, and when I woke up I was outside the building with no way to get back in. I could see on the map on of the enemy NPCs was still in there, and she will be in there for the rest of time!

I’m tempted to buy this as it’s on sale in the Switch store, plus I’ve almost exhausted BotW and it seemed... similar-ish?

Can anyone tell me what the gameplay’s like? I like exploration-ing more than combat, and reputedly the world is massive in this?

Not bothered by the Switch graphics downgrade - I was more concerned that it’s going to be one of those games that’s interminable dialogue trees and overlong cutscenes - is that right/wrong?

thank god I don't have to learn how to play gwent. I was wtf'ing it.

it's great Chuck Tatum. yeah there's some combat but really it's about exploration too

This is proving to be the perfect quarantine activity. The world is so beautiful, much of the time playing it feels like taking a long walk in the sunny countryside. And there’s no chance of running out of content; I’m 25 hours into it and the number of question marks on my map of Velen still dwarfs the number of identified missions/locations.

its big

Jelly tbh. I'd love to re-experience the trilogy all over again as though for the first time.