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

Tried 2 again today. Not worth it. There are just too many game mechanics with the mutagens, oils, potions, skill tree, magic spells. The controls are difficult. The story/cut scenes take forever and makes no sense. Selling it.

I got distracted from this. I enjoy the universe and vibe of the game, so maybe I'll come back to over Christmas.

20 bucks?? i thought this was on the regularly-less-than-a-fiver stratum of videogames

i bought this. and played through the prologue on hard and then restarted and played through it on easy because i figured the combat was never going to be interesting or fun enough to warrant the extra investment in time.

hey somebody give me a good critical review of this plzzz

feel like i'd love a good technical non-dumb rpg but if this sucks i don't want to be disappointed

W1 or W2? Witcher 2 has been described by everybody as being far more playable

i loved witcher 1, didn't like the 360 version of witcher 2 (for technical reasons) but people love the pc version and i could see why.

it is dumb and grim and dark and grim.

witcher 2 takes awhile to get going. it has maybe the worst prologue i have ever seen. a ton of dialogue and random game mechanics that have nothing to do with the game. spends a lot more time on boring backstory then showing you how to play.

its good enough that i am still playing but

- quests that you can either google or spend 6 hours trying to solve are bullshit
- the target lock system of fighting makes fighting vs groups stupidly difficult
- no fast travel gets really old really fast i.e. you end up running the same path probably 20 times per "chapter".

if you like dragon age games, you'll probably be on its level.

hmm thx for the responses everybody but i think i'll pass

i'm kind of burned out on engrossing but mechanically/narratively frustrating rpgs (read: rpgs) right now

n e 1 played witcher 1 enhanced edition? i know i can't run 2 on my lolmacbook but apparently i meet the specs for 1. the one for mac is a wineskin which i didn't realize steam was in the habit of selling

ok

i loved witcher 1 for a while but never finished it. lots of hokey problems and i set the voice acting to russian so the performances wouldn't bother me as much, but if you're into classic late-90s rpgs (fallout, torment, etc) it's an acceptable substitute. i still love the corrupt decaying slavic fantasy world even if some of its Look! Racism! moments are heavyhanded, and i dig the idea of your being a professional monster-hunter in an age when the really dangerous monsters are less slavering-fangs-in-the-woods and more well-dressed-diplomats-at-parties. be sure to download the TITTIES PATCH (it does other things too, i guess): http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/The_Witcher:_Enhanced_Edition_Director%27s_Cut

combat is diablo with one extra mechanic, so dumb fun until it isn't.

lol ( @ Y @ ) patch. did you play 2 at all

i did not.

looking upthread i found a post of mine that sums up why w1 was hard to resist for me:

"they wore long grey coats over their armor and thought they had fooled me," a girl said to me in her apartment, "but i learned to spot their kind in university." later we had sex, of course.

haha. i'm not sure whether that makes me want to play it more or less

Tried playing 1 in Polish, but the language was so harsh I didn't enjoy it. Didn't try Russian.

i might go back and try the polish trick.

what got me was, i put it in hard so the combat wasn't trivial, but it was not-trivial in such a boring way i wished i'd put it on easy so i could basically skip it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A2bDHd-nUM

uh wait thats not even the trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpcjUkG2FI4

$3.39 on steam

so witcher 1 sux. o well.

fiddly tactical gritty fantasy rpg seems like it wd be right up my alley but i couldn't get thru the tutorial areas of this. looks really labored and unenjoyable.

witcher 2 i mean

silly ass intro movie too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0i88t0Kacs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx8kQ4s5hCY

soon?

i think i'm going to skip this. Souls games have ruined me, i don't have the patience anymore for rpg conventions like "dialogue" (also endless quests/objectives, maps, etc).

holy shit @ this game tbh

there is an absurd amount of dialogue and very little combat compared to most of these games but the red dead-style 5am wilderness trekking with random little vignettes to stumble on seems to be the real star of the show

I got it yesterday and got as far as Charles Dance, between staring at moving foliage and sunsets

true, the video i watched was surprisingly reminiscent of Red Dead. would love a next-gen sequel to that.

speaking of Souls games, pretty sure the ol' Crestfallen Warrior turns up about 0:02 in to this

can u skip cutscenes in this

i've heard the controls suck like just walking around and picking up stuff is a pain in the ass

This thing is getting insanely good scores.

I tried to play Witcher 2 but couldn't get a handle on the controls.

This seems like a good deal btw

16 social media avatars you say?!?!?!?!?

i think i'm 10 hours in and still in the beginning area. a peasant walked by and said "welcome to our shithole." :D

this game is pretty much one of the greats, no time for the people inventing flimsy reasons to dislike it

c.70% of the people in the first act are from Birmingham

the bandits def sound like it

i got to charles dance. this game is hueg

http://i.imgur.com/a9ecRJQ.gifv

This game is great. In addition to everything noted elsewhere, how is it possible that I'm 10 hours into an open-world(ish) game and have yet to encounter a single side-mission that sucks/is boring/feels like a make-work project. Also, that trading-card minigame is so good--am I wrong that winning doesn't seem to give you any real reward in the overall game? It's like your character has a (super nerdy) hobby. And that sounds TERRIBLE but the card game itself is so good it seems like genius that they don't force you or even encourage you to play.

(I have been giggling at that goose gif for like 10 mins.)

the apparent confused pause as the goose overtakes him slays me)

Feel like the immersiveness of the world means they can get away with more missions that are set-piece clue-finding trails or rudimentary choose your own adventure things where you just talk to people or decide an outcome without dismembering anybody; in LA Noire that was pretty much the whole game but it's just a tool in the box here

Conversely, yesterday a small child lured me into an ambush by vengeful bandits, and I immediately hit one of them with one of those critical animations that grotesequely severs their head, shoulder and arm in one chunk, and I thought oh this is really pretty terrible behaviour

is anyone bothering to play this on one of the top two difficulties? After a particularly arduous escort mission I bumped it down to the highest difficulty where meditating will still restore your health, not fancying 70 more hours of having to fund, purchase and eat ten onions everytime I carelessly vault off a slightly too high balcony and lose half my health

do you have to saute the onions first or just eat them raw

No you can't sleep in a bed or cook raw food in this game although you can incinerate beehives with magic

i haven't quite figured out the card game. whats the penalty for losing, does the winner take your cards?? anyway it is cool that in this massive game is a pretty deep mini-game. also made me laugh when i was helping some guy one of the dialogue options was "game of gwent?". its like fuck your side-quest for the moment, play me!

had a guard call me "shiteater" and "you're paler than oaty shite"

i'm playing on blood & broken bones which is 2nd highest difficulty. hasn't been too bad so far, i think you still regen health in daytime or i just grabbed a perk that does that? i keep forgetting to buy food though which fucks me over occasionally

http://gfycat.com/BigPoshAsianwaterbuffalo

:D

I'm playing on second-hardest difficulty as well and the health thing hasn't much bothered me so far. I've never bought food once. You just use the vitality-regen buff and eat some dogmeat every once in awhile. I don't think I'd want the combat to be much easier than it is, though I wish there was a quicksave hotkey on ps4.

Hearts Of Stone DLC has some of the creepiest moments of the game, but it's so imaginative and the story is really intense with some absolutely amazing twists. Blood & Wine is a lovely respite though and well worth saving for last. Geralt's 'Year In Provence', I've heard it accurately described. I think it's my favourite part of the whole game. Once I got to Toussaint I felt like I could SMELL the fields and warmth coming off the Earth. Strange to have a game that starts so drab but gradually blooms and becomes more light-hearted as it goes

How's everyone getting along with this game now?

I've managed to complete all the question marks in Toussaint, Velen,
Novigrad and White Orchard and now I'm slowly chugging through Skellige.

Hoping to achieve the medal of crafting and wearing a whole school of Witcher gear, but is it just me or is it an absolute dog to do?

I think I did everything except the question marks in the middle of the ocean in Skellige. Everyone recommends skipping those and I'm inclined to agree.

this can help you figure out which points of interest are worth pursuing (ie which aren't just smuggler's caches): https://witcher3map.com/

I'm a pathological completist so I even did those. :/

Eek. At some point near hour 120 I stopped caring about the ?s. I am 50% of the way through Touissaint, which I love, but I am pretty sure I'm not going to finish the dumb vampire story.

I've started to resign myself to the idea that my Witcher fever has passed and I'm not going to finish. I was going strong up until the pandemic--playing a few hours after work every day, seeing when I could squeeze in a few more on weekends--but it's been about three months since I've picked it up.

It's not because I got tired of the game, really--I'm near the end of the main plot, took a detour for the Heart of Stone content--but a combination of pandemic listlessness and moving in with my girlfriend took me away from regular playing, and it lost that urgency/compulsion to play it. I suppose it's like exercising or learning an instrument: once you break a regular routine/habit, it gets harder to jump back in.

I feel vaguely guilty not finishing after all the time I've invested playing and modding it. This seems to be a pattern: I think I want this big open world games like Red Dead Redemption (never finished either), though because I'm enamored with the idea of being immersed in months of game play, and I become obsessed for a good stretch, then it just tails off.

Toussaint story was my favourite of the whole thing. It really escalates and it's enormous fun by the end. I really didn't like the knight trials though. I'm not looking forward to going back and doing all those frustrating horse racing quests which I'm TERRIBLE at

Playing W3 again, this time modded to the gills. I don’t care for graphical overhauls, but I installed a bunch of quality-of-life mods that do things like turn off weapon degradation, give practically infinite carrying weight capacity, auto-loot every container within like 10 meters radius, fast travel from anywhere, and keep Witcher senses on all the time without fisheye lens effect, audio muffling, or the inability to run and jump. It’s really great! The game just flies by in a fraction of the time without any of the annoying time wasting aspects—just story, scenery, and fighting.

The auto-looting is key; I never realized how much I hated humping every corner of every shack to get every broken rake. Now I just poke my nose in the door and it all flies directly into my inventory. It’s also great for “discovering” secret chests under bridges and stuff. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the “thrill” of finding a chest behind a bush during my first play through, but this time I’m content to grab the loot and go.

I've been meaning to replay this again once I'm finally done with Bloodborne and do it on the hardest setting. Might even give Gwent a go this time. It's such a great game. Possibly the greatest game of all time. Just wondering whether to start fresh or do NG+

I originally intended to do NG+, but didn’t realize that the enemies all scale up with you, to the extent that they’re harder than they ever were the first time through, so you start the game getting your ass kicked by wolves and such. Other systems are similarly affected (eg you get to keep all your weapons and armor from before but they will quickly need to be replaced by new high level items in ng+). A “new challenge” isn’t the experience I was looking for, so I started a fresh game and am very happy.

And yeah, after initially ignoring it I became a Gwent fanatic 2/3 of the way through my original play, so this time I’m keen to not miss any cards. I’m definitely skipping the “instantly win every gwent game” mod.

Free next gen update/upgrade arrives tonight.

Comes with full cross save too, so while I'm looking forward to playing the PS5 version I might actually end up getting more use out of being able to transfer my PS4 progress to PC.

It looks like it's not actually tonight though? Midnight Wednesday: https://www.thewitcher.com/en/news/46916/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-next-gen-update-global-release-timings

My bad, you're right, the 14th.

Also got a feeling it's going to be one of those cross save situations which requires you to a) reinstall the ps4 version, b) update the ps4 version, c) go into the ps4 game and upload your save file to the cloud, d) exit and delete the ps4 version, e) install the new ps5 version, f) launch the ps5 version and then download your save file from the cloud within the game.

it'll all be worth it when you get to have PS5 sex

I read that they credited and paid people for the fan mods they chose to implement in the final product, that's pretty cool. As is, frankly, the fact that this is a free upgrade.

i forgot, have you played it before josh? and/or are you planning to get the ps5 version?

I have not! I bought it on sale years ago for ... $5? Something like that. So I will be playing it for the first time on the PS5, probably late winter/spring after I clear out a couple of other games that take only a mere 30 or 50 or 70 hours each, lol.

Still haven't started this, because of the aforementioned, but also because they keep patching it. In fact, I just saw this morning that a new patch is imminent ... and maybe 20GB. That seems huge to me.

CD Red Projekt really haven't done themselves any favours over the last few years have they?

they've made one of the greatest RPGs of all time and sometimes it has some comical issues, i don't think they should beat themselves up too much

The next gen upgrade was free, so there's nothing really to complain about. Though iirc people *were* complaining that the next gen upgrade sometimes made the game run *worse* so, yeah, maybe there is something to complain about.