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

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.

made me lol re: bandits

http://i.imgur.com/Jw72AwH.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h8Al__RVU8

This game makes Skyrim look like such an unbelievable turd

The next Elder Scrolls game announcement is in danger of being on some all-new hotmail level of pitiful obsolete desperation

ha. i think they'll be ok. new ES game is likely a few years from being announced anyway.

i really want to play this, but no way do i have the time for it right now.

its a huge timesink but its great. if anything i hope this sends bethesda back to the drawing board on a lot of shit

I am a grown man and I will no longer accept loading screens when I go into a building

since no one else is playing this we can talk about quests right. princess goat made me lol, and this guy

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/pHWKTVwnOlo/maxresdefault.jpg

^^now that's what real video game writing looks like

I think I let that guy off too easily but I've been leaning towards merciless extermination lately after a really bad thing happened as a result of me being too nice to someone earlier

i convinced him to take the scraps then told the 2 dudes up above there's some ruins below that they should check out. i figure its on them to take out his punishment ;). i also aggro'd keira and killed her. almost reloaded a save to re-do it then decided i didn't care

I've been leaning towards merciless extermination lately after a really bad thing happened as a result of me being too nice to someone earlier

I just got past the part with the tree dude and for the first time in this game I had the chance to be merciful to somebody and didn't, since the whole situation had a real foreboding feel to it... I'm not reading any walkthroughs or hints in this game but I'm hoping you're referring to this?

this game is the best. I can't believe a) the size of it and b) the fact that you're continually running into baddies who so outmatch you that the game seems to expect you to come BACK to these gigantic continents long after you've beat all the story elements associated with them. Must be 300 hours long or some shit.

However I am already sick of picking daisies and notice that you can't really buy what you need AND refuse payment from deserving questgivers without being broke all the time.

this looks like what I'll be doing with my winter if i can't find more work.

antexit no, it was a much more minor sidequesty thing, a dude I decided to go easy on had murdered a load of refugees for their money later in the game and they all had heart-rendingly personal unsent letters to their loved ones strewn about etc

I did the same thing as you on the ancient tree one and prefer the overall outcome I got compared to what I heard the alternative was, although both have their...ups and downs

with how much I've been playing this that feels like a really ridiculously long time ago now, can't believe how much substantial-feeling stuff there is crammed into this and from what I can tell I'm about 60-70% of the way through the main quest

im super obsessed with this game rn

just one more quest [2hrs pass]... ok just one more

haha yesss

i got home from work at 3am on monday and was seriously considering trying to get some witcher action in before i went to sleep

also destroying the completionist in me with all these gd quests

yeah i'm not even close to visiting all the ?'s in velen and there's 2 enormous maps after that... rip life

I've been doing this too and I normally play games obsessively for ~20 hours then completely forget about them until their sequel's about to come out

i feel like the best and worst thing about this cd-room lookin' new millenium myst is that ive spent just as much time playing gwent as i have accomplishing story stuff

http://i.imgur.com/DHQeDCv.jpg

met a rock troll named trollolo XD

I rarely get into the card games and mini games within games but I'm enjoying Gwent. No penalty for losing, new cards to help you take down stronger opponents for winning...it's like pokemon, gotta catch em all. Someone plays a zero strength spy card on you and you suddenly must have that. How do you get it? Play every random person you come across and hope someone gives it to you.

I enjoyed the first area's story where one dialogue option makes all sorts of weird things go down, but I haven't been as interested in the second area yet. Still, worth my time after Dragon Age.

http://i.imgur.com/sG0IZ0Z.jpg

this game is fun, soliciting pro tips for maximum fun

Just wander round and soak the vibe up, if you need experience try to do quests before you're more than 5 levels above the recommended level

don't rush out of white orchard, there's lots of sidequesty stuff that teaches you the game ropes and gets you started, but it felt a bit weird going back there later to mop it up

kill the tree spirit

download the free haircut pack DLC, get the "elven rebel" style and a beard and hey presto, Geralt is Kevin Nash now

skellige > skyrim

i have a terrible compulsion to clear zones before moving on so i did everything i could in white orchard before leaving (except there's an "abandoned site" which is just a roadside shrine that i suspect monsters show up at based on time-of-day) and am now in velen.

this is much, much better than skyrim (which is a bad game) and much, much, much, much better than dragon age inquisition (which is a terrible game). i found the previous witchers to be fun but a little embarrassing writing-wise, this is a big step forward so far.

is the ios version any good? Looks like it's based on the card game aspect?

wha-a-a-a-a-at a Gwent ios game?!?!?!?!?

oh wait no it's a euro-style board game. that's not the same at all :(

keeping the leveling at pace with the main storyline is kind of tricky - my main complaint aside from graphic card glitches. i tried to skip all the crappy dandelion quests too but no luck -_-

also having to google and backtrack for formulas because you found the enhanced version but not the regular is lame.

Dandelion quests result in Dandelion gwent card dude, a bargain at twice the price

dandelion suuuucks. lambert is annoying too but at least has kind of an interesting backstory.

keep hearing npcs that sound like chris finch from the office uk but can't tell if its him. i know he did voice for ass creed pirates

I am a grown man and I will no longer accept loading screens when I go into a building
― Dadjokke (Sgt. Biscuits), Monday, June 8, 2015 12:12 PM

going in and out of caves seamlessly is still impressing the hell out of me every time. lol @ bethesda's "you've opened a door, we'll be back in a few" engine

sorry for the 101 post but what game is this similar to? i love games like stalker, saboteur, alien isolation, far cry, fallout 3, dishonored, etc. am i likely to get on with this? i keep seeing it billed as an rpg, which usually puts me off, but gameplay footage makes it seem more actionny.

Skyrim

yeah it depends what puts you off about rpgs. its not turn based but there are elves and magic and shit.

is the game as sexist as it looks

nah its more racist

its got the awkward nudity/sex + every female major character is supermodel with blonde hair or supermodel with black hair or supermodel with red hair

Uh hello what about the crones/hags

but srsly there's at least the plot with Jarl's daughter Certs or whatever her name is, which is about gender inequality pretty explicitly. And the Bloody Baron plot, which doesn't even give you the option of acting sympathetic to the guy for being a shitty husband and father. Aside from the fact that all your love interests are hot and most of the major female characters are up for grabs, which is pretty bad, and all the boobs, it's not so terrible imo, especially for a) a video game and b) a narrative in the fantasy genre. If the Bloody Baron thing turns out in an all-is-forgiven way don't tell me because i'm not there yet

Diving into this

me too. big init? fave moment so far; slaying that massive fuck off bear outside of town - still on level 1 so pretty satisfying

I'm digging the detective aspect that they built up for this. I always read how Sapkowski wrote Geralt as a hard-boiled noir-type detective in fantasy trappings, mixing in some Hammett & Spillane with Polish/Russian/Slavic folklore mythos, and the game includes that.