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

right now i'm mostly concerned with how to allocate points in the skills tree in a way that isn't totally slapdash

like i got to velen and all the main missions needed level 5 or 6 and i was like level 2. had to go back and complete mission after mission, then even still i'm just about level 4 and a half.

my skillstree philosophy was to hammer it into two as long as i can equip two. my friend told me there's a potion you can get that allows you to rectify any mistakes, later on.

been away for a week for xmas and i'm surprised by how much i crave a 3/4 hour binge of this game.

starting to think this is one of the best games i've ever played. it starts to get very addictive once you start shooting up the levels more quickly - the range of ways to use your experience points is interesting - so far i mostly focused on improving my attacks with the sword and my igni (igni is my go-to sign).

also all the equipment and swag and stuff in dungeons is cool.

just did the mission with the curse on fyke island, thought the narrative was p cool.

got a bit of a fever, and spent the entire last night of attempted sleep with the gwent music looping in my head. wasn't too bad actually.

i can't get into gwent at all - that's the only part of this game i am not on board with. i assume i can progress without playing gwent. i played magic: the gathering back in the day and all, just a game like gwent within the game seems too deep inside for me, i spent about five mins playing it in that first inn and then quit and haven't touched it since.

i tried to go back and finish the gwent stuff at the end but i think you're meant to do it along the way from the beginning. i also suck at the suck at the horse racing shit.
the dlc is pretty good so far. seems to add quite a bit of side stuff along with the bigger story

lol typo

yeah I'm at level 14 and haven't done anything gwenty and wonder if it's worth doing at this point

just did the first horse racing mission in the ciri memory sequence and i won it straight away but it bothered me just for how redolent of other games it was, like just a stupid derivative and boring mission next to the fairly unpredictable quests i've done so far, hope there's not too much of that.

All the Ciri stuff that early in the game is just tutorial, right? The Bloody Baron episode is in retrospect the introductory chunk of what the game really is, narratively, passed just the movement/combat mechanics tutorials that is the White Forest.

I dug the DLC, since you encounter an interesting way to deliver narrative and demonstrate the doomed relationship thru memory and Impressionism.

Kinda highlighted the limited vocabulary of interaction we still have w.r.t. video games, since the control interface is still just button presses.

ah yeah, i guess that's true in theory but i ended up way behind on levels before the bloody baron, so i had to go back to white orchard, but then by the time i got to the bloody baron i actually was way ahead, i got kinda addicted to sidequests and i did all the fyke island stuff with keira metz which gives you loads of experience and a sex scene. though i ended up killing her soon afterwards.

so now i'm like level 9 or something, slaughtering everyone on the bloody baron quests - i guess it makes sense that it's teaching me hand to hand combat and stuff. i quite like the bloody baron storyline even if it's a bit too long. the botchling is pretty dark.

wait you killed keira metz??

yeah i honestly didn't mean to - it kinda escalated quickly i swear officer.

basically i followed her quests through and did the fyke island mission etc, then after the sex scene with her she cast a spell on me and ran back to fyke island. she robbed some notes from that creepy mage's lab and said she was bringing them to... the king whose name i've forgotten, a conversation followed in which geralt was telling her this meant certain death, it seemed very much based on the previous storylines, and he also told her not to do this as the notes could be extremely dangerous if the king sees them.

it went from the seeming possibility of a fight to the fight music initiating and she was dead within about three fast attacks and an igni. kinda weird.

like to me it seemed like my only choice was kill her or let her give the nuke to king radovid.

Same thing happened to me and I felt bad because I thought we had a real nice time on our sexy date? So I reloaded an old save and tried some other lines on her and she eventually went off to hang out in my dreary old home fortress.

Got real conflicted dealing with the crones and the whispering hillock.

currently deciding whether to help Dykstra kill a king.... i sort of love how his character arc works, they really put work into making him more 3 dimensional and his interplay with Geralt is top notch semi-homoerotic goodness

some of the decisions are tricky. how did you all navigate the fyke island stuff with the wraith? i fought her and then went and told her bf about it all - then he came back and kissed her, while she was a wraith, and died. p great that whole quest.

xpost

hmm thats a while ago! i'm not sure - i think i killed her, and that boyfriend ran off ashamed at what he'd done - has to live with the guilt etc.... just about to reach skellige and act 2 - but there's such a vast swathe of Velen still to cover, the completist in me might stick around for a while

ah really - i got an amazing cutscene where i brought him to her and she turned into this gross wraith and asked him to kiss her to remove the curse. and he kissed her and died, it was v touching.

I did the same. I think the crone one is basically that village and the Baron and his wife vs a bunch of orphans. I chose the former.

"crawl back under your rock"

it always makes me a little sad when geralt says out loud "looks like a storm" as he has nobody there to talk to :-( :-( :-(

Just a lonely guy, thinking about how it looks like a storm because of all the heavy rain and lightning there's been for the past four minutes

woah there roach

dlc is hard

game is p good at changing the atmosphere as you go through it - just got to oxenfurt after a lot of wandering south of midcopse (lots of bandit camps - bandit camps are definitely my favourite sidequest) - the music and atmosphere at oxenfurt is brilliant, and the way it looks.

agree that bandit camps are the most fun --- the parry/counter mechanic works a lot better with humans is part of it, i think

game is p good at changing the atmosphere as you go through it - just got to oxenfurt after a lot of wandering south of midcopse (lots of bandit camps - bandit camps are definitely my favourite sidequest) - the music and atmosphere at oxenfurt is brilliant, and the way it looks.

yeah, really like how Velen is all creepy scraping noises and sad violins and the whole region feeling like it's really base and sick and tragic

then you spend the whole big colourful capital city section with everyone dressed in bright colours and the most maddeningly infectious chirpy lute riff everywhere you go

agree that bandit camps are the most fun --- the parry/counter mechanic works a lot better with humans is part of it, i think

yeah there's more of a sense of carnage than i dunno, using a yrden to kill some irritating wraith.

btwi know it says blocking is for humans and dodging is for monsters, but mostly i dodge humans too, like my general tactic for big groups is a huge igni, preceded by an enhanced dragon's dream, if i have time - then i try to pick off anyone who got major burn damage. i dodge constantly and back off so it's just me vs one guy and i don't get surrounded. sometimes use mind control if the guy has a shield, but usually igni and quick attack does the job. i barely ever use strong attack or aard. i don't use block much either, dodge seems to work even better.

some of the midcopse bandit camps are cool, they had like 20 level three bandits instead of a few stronger ones - there are loads of new animations for killing people who are at a far lower level.

lol what have i become

i ended up abandoning fallout 35 hours in (i just didn't care anymore) and diving into this instead, mostly due to checking in on this thread on occasion and getting jealous. i'm level 4.5 or so, having just cleared out everything in white orchard (i think) and talked to the emperor.

the combat is great. i was awful at first because i was just mashing attacks and leaving myself open. now i'm learning how to hang back a little, and leveling up and getting better sign skills modifies things in a pleasing way as well. i know there's a stamina system of sorts during combat so that you have to occasionally recharge rather than attacking endlessly, but i can't seem to find the indicator on the HUD. it's almost better that way, though, because i find myself reacting intuitively and guessing at when i've recharged enough, rather than relying on an indicator to tell me i'm good to go.

the voice acting is so much better than fallout, too, although i really hate the Batman growl that most video game action heroes seem to use.

this game is stupid good and very addictive. always one more thing to do, one more element to finish the current storyline, one more quick run to get some food and water to prepare for a run at what might be a boss.

xpost but still, i'll take that over fallout's incredibly lame beaver cleaver voice for the main character

i wish i could delete the gwenty quest (gotta collect 'em all!) because i swore a sacred oath to never, ever play that game again.

Been kind of getting into Gwent the last few times I've played, actually.

once you have a few hero cards in your deck does gwent just become easy mode? or does it get more challenging

Oh by the way the Witcher 2 is free on xbox 360 at the moment, I won't link to it because it's different for different regions but it's searchable at xbox.com. Also playable on Xbox One via back compatibility. You'll need to grab it soon though, think it expires in a few days.

gwent tends to become more strategic once you have a few good cards unless you're playing the local inkeep or nonquest types in which case then, yes, very much easy mode.

I SIGNED UP FOR A GWENT TOURNAMENT NOT FISTS OF FURY AGHHHHHHHHG

one minor gripe would be that the story gets kinda tedious and overbearing somewhere from bloody baron to the novigrad and the missions finding dandelion. like some really long cut scenes and i was starting to feel like skipping them. i'm not sure finding ciri is that interesting a storyline.

how completist are you all being? i've done big clusters of question marks in some areas, but this game seems to be just vast - and like if i'm in the city where the missions advance the main quest, i'm more likely to keep pressing on with that.

have to say since i got advanced dragons dream and advanced grapeshot, and coupled these with a v levelled up igni, i am causing mayhem. like these gigantic mushroom cloud explosions and limbs fly everywhere. it's hilarious.

my problem is i'm too completionist, so if i see question marks i can't stop myself doing them... which means if i sit down for 3 hours, 2 hours of that will be side quests or just treasure hunt, and so i'm getting through main story VERY SLOWLY. I know some people have shot through the main story in 40-50 hours or so as they ignored the side quests etc... so its really down to what you as a person want to do!

but yes finding dandelion was a bit of a bore at points - but then it also had the stage play etc!
enjoying skellige much more now i've moved onto that.

these games would be way better with a silent character-created protagonist rather than reddit wish fulfillment sex having cool guy geralt.

^ a thousand times this; i feel very PUA sleazy picking the obvious sexytimes answer tree

lol true

though i suppose you could argue it's an attempt at reprogramming the users

"hmmmm... should i act like a total asshole to this woman or treat her human? i guess i'll treat her human"
three hours later
"holy shit everyone in this game wants to fuck me... i've got to start treating women human IRL i guess"

"also, i need to get rippling abs, learn magic and splurge on those catseye contacts"

i feel like the gamification of human interaction is the creepiest thing about those kinda dudes

sometimes geralt (and this game) surprise me with wit. not often i guess, and i'm damning with faint praise, but there's a p decent wit bubbling under in this game, relative to other games.