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

Bloody Baron: I'll never know what bloom would've been the favorite of my miscarried daughter, and the fault lies with me.
Geralt: Wanna play Gwent?
BB: LAY 'EM DOWN, PODNER.

Not sure I'm actually enjoying this now (level 14), might need to take a break.

Don't care for these characters much TBH.

I think that Geralt's general lack of affect may be why I'm connecting to him, but that doesn't explain why I'm not connecting with other, more colorful/expressive characters.

Is the story supposed to be good or merely good for an open-world RPG? I haven't been impressed, and I'm in Act II now.

the overall story did not strike me as a strength at the time and i can barely remember anything about it now. i don't think that the main storyline/plot is ever done well in open world games, and the smaller stories you discover (or sometimes create) as you go about the world are where narrative elements can actually shine.

What prompted me was actually a secondary quest, the one where you help the Irish viking princess help free a local chieftain from a demon tormenting him by...

SPOILERS BEGIN

... throwing his newborn infant into an oven -- basically, the demon needs to find a new host who genuinely has intense feelings of guilt, but the outlines of the plan were already described by Geralt so why would he feel real remorse?

yeah people mostly like it for all the weirdo side stories and world building. i never finished the main quest, same as all open world games

I finished it on accident

i find the story more amusing than necessarily good but it still has some sense of character to it and a consistency within its own world. some of the skeillige scenes were hilarious, as an irish person. the acting and the diff accents from diff parts of ireland.

it's weird reading the diff reactions to it. i never played a single hand of gwent after the first 10-minute foray, and i was a magic the gathering nerd in my teens. just couldn't get into it.

prob be surprised if i ever enjoy a game as much as this tho i am already looking forward to their cyberpunk game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSqi-8kAMmM

in a world

where you have to change your sword to suit your enemy

one butt is

flexin

*slow motion shot of butt muscles gently breathing in and out*

I just started this today ! I mean III. I hate starting games though and this one seems massive but I will try.

One butt cheek is for human enemies, the other butt cheek is for monsters.

that explains the unbalanced tingling when the witcher walks through the woods

henry cavill sucks and is bad, therefore this show will suck and be bad

^

Also the game is bad.

Nah.

All three instalments are worth playing. 1-2 do certain things better than 3.

“One of the things that probably shifted the most once we cast Henry is that Geralt speaks a lot less than I initially intended. In the books, Geralt’s actually quite chatty. He talks a lot. What I found, though, is that on-screen—especially with Henry portraying him—a lot can be done in looks and in grunts. Henry’s a big grunter. I mean that in the best way possible,” she said.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/heres-why-the-witcher-auditioned-207-other-guys-for-ger-1836600508

oh he’s a big grunter alright

this game really wants me to get into Gwent. I don't understand it at all, which is typical of me because I find most card games perplexing at the best of times

I've been playing this for a good few weeks but I'm still LV5. Seem to be trying to defeat the first Wild Hunt demon with the help of a high maintenance hippie witch who reminds me of my ex girlfriend's housemate

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