Witcher 3 - New Q&A & Game Length

Couchpotato

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This pissing contest of who has the longest game is just tiresome and it's absolutely uninteresting too. I rather play an awesome 8-10h game than a 200h game that feels extremely drawn out and makes me lose interest long before it ends (happens far too often these days with RPG's).

Tl;dr. Quality over quantity.
 
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While you are right, we are still waiting for an RPG with a game length like this AND meaty, unrepetitive content. Witcher 3 could be this game for all that can be read.

So yes, "quality over quantity", but "quality AND quantitiy over quality".
 
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It's not a black and white issue.

Let's say quality is subjective, which it is.

Then let's rate quality between 1 and 100.

Personally, I'd rather have a 100 hour game with 30 hours of 80-90 quality and 70 hours of 50 quality - than 8 hours with 95 quality.

But that's me.
 
I think you have it mixed up with taste.. quality is certainly not subjective, not for games, for hardware, clothes, sound, printing etc etc.. that some people are willing to accept crap is not the same as quality is subjective ;)

The older i get the less i feel like spending my time on stuff that is subpar. But that's me.
 
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I think you have it mixed up with taste.. quality is certainly not subjective, not for games, for hardware, clothes, sound, printing etc etc.. that some people are willing to accept crap is not the same as quality is subjective ;)

The older i get the less i feel like spending my time on stuff that is subpar. But that's me.

I wish it worked like that, but it doesn't. People can't even agree about the simplest things like clothes and hardware. Some people will swear to Apple, Xbox or Playstation - and there's no telling them one thing is of higher quality than the other. You could separate parts of hardware into a million different pieces - like build quality, rendering performance, CPU speeds and so on - and you'll find people who think one aspect is more important for them, personally, than another aspect. It will all add up to a whole bunch of nothing for the purposes of establishing objective quality.

That's for relatively simple things like hardware.

Where games and forms of game content are concerned, it's much, much more of a grey area. What constitutes a great quality quest, story, battle, item design and so on? What game is prettier? It's all but impossible to get people to agree whether Morrowind is of a higher quality than Risen, or if Baldur's Gate is of a higher quality than Fallout. You think that can be objectively established? You're kidding yourself.

So, you're absolutely and totally wrong about quality being objective.

As for being subpar to you, that's not necessarily subpar to other people. That's the kind of thing you have to appreciate if you want to have any hope of understanding why people like different things for different reasons, and no - people who don't agree with you are not all wrong.

The world would be so much easier like that, though, wouldn't it :)
 
Hard to say, if you do everything I d say 200+ hours.
I always do everything in games. Well… Everything that is "handplaced". Retarded respawns and nonstory grind, is not everything I'd do. I'm even doing the sidemissions in a certain uPlay series I'm currently on although most of them are repetitive but are not infinite garbage and once you do them all (about 50 missions I believe), there are no more.

If it's 200+ hours of no so-called "sandbox", "theme parks" and similar filler crap designs, TW3 won't be the game of the year, but the game of the century.
I can't remember doing one playthrough in any game so many hours. The only game I remember passed 200 hours with a single save was Sims 3 - but it was "completed" with most of it's numerous expansions, it was not just the core game.

The older i get the less i feel like spending my time on stuff that is subpar. But that's me.
It's not just you. And since IIRC you're into modding, please, pretty please, noone made it yet, can you please try to make nobear respawns in DA3? Subpar is too good word to describe them.
 
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And there were people complaining about the length of Lords of Xulima...
 
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What people would that be? :)

I complained on not keeping the same "tempo" in the whole game.
First quarter is great, challenging. Then came two quarters of pretty much boredom temporarily being cured with interesting puzzles here and there. And then the last quarter of the game is brilliant.

It's not about the length really, it's about the midgame. It's… Compared to the beginning and the end, not that good.
 
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@DArtagnan
you're talking about taste though. No one would argue that a pair of sneakers that are ruined within 1 week are of much high quality than the pair that held up for 3 years and were more comfortable. It just wouldn't make any sense. However you can say that the color or the look of the ruined sneakers were more to your taste. I'm pretty sure you know the difference.

For games, music, movies or art it's much harder to judge quality, but like anything else it's totally doable (by a person who is an expert in that particular area.) Most people are better off not judging the quality of said things though, because most people lack the knowledge to do so... And this is why we have taste, since it's not really something you can argue against, it's subjective, while quality isnt.

@joxer : i absolutely suck at anything that has to do with AI's or scripts, sorry.
 
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vurt, arrrrrrrrrgh!
Okay, back to whining on Bioware feedback forum then... :(
 
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@DArtagnan
you're talking about taste though. No one would argue that a pair of sneakers that are ruined within 1 week are of much high quality than the pair that held up for 3 years and were more comfortable. It just wouldn't make any sense. However you can say that the color or the look of the ruined sneakers were more to your taste. I'm pretty sure you know the difference.

For games, music, movies or art it's much harder to judge quality, but like anything else it's totally doable (by a person who is an expert in that particular area.) Most people are better off not judging the quality of said things though, because most people lack the knowledge to do so… And this is why we have taste, since it's not really something you can argue against, it's subjective, while quality isnt.

No, I'm talking about quality being impossible to establish for anything but the most basic items of primitive function.

Your shoe example is a good one to point out that even in such a simple case, quality is subjective. But if you were talking about "build quality" then it could probably be established. Except that shoes are often about the name and the label, and build quality based on pricing is tricky. You'd have to be an expert on materials - as in how does natural conditions affect materials - and in what way. Are some shoes better for walking in mud than on the pavement? What if the person using the shoes will use them for one kind of terrain instead of the other? On and on, and it's suddenly not so simple. Especially not when you add in the human element of how some people are exceptionally good at taking care of their things, and some people would wear out even the most durable shoes in a month. You will find experts in every field in the world disagreeing over what label/brand/item is best, just as you will find gaming experts disagreeing over what game has the best combat system. Who is right?

Again, it's much harder to do than you think.

As for knowledge - it has nothing to do with quality when it comes to entertainment. Why? Because the primary function of entertainment is to entertain. It doesn't have to matter in the slightest how good it looks or how good it sounds - or how deep and complex the mechanics are, unless those elements add to the entertainment value - and that will vary a LOT from individual to individual.

Some people would rather play Solitaire than Pillars of Eternity. Does that make Solitaire the best game of the highest quality? Perhaps it does to those people. Your preferences and knowledge of games makes no difference whatsoever there.

A person without any experience whatsoever can enjoy one game over the other, and as such - that one game will be of a higher quality to HIM than the other game, regardless of how much talent or passion went into making them.

Trying to objectively establish quality based on your own personal preferences is called arrogance.

I recommend not going that way.

I have more experience with gaming in general than 99.9% of the population. Does that mean I get to decide what game is of a higher quality than the rest of humanity? Does that mean that the person on the Watch with the most experience gets to be "right" when he or she says one game is better than another?

What a silly suggestion, really.
 
The length of the game depends from gamer to gamer. Imho.
Everyone has a game style.
But there is a choice, do you want to play the game 200+(if you do everything), or far less hours? It's a nice option to have in an open world game.

And by the way... the reporter woman is very cute and beautiful.
 
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I don't see how anybody could ever provide 200 hours of compelling content, consistent challenge, interest, character development, or anything. It's far more likely to be "inquisition" content where there's 10/15/20 whatever smaller/normal hours of quality story and a whole bunch of generic/repetitive/filler stuff, and whether your not you enjoy doing the same bounties and collection quests and other generic stuff over and over is a personal taste thing - for me it kind of gets old, which is why I've yet to finish inquisition (well that and I find 95% or more of the combat in that game is sleep inducing and the overall combat system is more action/console than RPG to me, spamming abilities off cooldown with rarely any tactical thought)
 
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They've never claimed to have 200 hours of compelling content. That's if you do everything - even all the trivial stuff.

Originally, they said 50 hours of main quest content and 50 hours of side quest content. Anything beyond that isn't likely to be super compelling.

But then again, that's not the point in a huge open world game. The point is to give the player time to breathe and get lost in a world. You don't provide a convincing illusion of a persistent world by rushing people through a linear story and ending it after 20-30 hours.

That's why it's not a problem for fans of huge open world games.

That said, I doubt CDPR will go the Bioware route of having a ton of dreary fetch quests. I suspect they'll add more meat to most of the content than that, but we'll see.
 
That said, I doubt CDPR will go the Bioware route of having a ton of dreary fetch quests. I suspect they'll add more meat to most of the content than that, but we'll see.

They (CDPR) have said in many post they're no fetch quest. All the side quest have some sort of meaning.
 
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As for the length of the game, personally there has been way to much chatter about the game in general. I am just going to wait until May19th and play the dam thing.
 
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@DArtagnan you're still talking about taste so i see little point in continuing the discussion, there's more to quality than build quality too, but build quality is an excellent example.

As for your example, you can only be an expert and a "judge" if the specific entertainment (art, music etc) is to your taste, so when it comes to entertainment quality and taste goes kind of hand in hand.. This is why people get pissed off if someone reviews a particular genre that he has no interest in and doesnt like, since there's no way this person could understand or even begin to judge its quality.
 
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They (CDPR) have said in many post they're no fetch quest. All the side quest have some sort of meaning.

200 hours and not 1 fetch quest! I'll believe that when I play it.

As for length, I'm not sure if I can stay interested for that long.

I played Skyrim for 400 hours but I had different classes, weapon fighting styles, magic and mods to add a ton of fresh content.

If I'm just Geralt with a silver sword, regular sword and a few signs. 200 hours? I just don't know if I could do that.
 
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