Review of The Witcher 3
 

Let me start off by saying that this has been writing as one text, but later divided into sections to make it easier to read about certain topics. In other words: If you start in the middle, and something seems a bit out of context, just read the previous paragraph.

At any rate, The Witcher 3 is quite an experience. While there will be criticism in this review, and with good reason (I was unbelievably frustrated at times, and almost managed to destroy my keyboard on one occasion), I still feel that it is one of the best games to come out in years, and probably the first to really get storytelling right in such a massive, open world.

And it really is massive. I’m not even sure exactly how many hours it took me to complete it, as I have the plain GOG version, and I haven’t been able to find any kind of timer. At any rate, I completed the vast majority of the content with a melee oriented build, except the following:

• A few land based locations in Skellige, including two places of power, due to a very annoying bug that prevented climbing from level 30 or so until it suddenly worked right near the end. Quite a few people have reported this bug, and worked around it by using cheats/mods to spawn items they could jump on, but I feel that’s too much hassle unless it’s on a main quest.
• Quite a few of the water based on locations on Skellige. In short: I found the whole boat thing tedious, with a few exception (sailing to the haunted island in Velen for example). Sailing around for hours only to find a few lousy treasures with generic loot just isn’t my thing. I wasn’t a fan in Two Worlds 2, and I’m not a fan here. If there’s going to be sailing, make it a proper ship like AC: Black Flag.

I ended up at level 35 or so, and I doubt it’s possible to go much higher as it is, simply because the game stops rewarding XP for quests/monsters when they’re too far below Geralt, and there just aren’t that many high level quests/monsters. I’ve heard rumors that this is a bug, but I suspect it’s simply a feature in order to prevent players from becoming too powerful. There is no scaling in TW3, and a level 40+ character would be immortal to just about everything even on the highest difficulty level.

It’s probably possible to get to such a level by doing things in a certain order (certain main quests are incredibly rewarding), but I simply see no reason to do that: Staying ahead of the curve is pretty easy at level 10+.

Beyond the lack of scaling, The Witcher 3 is similar to Skyrim in many ways, but with a few notable differences:

• The story, as mentioned above, is more much focused and provides storytelling of much higher quality.
• It’s less of a sandbox. The world is massive and all that, but Geralt is still Geralt. He’s a Witcher, and as such he’s not suddenly an Archmage or leader of the Thieves Guild.
• Skyrim is bigger, with quite a bit more content, but also more generic content. There were rumors before the launch that TW3 would be greater in size, but that’s simply not the case. I don’t consider that a drawback really, as it’s almost impossible for the writers to keep it interesting for that long.

Writing

Speaking of which, the writing in TW3 is fantastic. Like I said in the intro, it’s probably the first time I’ve experienced storytelling done right in such a massive game. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect, of course, as certain quest types become tedious over time:

• Treasure Hunt: Pick up letter -> Read letter -> Go to area -> Witcher Senses -> Loot chest.
• Contract: Talk to witness or go to the area -> Witcher Senses -> Follow trail -> Kill beast.

However, the main quest and most side quests remain very, very interesting throughout the game. In fact, they’re generally so good I didn’t even mind not getting XP or worthwhile loot from them in the end, unlike the treasure hunts and contracts which felt like a chore after level 20 or so.


Scope, exploration and C&C

That brings me to another point: The scope. Like I said, it’s massive, but for me it’s actually too massive (I said the same about DA: I, by the way). The main quest and side quests are all great, and should certainly not have been cut in any way, but there were too many contracts and locations that essentially felt repetitive and not worthwhile, especially since loot is completely iterative. In fact, no matter how awesome an item is, even if it is a blade called The Destroyer of Worlds, found in the ancient tomb of an Elven Sage, blessed by one of the Elder Blood, it will still get replaced by some junk off a bandit a few levels later (or found in some random chest). That combination of factors really killed exploration for me after a while. It’s a shame, because the world itself is exceptionally well crafted.

Here’s what I kept thinking: I can’t get any XP, as I’m too high level, and I’m not likely to find anything worthwhile because loot is mainly based on level. I’ll most likely find a “Guarded Treasure” with some junk in it or a “Treasure Hunt” where I’ll “Read letter -> Go to area -> Witcher Senses -> Loot Chest”.. and then find some junk. At 30.000 gold I hardly need more junk, so why bother looting? Herbs were also pointless after the first few hours due to the new Alchemy system, so that wasn’t an option either. In fact, why were there herbs everywhere when they simply weren’t needed? Perhaps the system was changed near the end of the development to need less herbs or some such thing?

Again though: This is related to general exploration and the contracts, not the main quest or side quests, as they remained interesting the entire time, which is quite a feat in a huge game like this. The one thing they could have changed regarding side quests is probably spreading. What I mean by that is: There is no scaling so, like in Gothic, you are likely to come across areas where you simply can’t do the quests. That doesn’t prevent you from obtaining the quests for that area though, and most likely in some area of your own level (Oxenfurt has a few quests around level 30 for example). The problem with that is that I kept forgetting who I was doing what for. Coming back for a quest 40 hours later happened several times, and I really had no idea what it’s all about, so I just traveled to the marker and completed it, without being able to appreciate what went on.

So, in short, I’d rather they’d have cut down the scope a little in order to enhance the main quest or side quests even further, or to increase the amount of C&C (choices and consequences). There is a certain amount of C&C in the game, and CDP proves yet again that they’re very good at such implementations, as the C&C is excellent. There’s just not enough of it. The save game import feature, for example, is a complete waste of space. The C&C in TW2 was among the best I’ve ever seen, with loads of political implications, yet hardly any of it is present in TW3. In fact, that’s probably my biggest disappointment with TW3: I really enjoyed that aspect of TW2 and was hoping to see what they’d do with it. Ah well.


Gameplay

Beyond the C&C, I also preferred the combat of TW2, as it was a bit less pacey. It just feels a bit too “mashy” at times. I also get annoyed when Geralt is unable to jump over small obstacles in the heat of the battle (he always does the lunge jump thing instead of a proper jump while in combat). Truth be told, the whole PC M+K experience of TW2 was better than TW3, but I guess TW2 was more PC centric back in the days? I honestly don’t know, but it feels that way.


Verdict

I normally write longer reviews than this, but I see no point in going on here unless there are specific things people want to know. Feel free to ask.

This really is one of the best, or perhaps the very best, RPG to come out in years. It has its frustrating moments, but when it shines it shines brighter than most. The main quest is especially good, and by far the best I’ve seen in any kind of big, open world RPG. I can forgive a lot of faults when that is the case.
For anyone who hasn’t bought it yet, I can list a few possible turn offs:

• The annoyances mentioned above (lack of impact from the imported save game, iterative loot and certain repetitive quest types being the main offenders).
• It’s very dark and gritty. Depressing at times. Too much so for me.
• A bunch of CTDs due to an NVidia driver issue. This can be solved by twiddling with the settings. Setting it to fullscreen instead of borderless window solved it for me.
• The minimap lacks a zoom function, so I felt I had to use the main map too often.
• Geralt takes way too much fall damage for a super strong, fast and durable mutant. He’s taking damage from jumps that even kids can do just fine. I’d break something now, but at 12 I wouldn’t have had any problems.
• A few invisible walls, but only a few of them are annoying. In fact, you’ll only ever find them if you’re very, very thorough and systematic while exploring.
• A certain female sorcerer can be annoying. Why Geralt bothers, given his status and all his heroic feats, is beyond me.
• Trophies aren’t as interesting this time around. In fact, they’re flat out boring.
• Scandinavians beware: There are a lot of Scandinavian names in Skellige, and the pronunciation is hilarious. Or annoying, depending on your point of view.

Other than that it’s simply a matter of buying it. There are a few annoying bugs (such as the climbing one I mentioned), but given the sheer scope of the game I’m impressed I didn’t run into more issues. That being said, CDP tend to release an enhanced version of their games after a while, so anyone with a lot more patience than me could wait for that and get an even better version, but I really see no point in that given how fantastic the game already is.

As always, if there’s anything in particular people want to know, just ask and I’ll fill in the blanks.

Excellent review and while I've not finished and am nowhere near it yet I concur with most of what has been written based on my own play through.

I'm still playing my way through Novigrad at the moment so dont have too much experience with the boat issues but I am experiencing a lot of the little irritations like at this point I'd like to just disable plants altogether so they dont show up at all.

Having said that I love just walking down the street and overhearing random conversations and surprised by how much variation there is compared to the Elder Scrolls games. The streets in the cities feel alive its not just a few token NPCs that are always fixed in place and even better they follow schedules.

Bug wise I've only had a few hangs and issues but nothing that is out of the ordinary for a modern game. The strangest was my camera getting stuck and watching Geralt move and act from the fixed position. Had to close and reopen the game as reloading was not enough.

I'm still at the beginning of the game (so I don't know if I can agree with all your points).
As always a well written review - Thank you, Maylander :party:

Cool review, thanks for sharing your opinions.

If you're starting the game from the GOG Galaxy client, there's a timer in the Galaxy UI. Otherwise, there is a timer if you open player stats (default: C while in either inventory or character screen). But the ingame one I found to be kind of weird. It didn't really match the Galaxy one. Others have reported it being broken, so I'm not sure which is more accurate.

There currently is indeed a bug where XP is not granted, even if it is withing the 5 level range. I was looking into it, and found it happened to me in certain quests (and quests give out the majority of xp). But I found it to be random. About grey quests, it's a bit different it seems. People that already received their game guides mention that the guides say grey quests should give out less xp, green quests should give out normal xp amounts, and red ones should give out additional xp. With the current implementation I found that grey ones didn't give me at all (maybe I missed something). It's there's either a bug for that also, or they implemented a change late in the dev process, and the guide wasn't updated.
I was really interested in this. It wasn't exactly a rumor, since the devs actually said this plenty of times, that it's bigger than Skyrim. I've no idea if they lied, but was curious exactly how did you calculate that Skyrim is bigger.

Other than this, I can't really give my opinion on the other things, as I also haven't finished it yet.

But I do disagree, at least so far, with two things. I actually loved the combat system in TW3, more than TW2. I felt it is a lot more free in allowing you to mix&match abilities, was more fluid. But the best thing was them separating the dodges in two (a dodge and a roll). This really gives movement a lot more tactical depth, at least for me.

The second thing I disagree is the itemization. I found it quite ok, and liked the way it was done. I never experienced having a powerful item, most of which I found either through obscure quests or through obscure item plans, being replaced by a generic one found either on enemies. Maybe I will.

Maylander,

Congratulations, your review is great! Great work!

But to put things correctly: there weren't rumours that TW3 would be bigger than Skyrim. Nah ! In fact, there weren't "rumours" (as per the word). What you heard/read about TW3 being larger than Skyrim came from the mouth of the folks at CDPR. Yeah, the devs/PR themselves told us, more than once, that TW3 would be larger than Skyrim. And that piece of info, coming from the people responsible for developing/producing the game, cannot be qualified as "rumour".

A little help here, fellas: how many times larger than Skyrim they said it would be ? 3 times ?

Now, I'm not playing TW3 yet! But if Skyrim is really bigger than TW3, that would be disappointing to me. CDPR themselves hammered us down this info many times: "Our game will have a landmass X times larger than Skyrim's !" If that's not true, why to make it public ?

PS: I am not implying that a game with larger landmass/continent is (or should be) better or worse than another. I'm not referring to game content here.

Are we talking about the base game or are we talking about Skyrim + Dawnguard and Dragonborn?

Either way, TW3 seems considerably larger to me. Not that I care either way as quality will always be more important than quantity to me.

I also don't want to go into "mine is bigger than yours" dispute but just did you come to the conclusion that Skyrim is bigger than TW3 Maylander?

Hmm I do feel Novigrad deserves special mention. It is an exceptional city, one of the best I've seen in an RPG. Perhaps I should add something about it.
Thanks. :)

I'm not using Galaxy, so I only have the character played time. It says "8 days, 1 hour", which is bound to be wrong no matter how you look at it. In WoW, played time is measured in a similar way, but 1 day = 24 hours. There's no way I've played TW3 for nearly 150 hours already, so that can't be the case. I was also considering the time could refer to when the character was first created (new game started), but that's about 10 days ago, so that's not right either.

If we knew exactly what "1 day" is in this context, it would be easy to figure out how long it took, but I simply don't know that.
That's quite interesting. I did a bunch of grey quests at level 33 or so, and the XP bar didn't move at all, despite killing dozens of monsters and doing at least ten quests or so. If it was intended to still give some XP, something is indeed either broken or has been changed.
The land mass could very well be bigger. I find it rather difficult to calculate square kilometers from horse back in my head, so I have no idea how the two games compare in that regard. I'm talking about the amount of hours it takes to complete all the content, which is much easier for me to notice, as I play them in exactly the same way (using fast travel, horses etc to get around quickly, doing quests methodically in a given area and so on).

Like I said though: The content of TW3 feels less generic, so it's not actually a drawback that there's slightly less of it. It allows it to be more focused and of higher quality. When it comes to content, quality > quantity in most cases (though a certain minimum of quantity is certainly needed).

I wasn't critical, just curious.

Skyrim is not bigger.
In Skyrim, you waste too much of time on grinding and too frequently repopulated areas which make you feel that the world is big. But it isn't really. It's just that the trashmob respawn rate in Skyrim is too fast.

Modders will probably eventually show us the actual numbers data on squaremiles in both games, I don't think Bethesda or CDprojekt will come out and say it themselves.

There is something at least 10 times bigger than Skyrim if not more, modders are not needed to compare it:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news…-450-000-Words

So start playing the game already!

TW3 has a larger landmass than Skyrim with Velen area alone. Skyrim as a lot more dungeons though, but a lot less buildings and characters.

Dungeons…
Skyrim doesn't have underwater part so not sure if dungeons should be compared, we're talking about landmass.

But even if we'll put it into calculation, the main difference that leads to possible misinterpratation is levelscaling. In Skyrim, the same old area looks a bit different because now it's not level 1 bandits there but level 100 superdraugr which creates an illusion of a bigger world.

To add to this, because of disastrous superfast respawn rate and too dense hostiles in the world, DA3 feels bigger than Skyrim and TW3 combined while in reality it's landmass is probably smaller than any other openworld game.

Really Good review. Witcher 3 is a great game, and reaches some highs that haven't been seen before, but it isn't a great *open world* exploring game: After the very promising prologue (which is a blast), there just isn't enough variety in Velen and as you hint here the very poor itemisation in the open world leads to numerous problems, such as devaluing quest rewards, inflating the economy and causing an annoying accumulation of useless stuff. And there is just far too much stuff mostly in places where it is more a chore to gather than any kind of reward.

On a related note, my other major annoyance is the potion system, which you also refer to here - the proliferation of potions is obviously there just as an adjunct, so that you can collect stuff for crafting them. But, potions add very little to combat and are a royal pain to use because of the lack of slots. Later, of course (the new alchemy system you mention), CDPR did realize that endlessly harvesting plants & organs wasn't fun, but they left all the stuff in the game to clog up the inventory and devalue currency.

Really, they should have stuck with progressive areas the size of the prologue area, rather than the huge but somewhat uniform Velen - because they haven't yet developed the mechanics to make exploring such areas as interesting as a more tightly focused progression would have been.

Regarding the size of TW3 versus (vanilla) Skyrim:

One of the big differences between Skyrim and the main mainland region in TW3 (rural Velen plus Novigrad, Oxenfurt and their immediate hinterland) is that TW3’s landscapes appear to be ‘flatter’ and more natural. Skyrim uses ‘mountains’ to split up the landscape, creating several distinctive ‘subregions’ and making travel by foot or horse longer.

Dan Vávra refers to this phenomenon in Skyrim in his blog post ‘A lesson in cartography in potato land’(http://www.warhorsestudios.cz/index….entry=blog_011).

Edit:
DA:I is not a good comparison anyway since its zones are not like Skyrim or TW3. Skyrim has a ‘compacted’ but ‘integrated landscape’, which tries to simulate a ‘living region’ with its totality of cities, villages, ruins, somewhat dynamic NPC’s etc.
TW3 does something similar to Skyrim but at a far less ‘compacted’ scale, with cities and rural hinterlands that are more believable in terms of size and variety. At the same time, the AI routines of named NPC’s are less elaborate and you can’t enter every house; making some compromises here was probably inevitable.
Also, because TW3’s zones are more naturally designed it probably wasn’t possible to introduce the ‘natural’ boundaries that Skyrim has in the surrounding seas and mountains.
Hence the somewhat unsatisfactory compromise of being warned off when you approach the zone boundaries in TW3.

DA:I, on the other hand, doesn’t have integrated landscapes. Zones in DA:I are either overland dungeons with a corridors-and-rooms structure (Fallow Mire, Arbor Wilds, Val Royeaux, arguably the Hinterlands and the Forbidden Oasis as well) or MMO-style ‘themepark zones’, meaning the obligatory desert zone, forest zones, wooded highlands zone etc. Some zones do contain a settlement (the villages of Redcliffe and Crestwood for instance) but you don’t really get a sense of a fully developed and inhabited (or formerly fully functioning) ‘working landscape’ in DA:I.

Good review and I agree with the gist of most of it.

I'm not far enough into it to say much for sure, but I will say that I think itemization is pretty good for a game that has a predefined character with clear restrictions on the kind of loot he can find and what weapons/armor he can use.

Skyrim, which doesn't have such restrictions had a pretty terrible loot system in comparison, for instance. Same with Gothic 3 - which is the only Gothic of a comparable size.

The "Witcher Gear" sets are really nice, I think.

I also like how they're "themed" and some sets are better for magic users - and something else is better for fast melee fighters, and so on.

I think the little stories and locations that are tied to this gear is much more interesting than a text blurb in BG/BG2 - but I guess that's just me.

The way you can upgrade the Witcher Gear means it stays relevant for a very long time - and I keep finding things in the wilderness that upgrades my character to some degree.

With that said, I do agree that it's not a great "gear game" - and I think gear in games like BG and other, smaller RPGs, is handled better. But I never expected a gear game - and I don't think gear is what's so great about exploring The Witcher 3. I think it's the unique NPCs, the little stories, scenes and journals you find - which add tremendously to the feeling of an actual world, rather than a generated mess like so many other huge games. Locations don't feel generic, so far - at least not to me.

I like the combat system much better than TW2 - for several reasons. One reason is that they significantly reduced the distance you can move when "left-clicking" an enemy - so you actually have to manage your position carefully in combat. In TW2 - you could just go from enemy to enemy with few restrictions - and that's much harder in TW3.

I like that you can do the basic stuff like parrying without having to invest in a specific tree.

I really like that spells all have two significantly different versions, which adds a lot to the spice of a fight.

I actually like the new potion system - though I think the cost of refilling them is far too low. That's my primary issue with it. But if you focus on alchemy - the potions get extremely powerful, and even if you only have two hotkeys - they can change combat completely.

The XP thing seems to be a bug - but I'll agree it's stupid if it turns out you stop progressing long before the end.

I do NOT think it's a problem with a lot of optional content, including contracts - just as long as there's enough meat in the game, throughout. Then again, I never understood the complaints about other huge games that have a ton of completely optional content ON TOP of the "main game" - because you can just skip it without issue. They have to try and make the game last as long as players want to play it - and it's never just a matter of creating more "meaty" content. They HAVE to provide this kind of optional content - as many players will exhaust the meat before they're full.

People have bitching about "generic" and "repetitive" content in Skyrim - and I just don't get it. There's a huge amount of non-generic content there, and the rest is up to you if you really want to keep playing and progressing.

Peronally, my main issue with the game - at this point - is that it's too easy. It seems almost everything I have to figure out is spelled out for me in-game, either through the detective mode or some impossible-to-miss quest markers.

In ~35 hours of gaming, I think I've encountered 2 enemies that were actually challenging - and I've been playing exclusively on Blood and Broken Bones and Death March difficulties.

I really hope this changes later on - because I expected a real challenge after The Witcher 2 - which was also rather challenging.

Great review…. but what took you so long ? :D

The grey quests thing is largely an MMO mechanic. And it works quite well when games are designed as a succession of medium sized areas of increasing level ranges. It doesn't seem to work too well here though, where quests of different levels are scattered across a very large map. That means that you out level quests without having any chance to do them on level.

Skyrim's scaling is meant to solve this difficulty, but TBH doesn't work too well in vanilla Skyrim. However, you can see how it could work well if you install some mods - I use Permazones, High level enemies (Skyrim Immersive creatures HLE edition), Revenge of The Enemies, Morrowloot etc.

IMOP CDPR just haven't thought out open world mechanics, but of course Bethesda have been doing essentially open world games since Arena and maybe should do better too.

Detailed and thorough as usual, cheers for that Maylander.

With one exception though: Much has been made on the 'Watch regarding the graphics, but next to nothing has been written (including in the review) about the soundtrack. This was very much a key component to the atmosphere of the first two games for me, particularly the first which carried that dark romantic folk feeling so wonderfully.

So how does the music for the third game generally compare to the previous two?

Also, I'd like to hear some viewpoints from Dark Souls veterans and players of Witcher 3 for how the combat compares, or at least to third person action games (and Witcher 2) more generally. At this point, I'm not fully sold on the W3 combat, though the game itself still sounds quite appetizing the more I read about it.

Music is superb, in my opinion. I liked it in the first two games and it's even better here.

I'm not a veteran of Dark Souls - but I know how combat works. Dark Souls is more refined - and is more about timing and precision. In terms of challenge, I'd say Dark Souls is more challenging, even when Witcher 3 is on the hardest setting.

Combat is an evolution of The Witcher 2 combat - and I think it works and flows better. That said, it's quite a bit easier than Witcher 2 was upon release.

A small note: I'm writing a new version of the review right now. It's far more comprehensive, and I will be taking feedback into account.

Okay, here goes nothing.
Did you manage to collect all possible gwent cards? :p

Question.

How the heck did you get to level 34 in under two weeks??

I have hours into it this game even took a few days off and also worked from home(wink) a few days.

I there is still ton more I need to do.

There are lots of people on the Steam forums who had it finished in the first week. I assume they took a more linear path through the main quest-line though and were probably using various strategy guides as well.

And skipping through all the talky-talk.

No, sadly I couldn't. There are a few cards in the first area that aren't available if you don't get them before moving on. I'm replaying it now though, so now I'm aiming for them all!

Yep. I saw people completing it several days ahead of me, which doesn't happen too often, but they probably just had the week off. It's remarkable just how much time it's possible to put into a game if it's the only thing on the schedule.

Do you mean the prologue or Velen? I understood they had added the prologue cards back in somewhere (Elsa's brother?) for anyone who didn't pick them up before going to Vizima.

I know it's possible to miss a card by not doing one of the blacksmiths early enough, but maybe there are other twists that remove and/or piss off Gwent players. I seem to remember, Celtic Frost I think it was, managed to alienate the innkeeper at the crossroads.

Forget the initial area, it's patched.
But there are several sidequests to collect more gwent cards and some of those aren't titled as gwent quests at all. Also, rushing through sidequests without thinking can lead to missing on cards.

Basically I asked did he solve all sidequests. ;)

For gameplay time, some steam crybaby posted that they finished the game in 22 hours and is now angry because there is no post maingame material. I mean… WTF.
I can't understand people who rush games generally, but when it comes to TW3, where the world depends not only on main story choices, I can't understand that even more.

I am trying to stay away from the main quest, doing mostly side quest, witcher quest and treasure quest.

I'm level 11 and almost done with the main quests in Velen (I think). Maybe only 1/4 of Velen is fully explored (lawnmower style). Lots of exclamation points remaining despite cherry picking a lot of them, and about 17 open side quests, etc… I am taking a break from the MQ for the Wolf gear treasure hunt I ran across accidentally, although the clothing stats seem to be weaker than than what I am wearing except for little boni to sign intensity.

It is what always happens in MMOs. People rush up to max level and then complain there is no "end game"… I'm still only level 15 in TW3, but must have played over 50 hours in the last 12 days or so - Gwent is a bit of a distraction of course - just found this really great card… :).

I can't get into Gwent at all. The idea of finding every merchant just to collect some cards is anathema to me. I do the fistfights as I come across them, because they are very fast on the easy difficulty. Most guys can only take 3 punches and G can take about 30. I played the Baron with the few cards I did have and he started throwing scorches and 7 and 8 point cards around willy-nilly. Not gonna waste the time to come up with a deck to beat him.

People enjoy CRPGs for different reasons - And collecting is one of those things that is quite compulsive. We collect gear to be better in combat and Gwent cards to be better at Gwent. In a way its not all that commendable, as an aspect of human nature, since it's probably complicit in why some people feel it necessary to stash huge amounts of cash, have 12 ferraris in their garage, and let others starve. I suppose that if you adopt a more adventury play style then the collecting side might not be what draws you to play these games. I tend to like exploration most and finding cool stuff goes together with that quite well.

crpgnut, why would you go find every merchant for sakes of cards, most of them don't even play gwent.

Inkeepers sell and play cards so find every inn instead.
Smiths you'll definetly visit to repair gear and buy schematics, then you can play cards against them too.

Speaking of Baron… He's easy peasy to beat. Easier than tutorial game.