I personally like the gameplay of Witcher 3. I also liked the combat mechanics, and the various options to make a character build. Where it did fail was the balancing of it all. They put in many options, but none are required. Even on the highest difficulty, once you get to a certain point it gets very easy and all of the option are just empty flavor.

And I also agree that the open world feels kind of like a very pretty empty world. I think this is because they also can't seem to make it explorable. The reward for exploration is never in finding some unique items. And the world is not designed very tightly, to be made to be explored. It's very open and in being that open, it ends up being flat.

I really am curios what FromSoft will do with Elden Ring. Their world/level design is fantastic, and just made for exploration. But I think that is also because it's not open world. So I'm curious how they will match the two paradigms. Will their open world end up being like a hub world, with various close-hubs which are very high on the exploration meter. Or will they actually make an open world that feels both organic, and still constrained enough to offer exploration.

That's fair enough. I found the skill system to be very rigid and limiting, personally.

Combat "felt" good, definitely - with cool animations and so forth. But the actual fights were way, way too much dodging all over the place and doing one single thing to win almost all of them.

I think I defeated 95% of every single fight using Igni and nothing else. I played on Death March - and apart from the inevitable initial few hours of struggle, it was a complete pushover.

That said, I always prefer stealthy characters in single-character RPGs - so I'm naturally biased against games that don't allow for that.

I think my primary problem with the character system in W3 is that, apart from the tiny handful of spells, you have next to no active abilities.

I'm a huge fan of active abilities in RPGs - as I consider them the best "toys" you can get in terms of power progression.

But the problems with W3 mechanics, for me, go much farther than just the character system.

Yeah, the PoI encounters were simply underdeveloped and utterly boring once you've done a couple of them.

The itemization ensured that anything that wasn't a Witcher Gear "recipe" was 99% trash gear that you had no reason to care about.

Beyond that, they even opted to reward you with absolutely minimal XP for defeating enemies - so you couldn't even use that as a proper excuse to go exploring new places.

Dreadfully bad design.

CP2077 is much worse, though.

I don't mean to go on and on about it, though.

Suffice it to say that I don't think it deserved quite as much praise as it got - and I don't think fans did themselves any favors by overstating how amazing it was over and over.

I'll check it out :)

But we've been through my opinion of asian game design already.

Essentially, these games are too much work for too little reward for my westernized privileged tastes :)

Even my sister played The Witcher 3, so it must be not bad …

kaer moren area looks :drools:

I love the Witcher universe. I own all 7-8 books and they are definitely a must for anyone who like reading Fantasy. That said, I'm sad I have never managed to really enjoy any Witcher game(I tried 1 and 3). It's mostly because of the gameplay. Too twitchy, too consol-ish.

It's just not my cup of tea but I understand very well, that some people like it. It's one of these games I wish it had a "story" difficulty mode to not botter much with the fight but enjoy the story and dialogs.

All of the Witcher games have an easy mode now. In fact, it's even called "Just the Story" in TW3. TW1 on the other hand was pretty easy to begin with.

What did you feel was consolish about them? There's nothing consolish about the first game that I can think of. I can understand someone feeling that way about certain aspects of TW3 though.. like how they went Ubisoft style for the world map.

Battles. How it needed to be timed and you had to do "combo". I have a vague memory of getting frustrated doing some combats in a marsh. It's been quite a long time so my memory of it is pretty fuzzy.

Yeah the first Witcher games combat was a bit wonky. You had to choose either your steel or sliver sword styles and swing in a certain rhythm to attack. Glad they ditched it.

They're action-oriented for sure, but I don't see how that makes them consolish. TW1 doesn't even have native support for controllers.

The combat in TW1 takes a little getting used to, but it becomes second nature fairly quickly. I actually quite like it, but I can understand why a lot of people wouldn't. I think it's still worth playing for the story and characters though. Not to mention some great music as well.

That's the sort of gameplay I assimilate, perhaps wrongly, to those console games I used to play in my youth. Perhaps it wasn't the right word, but anyhow, I didn't like it!

https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroo…he-game/z83b21
quite the surprise if it comes today on pc
edit false alarm, probably it will come with tv season 2

Is that the new version with ray tracing, etc, though or just the game getting released on PS5 and Xbox Series X?

From what I've read, the core of the upgrade is a version of the HDproject meshes and textures (available now on Nexus). Not sure about ray tracing but it's possible. I believe the intent is to bring the vanilla game up to the latest modded state.

https://www.dsogaming.com/news/the-w…se-in-q2-2022/

So it seems it's been delayed to Q2 2022.

Played it.

I wonder if they can provide a water shader that doesn't look like gloopy gel.

*Sheepish developer deletes goopy_blue*

I think it's still one of the best looking RPGs out there even 6 years later. My only complaint is the animation of the foliage when the wind is blowing. It moves like it's in a hurricane.

For me, the delay is irrelevant since I don't have a ray tracing capable GPU anyways and probably won't for quite awhile.

The only upgrade I would like, should I ever revisit the game, is to remove that plaintive Velen theme song. God did that wear out its welcome for me.

Hey, another game I haven't finished. I had a session relatively recently, and yeah it still looks beautiful to my eyes.