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PC Gamer joins the speculation that The Witcher 3 will be announced on February 5 by listing the improvements they'd like to see:
More information.Consequence Over Choice Nobody sane would say that The Witcher 2 lacked for choices to make. The end of Act 1, the entire of Act 2 and most of Act 3 didn’t so much have a critical path as a critical spaghetti pile. Make no mistake, this was seriously impressive and deserves credit.
That said, while choices did have big consequences, the scale of the game and sheer number of paths did have a tendency to trip over its own feet – key characters simply disappearing or being shoved into the background, massive events being dismissed, and most painfully of all, much of the plot that Geralt should have been uncovering during the game having to be explained via the final boss actively holding an expositional Q&A. It was also unfortunate that your choices tended to be a step removed from what you were actually choosing – the lead-up to Act 2 being the decision to throw your hat in with Roche or Iorveth, not Henselt or Saskia – or simply swept under the table with the politics of Act 3.
For The Witcher 3, it would be good to see that willingness to take the tough road put to more focused use – the world itself changing as a direct result of decisions, for good and bad, rather than the focus being on altering the path through it. A central city like Vizima wouldn’t hurt for this, with its development over the game altering based on who you kill, and what relationships you form. Kill too many crooked officials, and the entire thing becomes a fascist state out of fear, for instance, or have the monster population of the area directly tied to how much killing you bother to do. Direct responses, with unexpected twists, tend to be what make choices interesting. Especially with…