Dark Souls is completely different. It's basically Diablo with fancy 3P visuals and a player-driven combat system.
DA we've established numerous times your 20 minutes played in Dark Souls equates to exactly squat, so please refrain from embarrassing yourself further with your callow opinion that repeatedly reinforces this fact. Its basically
not Diablo in any respect.
No, they need a better combat and less linearity, but loot wasn't really a problem, especially in the second game.
Loot should be sparse, hand-placed and meaningful.
Games focused too much on hoarding items tend to suck, not to mention how they usually make upgrades meaningless. Look how turning Darksiders II in a diablo-like lootfest killed completely any sense of progression and reward compared to the previous chapter.
Agreed. They need more loot to
make better combat! I'm not talking randomised Diablo items scattered meaninglessly around, not tiers of the same sword with a little extra damage. The whole combat:items system has to be changed to accommodate loot as I mean it. Each weapon should be like a whole new character class, not just a new 3D model doing the same swings with more or less damage.
I never got that far in the Witcher games before I lost interest, so all I can really say is I was bored and therefore more anything, including loot, and less time listening to NPCs, I personally would have found more engaging. I mean, what was he? Some kinda werewolf hunter? Who cares! What is this, Twilight?! It's not Geralt playing; its ME. I'll carve my own story through the world with my imagination and let him enjoy his illusion of choice by picking either grey option and either grey weapon… Or silver weapon.
I'm kinda bias because I generally do prefer multiplayer games, but the linearity of the game probably didn't help with the boredom, either. If they were co-op games, I'm sure I'd have clocked them both, though it should be noted that my first play-through of Dark Souls was offline as I didn't have an xbox live gold subscription, and I didn't get into its unique multiplayer aspects until the PC version came out. But the combat system and the way each weapon changed the gameplay really drew me in!
Witcher3 graphics are looking awesome so I genuinely do hope I like it, but, Assassins Creed games always look fantastic in the videos and all open world and sandbox but then when I play them I get bored so quickly. I'd rather play some Heroes of Newerth or Natural Selection 2 than slog through boring combat to listen to crap I don't care about. My favourite RPGs are roguelikes like nethack and crawl. A story driven game can only be played once before you know the story, but this isn't the way with roguelikes.
It's not an issue that they just need need better writers because I also like movies and games and movies are separate. Dragon Commander was bad because, like everyone expected, it had a really average RTS with a whole bunch of other nonsense I don't care about. I decide before I pick my entertainment whether I want to watch a story or play a game. Games are all about the gameplay. What's the story in a board game like chess? Nothing unless you make one up! It's more fun multiplayer than VS AI. And if your writers are that awesome and there's a really, really good story to tell - make it into a movie where you have more control over your audience. Not have people save and exit at unforeseeable moments right while you're trying to build up suspense only to return not feeling the same.
Witcher3 is also obviously trying to be more like Skyrim by being open world(and selling way more copies!), but Skyrim combat sucked. The stealth and destruction magic were fun for a bit, but the melee wasn't half as good as Dark Souls.