Witcher 3 - Review @ stuff.co.nz

Lee Henaghan (stuff.co.nz) says: "The Witcher 3 is raising the bar for epic Adventures".
A snippet from the review:

There are plenty of scantily-clad characters, but just as many are intelligent, strong and independent. Sections where you play as Ciri feature a powerful female lead and Geralt is rescued, protected or saved by female allies on several occasions.

In any case, using sexual imagery doesn't make fiction inherently sexist, in the same way that using racial imagery doesn't make it racist. Twelve Years a Slave featured some horrific scenes of racial violence, and was full of disgustingly bigoted characters but nobody would dream of calling it a racist film. Dismissing the Witcher 3 as sexist because of some revealing costumes and relatively tame sex scenes is just as ridiculous - there's so much more to it.

The game's morality, or lack thereof, is in the eye of the beholder. Several moments require you to make a make a judgment call on how to handle a situation, with your decisions having long-lasting effects on how the story plays out.

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Score: 9.5/10

More information.

The Witcher 3 has one big advantage over other games: It is made on the basis of a very good fantasy book series by Andrzej Sapkowski.

I am playing polish version and it is clear they have achieved climate from the books with stylized dialogues and Jaskier's descriptions in Journal (old polish vocabulary, local dialects). This is impressive work

*Jaskier = Dandelion the bard

http://www.thejimquisition.com/2015/05/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-review/

No idea if it was already posted. I think his review is quite objective.. but again this is my humble opinion.

IIRC jimquisition is xbone version review. So you can read this:

Loading times are obscene

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On my machine loading times are just a few seconds (SSD) and fast travel loads after 2 seconds max.

Also:

there are plenty of bugs on offer

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Not really on PC. I had the directaudio issue where sounds get almost muted and similar upon area/cutscene switch but it's nothing new, some other games also suffer from it and is solvable by "hacking" windows/system32 files so I fixed that.
Other than that I've seen a kid playing while floating in the air once, 20 hare respawned on the same spot instead of one while doing the Ciri wolf king sidestory, couldn't loot some containers and in one (just one) occasion Geralt didn't draw the sword when the combat began. I didn't hit 1 undeliberatly, honestly!
Also, one guy I never talked to before said "hi Geralt". He's actually a part of a quest later where we're supposed to be introduced so he isn't supposed to know me before. Yea, I'm nitpicking as usual. But that'd be it, the game feels totally polished.
Didn't freeze, crash or something yet, no stutters or FPS drops or something.

Plenty of bugs on xbone, perhaps, on PC… Nah.

Just got started with this. One thing that sticks out as an annoyance: Geralt's voice ALWAYS sounds like he's in a sound studio with heavy reverb. The NPC voices all sound more convincing to me so far, in that they sound like they were recorded in the open vs. a tightly controlled studio.

I guess it's small, but considering the huge amount of dialog (so far) I find it really jarring.

Playing with the controller, I find movement and combat to be decent so far also. Spotting herbs and loot feels really floaty, and some of the button mapping seems odd, but I'm sure that's just a matter of time to learn it.

Ovenall, I'm more interested in inventory/shops with a controller. Is it as some sites say - totally awkward and m/k design ported not the best way to controllers, a proof that the game wasn't designed initially for consoles?

About voices I can't say I experienced the same thing, but it could be the directaudio problem I've mentioned elsewhere.
The patch 1.04 is out but the sound problem is not addressed in the changelog.

Well, I haven't played to the point where I have used shops a lot... I bought some food from the first inn. Took me a while to figure it out, but it worked. I can see when I have much more inventory things might get annoying.

What bugs me is the PS4 controller HAS a built in touch pad, and games almost never use it, or when they do it's something superficial. I guess they design for parity with Xbone which doesn't have one. Touch pad would have been great for inventory, etc.

Ovenall said:

Well, I haven't played to the point where I have used shops a lot… I bought some food from the first inn. Took me a while to figure it out, but it worked. I can see when I have much more inventory things might get annoying.

What bugs me is the PS4 controller HAS a built in touch pad, and games almost never use it, or when they do it's something superficial. I guess they design for parity with Xbone which doesn't have one. Touch pad would have been great for inventory, etc.

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You folks are weird.

It's just an input device for a game, it's not apostasy.

HiddenX said:

The Witcher 3 has one big advantage over other games: It is made on the basis of a very good fantasy book series by Andrzej Sapkowski.

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I read one of the books and got about half way through another. I thought it was OK but nothing great. Granted translated to English maybe it loses something. At the time only a portion of the books were available in English.

sakichop said:

You folks are weird.

It's just an input device for a game, it's not apostasy.

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Oh please. I play games made for K&M with K&M, and the ones made for a controller with a controller.

Good home grown kiwi review; one of the better ones around IMO.

Ovenall said:

Oh please. I play games made for K&M with K&M, and the ones made for a controller with a controller.

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Oh please, apparently its not made to play with your controller though. So dump the ps4 and pick up an xbone. No biggie.

If other peoples input device of choice isn't supported to their satisfaction they should just play with another one. If yours isn't though its a problem. No need to explain I hear ya loud and clear.

sakichop said:

Oh please, apparently its not made to play with your controller though. So dump the ps4 and pick up an xbone. No biggie.

If other peoples input device of choice isn't supported to their satisfaction they should just play with another one. If yours isn't though its a problem. No need to explain I hear ya loud and clear.

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Wrong. It works the same for ps4 and xbox. Neither is better.

Ovenall said:

Wrong. It works the same for ps4 and xbox. Neither is better.

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Yep, that's why your complaining.