That just isn't your idealistic vision. When the barrier of entry is too high, no matter how much you increase the value, people would be reluctant to use it, so they reduced the cost.
I understand that, but it doesnt seem to be a very relevant point here, the entry bar for potions in witcher games has always been extremely low, with 0 challenge involved. So expecting to take that to even greater extremes, to solve something that wasnt solved before, is a curious strategy to me.
I was calm. I just like to use the BIG letters so the important words stand out.
lol! oh well, it may be that I tend to use bold and italic to stand out words, and caps to scream/yell
Sorry, but I'm just quoting from the developers here. I might be paraphrasing here and there but they said a lot of times, and yes also recently, that they made the ingredients for the potions "harder to get in general" "but therefore you only need to collect them once".
No no thats completely true as well of course, but there are different ingredients and different potions, and treating all of them alike would be foolish. What I said, that they removed them because it never was fun and challenging, and what you say that they said they made them harder and more challenging to get, coexist together.
The ingredients/potions that are supposed to be of basic use, the "starter witcher potion set" to call it one way, was "boring" in the old games because on one hand it had to be easy and straightforward, cause they are supposed to be the basic potions and ingredients, but on the other hand, that easyness combined with regular and repetitive gathering of them, to keep your basic alchemy tools going, was making them more like a tedious task. So thats where I think they introduced auto refilling and the ingredients still arent hard to get, like those that appear everywhere in the recent youtube videos. Maybe the recipe is harder or quest related, but I dont know.
Then we have the more "optional" and valuable/specific potions, the ones that depending how you play, who you talk to, what monsters you defeat and what quests you solve, you either get to craft them or not, and those are, I imagine, the ones that they made ingredients definitely harder to achieve that in past games, and who knows maybe many of those are the mutagenic potions or whatever.
I just do not approve of the strategy of completely getting rid of herb gathering while at the same time making the first-time-gathering take longer. It basically ends up being like buffs in an MMO where you need to meet certain conditions to "unlock" the buff and afterwards can use it in every combat a set amount of times.
The immersion as well as the resource management of potions was always very important for me, which is for example one of the reasons why I did like the system in TW1 the most and was disappointed by the system in TW2, due to the fact that the potions lost their secondary ingredients, did only last 10 min and herbs were basically everywhere.
Yes I more or less agree with this, especially because I dont see the sacrifice worth something like I said before. I feel like we're loosing things for nothing practical.
Keep in mind though, that like I said, they arent treating everything similarly; your initial/basic potions likely wont also take more time or effort to get initially, so for those the only change I think is that they refill, I dont think swallow for example will be harder to get for the first time than in previous games.
Right now, as in that post where I tried to speculate that they want alchemy to be a part of the game always even though its minimally, I think we will have this set of basic potions where their objective really is that the player gets them as simple and easy as possible, so they wont add difficulty in the beginning in exchange for unlimited refilling or whatever, I think we'll just get them and thats it.
The more difficult to get ingredients will be valid for the better potions I imagine.
Like I said, I would be fine with any number of compromises, like basic potions refilling and needing some (not many) ingredients for upgraded versions of them, or all potions refilling automatically IF you do not use ALL of the "uses" they have, or potions refilling but with reduced effect and if you want a "normal" effect having to collect some (again, not many) ingredients.
Yeah, look, on a very conceptual level, making something infinite just like that, is an extreme, and i dont like extremes, especially when they dont seem worth it. I agree the matter could've been treated possibly "better" with other solutions.
I think every potion has at least 2 levels above their initial crafting. I saw some "superior" ones, and some "enhanced" ones.
There are a sh*t ton of herbs all around Geralt on the map in the gameplay videos, there is an overabundance of them just being there. Even if you need more herbs for each potion to make it the first time, more than you needed in the previous games, even then it doesn't add up, it is a waste of herbs being all around you.
If there are too many herbs it either becomes painful to find the right, more rare ones, or it becomes to easy to make a potion, which means you get the potions too quickly and have them unlocked very fast and very early in the game.
At this point I think the large number of herbs is just for consistency and to make sure the player gets all the basic set of potions no matter where they go. And yeah like you say, we will unlock them very early in the game, and thats the idea it seems, so for the stronger ones or more specific ones the job will get actually hard.
There's actually something interesting here about the "waste of herbs" that is in the environment: In the first games you had that, but at the same time since you never knew what you needed and the potions were limited, more than one player would collect all or most of those many herbs. Now the game refills the stuff, so they can have many herbs without "chaining" the player to gathering always, like, they are always there if you need them, but that never implies you need to constantly get more. Instead of supporting your potion using habit, you just go back to get normal herbs when you get a new recipe or quest. Thats actually not bad at all you know, but its still just another "solution" that wasnt needed.
Is buying specific types of alcohol from shops every time less annoying then picking herbs while going in the direction of you next quest?
I disagree with this. In gathering herbs there's also looking for them, and going and see if they are the right ones like you said, and more importantly they are in places close to quests, so your resources can be increased while doing quests. If you can only buy them you need to go to a shop, you need to interrupt your journey but its always a concrete objective, you know where to go, and what to do, and what is there, and if you'll get it. It also makes you wanna save alcohol more while doing quests so you dont have to return or you dont loose money. but If you decide its worth it, you go and do it, not so much with herbs. You could wander for minutes after deciding you wanted more potions, and still not find what you were looking for, time lost.
But what they do in TW3 is not the right solution IMO and I (and others) have been saying this since they first revealed they wanted to include an auto-refill for potions.
Yes same for me, at the beginning I was more cautious because we knew too little to judge, and I could see many ways this could be well implemented, but now that I know a bit more its sounding worse.
And again, I agree that the main problem of the potions in TW2 was that only a few of the potions were really GOOD potions, only a few were viable and effective, and only a few were ever used. You never needed them, you had to meditate (and be out of combat) to take them and they had a very short duration. That was the real problem.
And what did they do?
They made the duration even shorter and they made the ingredients unnecessary after the first time (while still having tons of herbs being around). The only GOOD thing they MIGHT have done is increase the variety in potions, but we can only tell that once we got out hands on it.
Its not just that potions in TW2 werent that good, on the grand scheme of things, you had a much better way to beat enemies, its called sword fighting, and its way more fun, the end. I mean, in TW2 the alchemy tree was the most powerful one, so its not about winning all the time, its about the execution of how you win or progress, and that was totally lacking compared to swordmanship, and even signs which let you send guys flying away and/or burn them.
The improvement that actually might happen, is that thing we saw in the pax vid, when geralt takes thunderbolt and he swings like crazy, thats what alchemy needs, it doesnt need to be more powerful, it needs to be more fun and in a way that other solutions cant give you. It needs to let you have completely new attacks or abilities even. Hell, even making you dismember people more easily is a more valid way to increase how much alchemy is worth. But still, we need to see the extent of this.
- Heavily reduced the exploration-encouraging aspect of searching for ingredients (it HAD to be reduced, I agree, but not to that EXTEND IMO) eliminating resource management
- Reduced the time potions last (maybe not bad inherently, especially since you can take them anytime, increases the amount of strategy you need when using the potions in combat)
- Negated Experimentation (they did do that in TW2 already and it made the system more dull)
Yeah I dislike both things.
It looks like the pros overweight the cons, in numbers.
But in terms of impact those few cons tip the balance for me and make the system less fun and interesting for me.
yes it seems. I personally dont feel it'd be worth to make that kind of list myself, sorry if you were interested in knowing, because those points are so precise that I really need to play the game to be fair while judging them. But some of them I can more or less discuss:
dont like no experimentation, dont like less resource management, and "Overabundance of herbs in the world for no apparent reason" I dont really care, there simply are plants in the real world, and thats it.
these are just subjective btw, just about my taste, i dont think they are inherently wrong or whatever.
Regardless of how much we know now, this has to do a lot with balance, and only way to test balance is to play,
a lot, but at this point I'm not particularly excited for alchemy in TW3, its just there, kinda crappy like it was in the previous games. Except that TW1 was the less crappy version.
Oh and hey, damien said something like "ingredients like rubedo are still here" or whatever, I wonder if he just means any normal ingredients, or sub ingredients that give you side bonuses/penalties like TW1...
