A button to quickly view Dandelion's updated bio and journal entries.

[killingyouguy7]

A button to quickly view Dandelion's updated bio and journal entries.

I like reading Dandelion's biographies and his journal entries about your quests, but I hate how I don't know when they've updated; that there's no quick way to access them, and you have to scroll and look to see if there's something added you don't recognize. I felt something similar with The Witcher 2.

It'd be nice if, when Dandelion updates an entry, we could get a little notification on the screen saying something like "press touchpad (something else for PC) to view updated journal/biography entry", and we then get sent to the entry and automatically scrolled down (if necessary) to the new content. A little star or something to highlight paragraph(s) which are new would be nice too. The writing is great and highly enjoyable but the current way it's updated, and the lack of notifications, make it a chore to keep up on.

 

[iCake]

That's just the reason why I never went through the journal entries in both TW2 and 3. They're just too much of a pain to keep track of. Apparantely, UI is not a strong suite of CDPR. (I have to say that proper balance falls into this category as well.) Fortunately, they do so many things better or way better than the competition to more than make up for that.

 

[sv3672]

The game does actually give a notification when something in the journal is updated, although it may be missed when several messages are displayed at once. But an easy way to access the most recently added or updated entries would indeed be useful. Especially when it comes to completed quests, they are listed in a "random" order which makes it difficult to search them, and when one intends to read the journal entry of a completed quest, it is usually of the one that has just been finished.

Apparantely, UI is not a strong suite of CDPR. (I have to say that proper balance falls into this category as well.)

Balancing gameplay is generally problematic in open world RPGs, there are many ways to play them, and it is difficult to take all the possibilities into account. And UI design is not easy either when there are a lot of things to manage and the game can be played either with a controller or keyboard and mouse. While TW3 is not perfect in these aspects, I do not think it does a particularly bad job at them either, especially when compared to the competition, such as Bethesda's games.

 

[iCake]

@sv3672, I didn't say the UI design was bad, but rather that it's not good and leaves a lot to be desired. Also, being an open world doesn't really interfere with the UI in any way and there are a lot of games that does the UI better than the witcher games. Moreover, while it's okay to mention the open world to explain why balancing TW3 wasn't that easy to pull off, but TW2 wasn't very well balanced either and it wasn't an open world game, so we have a tendency here.

Just for those who will definitely throw rotten tomatoes at me for saying that TW2 wasn't balanced out well. I actually thought that the game had a good balance overall just a few weeks ago. That was before I replayed the game just a short while ago. Going the alchemy and combat tree I rather early became a one hit recking machine for almost all the enemies, tougher ones like arachas, golems, elementals took two hits to go down. Even the dragon fight, I managed to bring the beast's health down in the very first stage of the fight, took about 3 to 5 seconds to do that.

 

[killingyouguy7]

Keep it on topic, lads. And no need to bash. Try and be constructive.

 

[killingyouguy7]

Could we use the quick access button for this? Just like with the books? (It's R3 on PS4) It'd be really nice to be able to just press a button and be sent to the latest addition to a quest log, or character bio, rather than having to search through hundreds of entries over and over. It's so much great writing going to waste.

So, yeah, can we just use that quick access button, please? You made so many great improvements to the UI with the latest patch and I'm surprised this wasn't one of them.

 

[killingyouguy7]

Still find myself desperately missing this option. It is such an absolute chore to go searching through the quest logs and character logs for new content.