Anyone else not liking the graphic executions? [GIF warning]

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I'm quite happy with them.

I'd criticise, ever so slightly, the way that, in that first clip, the man is pretty much completely covered in shiny blood instantly from shoulders to ankles. Looks like he's been dipped in a huge, red gloss paint pot.

Also, the seeming ease with which a man is sliced clean in half is a bit far fetched but it's fantasy after all and Geralt is a supernatural swordsman. I'm not fussed.

Yeah, like I said, I'm pretty happy with it all, though I was surprised at the extent of the gore.

EDIT: I can see the point of people who think it's a bit much and, for their sake, hope there's a gore toggle in the options. The more options for people the better. *cough* camera angle *cough* ;)
 
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Ah. Stop acting caustic. It doesn't become you.
Jaded from over-browsing gaming communities. I'm a bit malicious in my posts lately due to a lot of pent-up and pointless frustration. So sorry about that. I don't like being overly gentle but there's still a gap between that and adding to the toxicity level myself.
:hatsoff:

The point is that while Geralt can be quite the savage, there would be no emotional spur for him to behave like one upon meeting a random hill-billy road bandit. To show Geralt acting like this, as frequently as the latest footage suggests, strikes me as misrepresenting his character, which, if true, would help build the case for a roleplaying conundrum. Mind you, this conundrum only arises because of the change in speed and change in camera angle. These are for effect. Notwithstanding, they underline and signal the beheading as particularly significant. But it's completely banal, isn't it? There's no more significance to beheading that road bandit than to dispatching your 23rd or 24[SUP]th[/SUP] nekker. The only scenario where deliberately guillotining a road bandit would be so meaningful to Geralt that it would warrant depicting it in slow motion and in close quarters camera, that scenario involves Geralt having a different personality altogether.

So it's not that Geralt would never find it in him to dismember, to decapitate. That he certainly would, given the right circumstances. And it’s not that shit doesn't happen when a sword is wielded. Limbs are bound to fly left and right, once in a while. That's simply a contingency.

But once you depict it in dramatic slow motion and in a more intimate camera angle you re-frame the act itself, you award it intent, meaning, an emotional charge it can't originally claim to have. Moreover, when further down the line heated emotions do drive Geralt into decapitating and dismembering an adversary, that emotional capital, so to speak, will feel instantly and irrevocably disparaged because the act itself has been trivialized and wasted at its most dramatic and expressive peak on lowly roadside nobodies.

It’s the Law of diminishing returns at work.
We kind of agree about the frequency. I want amputations to be a very rare thing (let alone cutting people in half). I really like the system but my concern (as I wrote in my first post in this thread) is that it'll become overused.

But something to note about tying the slow-motion to amputation - this isn't accurate. Slow motion is tied to finishers (and attacking while on Roach, but the slow-motion there is a player choice to make it easier to hit while charging, and has nothing to do with amputation). Not all finishers result in amputation. The last finisher in the new footage is just Geralt slamming his sword into someone.

So this,
Notwithstanding, they underline and signal the beheading as particularly significant.
Isn't true. The emphasis here isn't on the beheading, it's on the finisher, on the end of combat. There will likely be several finishers, and we already know of one that doesn't result in the enemy losing his head, arm or torso. Just dying.

As for this,
The point is that while Geralt can be quite the savage, there would be no emotional spur for him to behave like one upon meeting a random hill-billy road bandit. To show Geralt acting like this, as frequently as the latest footage suggests, strikes me as misrepresenting his character, which, if true, would help build the case for a roleplaying conundrum.
We just have to disagree. Both on how often he finds himself in a rage, both in how brutal he is outside one. Because I believe that his emotions spark pretty often in battle, even if it's not with Ciri right in front of him, and I also believe that's he's bloody when he's relatively calm.

In Lady of the Lake, page 152, Geralt is described as cutting off a monster's hand without there being any mention of his emotions flaring. A page later, 153, Geralt separates half of the skull of another. And throughout this battle there's no mention of him raging. In fact he finishes the fight pretty calm, while he had all the reasons in the world to be angry, since he was betrayed.

To take the example of his bloodlust, just in Baptism of Fire, page 98, there's another description out of many of how Geralt severs someone's limbs. In this case, two hands that the opponent raised to cover his face. This had nothing to do with any of his companions being threatened, let alone his family. He was hiding in the bushes and watching a random bunch of bandits he's never seen before with a girl they were about to rape. Incidentally this was also the "finisher" move for this battle since the rest of the bandits fled afterwards.

On that note, and about the assertion that Geralt doesn't enjoy it, just a few paragraphs before that amputation Sapkowski writes:
Baptism of Fire said:
[Geralt] took some deep breaths and each one intensified his blood lust. He could have calmed himself down, but didn't want to. He wanted to have some fun himself.
Sapkowski clearly states here that Geralt can be a maniac. Out of the blue. Not because this is an epic showdown, not because Yennefer is about to be hurt, not because this is a foe he's been chasing for months. He could have calmed himself, but he decided not tot, because he felt like killing. A conscious choice from him. It was his form of fun at that moment. It can't get more explicit than that. We have a very different understanding of Geralt.

Thing is, while I'm discussing this I can't help but feel that we're reading too much into the matter. I honestly think that the slow-motion for finishers is just for the cool factor, and that's it. A select few animations that we can't activate by choice that serve as a reward to the player for finishing a battle. Which, again, doesn't always result in amputation, so it's not exclusively the dismemberment that's being glorified. I see nothing wrong with this. And it's why I don't agree with:
The only scenario where deliberately guillotining a road bandit would be so meaningful to Geralt that it would warrant depicting it in slow motion and in close quarters camera, that scenario involves Geralt having a different personality altogether.
I still fail to associate the slow-motion with Geralt's personality - I see the slow-motion as a reward for the player, combined with a rare animation (I personally find it cool, but whether a player finds it cool or not doesn't matter in our discussion at this point). It's a way to make regular fights more exciting, because the boss fights will have their own thing going for them anyway.

My post is a bit of a mess because I'm still strugging to see how slow-motion says anything about Geralt instead of being a reward to the player. Severing limbs and decapitating foes isn't shocking to him, but the player isn't used to it, and the slow-motion, the way I see it, just emphasizes the witcher's triumph and feats in the battle (and the effect, once again, activates without necessarily an amputation - just the finish of a fight).

I also hope I managed to establish that the character in the books can become blood-thirsty even in random encounters, and brutal even while calm.
 
The executions are awesome , but I would like feel the same feeling from the witcher 1 , the same speed, the espectacular animations and the brutal sword choreography. Those feelings were :yes:. And someone knows if the diferents styles will be in the third game. I mean , group style, speed style and strong style.

They will be???? it's obvious that the combat system is very very different (And I prefer this like the witcher 3)but something like , geralt is surrounded for bad guys or ghuls........ And this way geralt will be move quickly for kill everyone. Its just my opinion but I would love it. All this I loved in witcher 1.

Thank you
 
I'm not sure about the Witcher 1; I always found the way it rained heads when Geralt took on a mob of Salamanders a bit comical.

There's a danger in making combat so brutal, but it's not that you're making it unrealistic. It's that your audience will miss the point. If you mean for extreme brutal combat to shock and frighten your audience, and reassess their understanding of your character's morality, you may miss and end up with the audience grooving on your character's machismo. After making this mistake with The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah made a career out of making it again and again on purpose.

Geralt should be permitted to commit needless acts of extreme violence; the justifications for it in his backstory are sound, and it should affect how we perceive him. But there is a narrow path between shocking and offending on the one hand, and celebrating violence on the other. Not all will agree on whether CDPR has held to that path, but the presence of arguments on both sides is a good sign.
 

MilezZ

CD PROJEKT RED
Actually, you can turn the finishers off in the game options. :)

Regarding "Horse Slow-Mo" - it is not meant as a sort of finisher. On the horse, when you hold the button for fast attack, it slows down time when you are close to an enemy. This allows you to line up your attack a bit better for a few split seconds. The window for this is relatively short, as it sort of wears off as soon as you get too close to the enemy.

Consider this: horse combat without the slow down didn't play too well, since the horse movement is quite fast. The high speed, when testing, got even more problematic on horse to horse combat, so the short slow down window (again, only activated when holding the button within a certain range of an enemy) helps a lot here.

Edit: Typoooos the german in me couldn't resist to fix.
 
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Actually, you can turn the finishers off in the game options. :)

Regarding "Horse Slow-Mo" - it is not meant as a sort of finisher. On the horse, when you hold the button for fast attack, it slows down time when you are close to an enemy. This allows you to line up your attack a bit better for a few split seconds. The window for this is relatively short, as it sort of wears of as soon as you get too close to the enemy.

Consider this: horse combat without the slow down didn't play too well, since the horse movement is quite fast. The high speed, when testing, got even more problematic on horse to horse combat, so the short slow down window (again, only activated when holding the button within a certain range of an enemy) helps a lot here.

That is great for both sides. Thank you very much
 
I bet these last two delay will fully worth the final result. Each complain seems have its answer in the game. Maybe I always trusted in CDPR's team competence by their gamer sight of a good game.

Once again, even twice, Thank you.
 
Actually, you can turn the finishers off in the game options. :)

Regarding "Horse Slow-Mo" - it is not meant as a sort of finisher. On the horse, when you hold the button for fast attack, it slows down time when you are close to an enemy. This allows you to line up your attack a bit better for a few split seconds. The window for this is relatively short, as it sort of wears off as soon as you get too close to the enemy.

Consider this: horse combat without the slow down didn't play too well, since the horse movement is quite fast. The high speed, when testing, got even more problematic on horse to horse combat, so the short slow down window (again, only activated when holding the button within a certain range of an enemy) helps a lot here.

Edit: Typoooos the german in me couldn't resist to fix.

Hats off! You seem to take into consideration almost everything we post here. I really appreciate your efforts. I am looking forward to have my copy of the game.
 
Looks fine to me. That's more or less what happens when you hit someone with a three-foot piece of sharpened metal.
 
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