I played TW3 to completion and I can't exactly say I hated it. In fact I more or less enjoyed my time with it.
Still, I had two main gripes with the game:
- the completely redundant, unnecessary and immersion-breaking leveling system. Levels in this game served literally NO other purpose than adding a layer of number bloat on a system that could have worked perfectly without them. In fact, you could revamp the entire game to work entirely on unlocking talents and getting better gear without leveled main character and enemies, and as a result STILL have a deeply imbalanced system where power creep became too marked anyway.
In a best case scenario, though, a leaner system that did not create stupid incongruences like "Wild Hunt general level 9 followed by farmers with pitchforks level 45 thirty hours later".
A mistake that incidentally CDPR somehow managed to replicate even adapting Cyberpunk, a famously "level-less" progression system.
- the itemization, that suffered of several problems. Namely:
1) too much fucking loot in general. Not just equipment, I mean a boatload of crap you could (and were actively encouraged to) pick up at every step. Why everything had to contain something? Why you couldn't go two meters without a container turning orange with the Bat-vision? And more than anything why the hell game actively expected you to pick up wood planks, leather lacets, flasks of oil, pieces of silverware and tons of other pointless shit as sources for crafting materials? Don't tell me this system couldn't have been streamlined tenfolds (making you gather only few genuinely rare and meaningful materials in specific circumstances) and made significantly leaner and better in the process.
2) loot often randomly placed in ways that didn't make any sense. Examples may include: diamonds and rare alchemical reagents in a farmer's house or in some street trash pile, a book commenting on recent politics found in an "elven ruin no one visited for centuries", rakes and other gardening tools inside small containers and drawers and similar shit.
3) the range between low level equipment and high level one was TOO GODDAMN BROAD, going to add to the hideous stat bloat of the previous point. You had starting items doing 20-30 damage in the early hours and then end game ones going up in the high HUNDREDS. That's a 30X multiplier, which is insane and completely unnecessary... No, worse than that, actively detrimental to internal consistence in a non-linear open world game.
4) equipment being level gated, which is not just a questionable (let's even say horrible) decision in itself, but a direct consequence of the previous points (pointless leveling system and weapons scaling too much).
Past that, you have the usual complaints about the combat not being great (but frankly I found it at very least serviceable, at very least not significantly worse than many other in the genre -I'm looking at you, ELEX- and mostly ruined in its balance by the points mentioned above) and yeah, the "detective mode" in the overwhelming majority of quests being the usual mind-numbing "follow the dotted line" drivel of "modern game design".
Personal opinions and all that, of course.
Still, I had two main gripes with the game:
- the completely redundant, unnecessary and immersion-breaking leveling system. Levels in this game served literally NO other purpose than adding a layer of number bloat on a system that could have worked perfectly without them. In fact, you could revamp the entire game to work entirely on unlocking talents and getting better gear without leveled main character and enemies, and as a result STILL have a deeply imbalanced system where power creep became too marked anyway.
In a best case scenario, though, a leaner system that did not create stupid incongruences like "Wild Hunt general level 9 followed by farmers with pitchforks level 45 thirty hours later".
A mistake that incidentally CDPR somehow managed to replicate even adapting Cyberpunk, a famously "level-less" progression system.
- the itemization, that suffered of several problems. Namely:
1) too much fucking loot in general. Not just equipment, I mean a boatload of crap you could (and were actively encouraged to) pick up at every step. Why everything had to contain something? Why you couldn't go two meters without a container turning orange with the Bat-vision? And more than anything why the hell game actively expected you to pick up wood planks, leather lacets, flasks of oil, pieces of silverware and tons of other pointless shit as sources for crafting materials? Don't tell me this system couldn't have been streamlined tenfolds (making you gather only few genuinely rare and meaningful materials in specific circumstances) and made significantly leaner and better in the process.
2) loot often randomly placed in ways that didn't make any sense. Examples may include: diamonds and rare alchemical reagents in a farmer's house or in some street trash pile, a book commenting on recent politics found in an "elven ruin no one visited for centuries", rakes and other gardening tools inside small containers and drawers and similar shit.
3) the range between low level equipment and high level one was TOO GODDAMN BROAD, going to add to the hideous stat bloat of the previous point. You had starting items doing 20-30 damage in the early hours and then end game ones going up in the high HUNDREDS. That's a 30X multiplier, which is insane and completely unnecessary... No, worse than that, actively detrimental to internal consistence in a non-linear open world game.
4) equipment being level gated, which is not just a questionable (let's even say horrible) decision in itself, but a direct consequence of the previous points (pointless leveling system and weapons scaling too much).
Past that, you have the usual complaints about the combat not being great (but frankly I found it at very least serviceable, at very least not significantly worse than many other in the genre -I'm looking at you, ELEX- and mostly ruined in its balance by the points mentioned above) and yeah, the "detective mode" in the overwhelming majority of quests being the usual mind-numbing "follow the dotted line" drivel of "modern game design".
Personal opinions and all that, of course.
