Equipment scaling is bothering me a bit.
I'm enjoying playing the Witcher 3, and apart from a few minor graphical glitches have had no serious bugs affecting gameplay.
I do however have a difficulty with the equipment balancing. (Not that between Geralt and the world at level appropriate quests ~ that seems to be working more or less as intended, but rather that between level 14 'just some random bandits' and level 4 'regular army units'... or Geralt's starting gear which is described as "superior" quality in several dialogues by virtue of being "witcher blades".
I'm throwing away (or selling for about the price of 2 apples) swords, hatchets and maces that are 4 times as good as my starting equipment... and the stuff I'm keeping is at least 5 times as good with bonuses. Where is the feeling of the difference between a drilled, efficient regular army and the dregs of a shattered one, those disaffected opportunists? Or the comment actually made in game by Geralt, that it isn't about the steel, but the man who weilds it?
In this game it is *all* about the steel. (Ok... hyperbole. Not all about the steel... but an order of magnitude difference in numbers is the lions share of the damage increase/protection from damage.)
I can't help thinking that the difference between equipment between regular soldiers and bandits should be more about the condition and completeness of their equipment rather than it's intrinsic quality... and that the difference between a level 14 warrior and a level 4 one should be almost all about 'skill' not the piece of metal...
While this can be argued to "work", and work reasonably well in a linear game such as W1 and W2, I frequently find myself noticing this issue when moving around the W3's map. To my mind it is screaming out for a re-work along the lines of FCR1 and FCR2...to bring the emphasis back to story and character (and some significant, but relatively small) improvements in equipment beyond the 'norm'. (I also thought these mods improved the first games noticeably, and Witcher 3 so far seems to "work" better in vanilla game, but the structure more obviously doesn't make sense to me because of the "random access" nature of gameplay progression, which emphasises the differences, much more frequently).
I'm enjoying playing the Witcher 3, and apart from a few minor graphical glitches have had no serious bugs affecting gameplay.
I do however have a difficulty with the equipment balancing. (Not that between Geralt and the world at level appropriate quests ~ that seems to be working more or less as intended, but rather that between level 14 'just some random bandits' and level 4 'regular army units'... or Geralt's starting gear which is described as "superior" quality in several dialogues by virtue of being "witcher blades".
I'm throwing away (or selling for about the price of 2 apples) swords, hatchets and maces that are 4 times as good as my starting equipment... and the stuff I'm keeping is at least 5 times as good with bonuses. Where is the feeling of the difference between a drilled, efficient regular army and the dregs of a shattered one, those disaffected opportunists? Or the comment actually made in game by Geralt, that it isn't about the steel, but the man who weilds it?
In this game it is *all* about the steel. (Ok... hyperbole. Not all about the steel... but an order of magnitude difference in numbers is the lions share of the damage increase/protection from damage.)
I can't help thinking that the difference between equipment between regular soldiers and bandits should be more about the condition and completeness of their equipment rather than it's intrinsic quality... and that the difference between a level 14 warrior and a level 4 one should be almost all about 'skill' not the piece of metal...
While this can be argued to "work", and work reasonably well in a linear game such as W1 and W2, I frequently find myself noticing this issue when moving around the W3's map. To my mind it is screaming out for a re-work along the lines of FCR1 and FCR2...to bring the emphasis back to story and character (and some significant, but relatively small) improvements in equipment beyond the 'norm'. (I also thought these mods improved the first games noticeably, and Witcher 3 so far seems to "work" better in vanilla game, but the structure more obviously doesn't make sense to me because of the "random access" nature of gameplay progression, which emphasises the differences, much more frequently).