[Interview] CD Projekt Red explains why you’re always poor in The Witcher 3

[Smurfin]

[Interview] CD Projekt Red explains why you’re always poor in The Witcher 3

I get it Geralt is always poor in The Witcher series, but not in The Witcher 3, Geralt is loaded like a BOSS ! He doesn't even need to haggle.

This article was posted recently, but why was it the opposite. The interviewer was asking the wrong question in the first place, or he hasn't played very far. It works in the beginning and Geralt is somewhat poor, but it fails in the long run.

We need another interview I suppose, why you're always rich in The Witcher 3. ;D


I don't quite get the thing that happened with the QA guy or was that a joke, he already said he had 6k at lv 10 and nothing to spend it on. They said they had to work it out, but leaving an unlocked door for even more loots ? How is that working it out ???

CD Projekt Red explains why you’re always poor in The Witcher 3

The sprawling fantasy open-world of The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt is filled to the gills with intrigue, monsters, an ever increasing list of free DLCs (including Wild Hunt's very own pig defending exploits) and enough sex scenes to make even Lars von Trier blush, but there's one thing Geralt's adventure isn't overflowing with: cash.In the latest issue of Edge, the team sat down with senior games designer Damien Monnier and senior quest designer Pawel Sasko from CD Projekt RED to discuss Geralt of Rivia's final hunt and the conscious decision to make your work hard for those pennies.

Edge: The economy is tightly balanced to ensure you’re never too well off. How did you maintain that? Damien Monnier: It’s very difficult! We didn’t want Geralt to be this multimillionaire that just goes around killing monsters. Ultimately, he does it for money; we really wanted you to try to haggle over prices and get more, because you really need the money.
Pawel Sasko: In the books, Geralt was very poor; he was always struggling for money. It was one of the cool things we wanted to keep. There are a lot of funny stories about our economy. A QA tester came to us like, “I’m level ten, and I have 6,000 gold and have nothing to spend it on,” and we had to work out what happened. We’d left a door unlocked to a big villa – he’d robbed it and sold all these expensive swords.

Edge: The XP payout for monsters is small, as if you’re pushing people away from combat for combat’s sake. PS: You get more XP from quests, yes. For us, this made it easier to see how player progression would work – how powerful a player was going to be [for any given quest]. It was also to prevent you just sitting in the bushes killing wolves, turning the game into a boring grind. You do get a little XP [for kills], and the more powerful the monster, the more you’ll get, but mainly the experience points you get are from quests. And there are 280 of them, so...


Source : http://www.gamesradar.com/cd-projekt-red-explains-why-youre-always-poor-witcher-3/

 

[Sapath]

I agree. Seems to me like that didn't really fix the money balance issue. I still was constantly hovering around 10k past level 15. The game constantly throws garbage loot at your face that is inferior to your gear but valuable to vendors.

After White Orchard and the first ten hours in Velen I had no trouble with money for the rest of the game. Goes along with the declining difficulty curve on Death March. Must be really hard to balance a game of this scope.

 

[IoriYagami76]

I'm always loaded with coin... So easy to make money lol.

 

[randyrhoads]

I got 50k without even hoarding it. The loot is too much and I'm just a pack mule.

 

[Luxorek]

Don't know about that poor part. I probably have around 100k in monster parts and smithing items.

 

[IoriYagami76]

Don't know about that poor part. I probably have around 100k in monster parts and smithing items.

True fact. i'm probably richier than the Rothschild family counting all the loot I still haven't sold.

 

[TheGhosTz]

Bitch Please, i have 20K after i finished the game, and another save file with 4K and i just arrived to novigrad (no mods)

 

[FuhrerGrifter]

what? i have 112k on my Geralt

 

[OliverDK]

85k here and could relatively easy have double that amount but I stopped caring after I realized there is absolutely nothing to use your money on in the game.

So being poor in TW3 I simply can't understand how it should be possible. And it's not like I went out of my way to accumulate the 85k nor did I use any exploits, sell any pearls (black or white), or wait for merchants getting coin again and so on. It was simple just accumulated through gaming and questing. Granted I have so far used 160 hours on the game but still money in TW3 just comes far to easy.

And am I the only one that find it ironic and crazy that a contract on a "difficult" monster get's you from anywhere between ~100 to around 500 while picking up and selling crappy swords and armor from random bandits or selling pelts from eg wolfs can earn you more than that easily. Especially on higher levels and if you consider the time factor.

 

[Garrison72]

What they're saying is true of the first two games, but not this one. The game has a ludicrous amount of loot you can sell.

 

[Luxorek]

The only thing I spent money on was diagrams, I think. Mostly alchemy, then armor/weapons [even though I never used them]. There was a moment when I was spending money like crazy on amber dust to craft some runes - then I realized it would actually be cheaper to buy them, heh

I can't recall how many relic swords and armors I've sold and dismantled because I had better equipment already. It's possible we may perceive the whole issue differently because we took the time to explore the game and were rewarded for doing so... in sub-par loot

 

[Phinnway]

They should kill too birds with one stone and decrease the sell value of loot and increase the gold reward for quests. That way, people wouldn't care so much about throwing a sword away and the inventory space wouldn't be as much of an issue (they could still increase inventory space on top of this though.)

 

[Smurfin]

I finished the game with 31k money and after doing all leftover sidequests and some ? quest, I ended up with 36k. I also spent most of it on diagrams, and potion of clearance.

I am trying to play with a rule not looting in houses/'stealing' unless it's empty house, but it's hard to stick on it when items I know I'm gonna need it is just one click away because I still check what's inside boxes sometimes just in case it has a diagram in it.

I agree they should reduce prices on some items, especially sword/armor with higher level, level shouldn't increase the price.of an item, at least for selling them. If people finished the game with like 20k++ then halfing the value of everything is ok. 10k is plenty enough for finishing the game.

 

[Exentryk]

There are some problems that can be addressed:

1. No one buys weapons/armors. Reasons for this are excessive loot weapon/armor drops, Witcher gear, and lack of good weapons/armors (relics) with blacksmiths/armorers. Every new village or town should have fixed cool equipment that can be purchased. Perhaps update their stock after every 10 levels or so.

2. Almost everyone sells their loot weapons/armors. Reasons for this are loot weapons/armors being crap as they scale a few levels below your current level. So there is absolutely no way of finding a loot weapon/armor that will be higher level and worth using. Even if somehow you found a higher level weapon, you can't use it as it will be level locked, and by the time you get to that level, you'd have better gear anyway; so you're always better off selling it. It's just a bad system (loot scaling).

Buying equipment should be the biggest money sink in the game. But with the systems they have in place, it just doesn't work.

 

[elisar]

There are too many swords and armor pieces that sell for 200-1000 crowns, to the point I have piles of them because the vendors run out of crowns just selling one or two to them, and you can really pile up a lot of 20-80 crown garbage weapons/armor (they get decently valuable as you get higher level) if you loot everyone you kill. If you are a treasure hunter, then you will be rich. If you just kill monsters then you will be living job to job, true. I just wish I could use my crowns to repair Kaer Morhen back to its original glory (probably something to do after the main story is over so nothing would need redone or rebalanced). I finished the main story with around 60k crowns, but I also mostly cleared every map of quests, treasure map markers, and contracts etc, so almost did everything but not quite yet. Also with the exchange rate, that's only 20k orens (3 Novigrad Crowns = 1 Temerian Oren = 1 Nilfgaardian Floren, because of the war everyone is using "neutral" crowns to avoid ending up with useless currency from the losing side I think). I should add that I have over 60kg of animal parts and other ingredients, so I know my diamond dusts and what have you are all worth a lot too if I were to sell them.

 

[Scholdarr.452]

Well, they failed pretty hard on that one. Problem is the pointless looting system which causes the player to have way too much money.

After a few hours I had constantly above 10k gold although I bought all formulas and stuff. Those 300-500 gold monster contracts were no incentive at all. Who needs 300 gold if you could earn the same money by just selling stuff that you picked up in some containers within less than 5 minutes.

This whole economy could only work if they completely redesign the looting system, abolishing all the "normal" contrainers and making the special ones more unique. Or you should basically only find crafting and alchemy ingredients which you shouldn't be able to sell for more than 1 gold. So picking them up makes only sense for their intended purpose and not for making money.

So short: a good and restricted economy is impossible with mass looting. It's quite weird that CDPR still states that they manage to combine the two although obviously that's not the case for most players.

 

[elisar]

There are some problems that can be addressed:

1. No one buys weapons/armors. Reasons for this are excessive loot weapon/armor drops, Witcher gear, and lack of good weapons/armors (relics) with blacksmiths/armorers. Every new village or town should have fixed cool equipment that can be purchased. Perhaps update their stock after every 10 levels or so.

2. Almost everyone sells their loot weapons/armors. Reasons for this are loot weapons/armors being crap as they scale a few levels below your current level. So there is absolutely no way of finding a loot weapon/armor that will be higher level and worth using. Even if somehow you found a higher level weapon, you can't use it as it will be level locked, and by the time you get to that level, you'd have better gear anyway; so you're always better off selling it. It's just a bad system (loot scaling).

Buying equipment should be the biggest money sink in the game. But with the systems they have in place, it just doesn't work.

I mostly used looted gear. You aren't looting the right things if you aren't finding good gear, especially weapons. You do loot a bunch of garbage, but that's just for making money. Only important people or hidden treasures have things you are meant to don and wield. I agree with the point about not having much gear enticing enough to buy, but I don't think that is necessarily the problem. I'd rather have more flavor things to buy than just weapons and armor, such as more horse armor and drapery, pets, options to upgrade kaer morhen, a ship of your own that you can upgrade, more gwent cards, gifts for friends and whores, more whores, investing in enterprises and undertakings, not having your friends keep you from being part of a kick ass new establishment even though you are flush with crowns, and other new things they might come up with instead of just gear with new stats. I wore level 4 armor up until level 15ish, just for the looks of it, when I wasn't fighting anything dangerous enough to change. I finally found some decent looking armor later on, and I did craft some, but I found plenty of armor with good stats that I discarded if it was ugly. I also liked wearing fancy clothes.

 

[Nantes]

They could just dramatically increase the merchant's prices in Velen, which would be lore-justified since Velen is now a no man's land, so there's greater risk in being a merchant than White Orchard. Because right now the economy is so favourable to the player you could call it broken...

 

[Exentryk]

I mostly used looted gear. You aren't looting the right things if you aren't finding good gear, especially weapons. You do loot a bunch of garbage, but that's just for making money. Only important people or hidden treasures have things you are meant to don and wield.

Not saying all loot gears are useless. You do find the occasional good one. But that may be 1 in 20 good, while the rest 19 can be sold off. They should reduce the number of useless crap, turn off loot scaling, and give more unique and better gear with fixed stats so it feels like you've purchased something decent, and that is better than the loot gear for at least a few levels.

 

[soot00]

Money sink is hard to balance in RPG's. The one game that did this well was Fallout New Vegas in Hardcore mode as there were "persistent" character issues you had to deal with. Character had to sleep, drink and eat (money sinks). They dealt with radiation and poisons that you had to buy or craft cures for, more money sinks. Your character could get broken bones that could be cured with a Doctors bag another money sink alongside having to buy or craft ammo and repairing worn out weapons and armor.