Isn't flotsam forest still far more beautiful than anything in witcher 3?

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Tuco

Forum veteran
Nice to see you're keeping an open mind on the subject, lol. But seriously, the fact is that The Witcher 2 has plenty of textures, assets, and post-processing affects that are higher quality than those in The Witcher 3..
Well, no, that's the problem. It doesn't.
Ubersampling, by the way, it's just downsampling under a fancy name.
You could apply it even to TW3 through drivers, external tools or maybe even just ini tweaking, if your hardware could manage it (which is unlikely).
 
The Flotsam forest is indeed beautifully crafted ... but TW3 has some really gorgeous environments as well. The lighting is amazing, and I really enjoyed visiting worlds like Tedd Deireadh. There was something really stunning about its desolation. I think they were also tremendously successful at crafting cityscapes in this game. I haven't seen anything on the scale of Novigrad in quite a while, and the city really felt alive. Also love Oxenfurt.
 
Well, no, that's the problem. It doesn't.
Ubersampling, by the way, it's just downsampling under a fancy name.
You could apply it even to TW3 through drivers, external tools or maybe even just ini tweaking, if your hardware could manage it (which is unlikely).

I know what ubersampling is and I know how to force it. The fact that it's not included as an in-game option speaks more for my point than yours, actually. Ubersampling is not a graphical feature in TW3 because the performance hit is not viable in the latest iteration of Red Engine. Too much fancy lighting and texture streaming going on.

So yeah, you can download a mod to force this disabled feature, which again proves that TW2 had some pretty impressive graphical options that TW3 lacks. And there are plenty more examples if you have a good eye for graphics. The LoD, for example, in TW3 is horrendous, and it was miles better in TW2 (literally). This goes for NPCs, buildings, and vegetation. TW2 had some issues with grass pop-in, but that's it.

Another example is the metal texturing on NPC armor. Many gamers won't notice this stuff individually, but it does add up to create a noticeable difference for those of us with an eye to see it.

You'd have to be blind to think that TW3 isn't a vast overall graphical improvement from TW2, however the perfect storm of artistic brilliance that took place when Flotsam forest was designed still stands apart as an area that hasn't been matched in TW3.
 
The Flotsam forest is indeed beautifully crafted ... but TW3 has some really gorgeous environments as well. The lighting is amazing, and I really enjoyed visiting worlds like Tedd Deireadh. There was something really stunning about its desolation. I think they were also tremendously successful at crafting cityscapes in this game. I haven't seen anything on the scale of Novigrad in quite a while, and the city really felt alive. Also love Oxenfurt.

Yeah, Novigrad is probably the best city setting in any game I've played thus far. It just felt populated rather than just buildings, quest givers, a handful of random npcs and merchants. Games such as TES, Mass Effect etc have their city hubs, however, there aren't actually many npc populating them and none feel like proper large towns or cities. In fact, a real life small village probably has more residents than most game cities do.
 
Agreed. In my opinion TW1>TW3>TW2 in terms of atmosphere, story, gameplay, being true to the source material in terms of the world setting and the main character.
I absolutely disagree. I started playing the first game after finishing the novels and hoped for some kind of sequel storywise. But it seemed as if the game was set in another universe. Gone was the wit and humor, what you got instead was dreary and bleak atmosphere, something that's not in the books. Sapkowski created a harsh, realistic world, not a rotten hellhole where even in the city you feel like you're crawling though a dungeon. The story was confusingly told, the huge gaps between the chapters were annoying and the whole game just doesn't feel like a Geralt of Rivia-adventure. Maybe the amnesia idea wasn't the greatest, the fact that the plot was completely detached from the events of the novels didn't help, either.
In the second game you finally got many things from the books, the kings, the lodge of sorceresses, the Nilfgaardians, the more beautiful aspects of the world. But only the third game really captures the spirit of the original material, for me it absolutely works as a continuation of the Geralt novels. The dialogues and the humour are spot on, Yennefer and Ciri finally are here, the world is rich, the stories deep, if Sapkowski weren't such a game-despising snob he would be proud of it.
 
I absolutely disagree. I started playing the first game after finishing the novels and hoped for some kind of sequel storywise. But it seemed as if the game was set in another universe. Gone was the wit and humor, what you got instead was dreary and bleak atmosphere, something that's not in the books. Sapkowski created a harsh, realistic world, not a rotten hellhole where even in the city you feel like you're crawling though a dungeon. The story was confusingly told, the huge gaps between the chapters were annoying and the whole game just doesn't feel like a Geralt of Rivia-adventure. Maybe the amnesia idea wasn't the greatest, the fact that the plot was completely detached from the events of the novels didn't help, either.
In the second game you finally got many things from the books, the kings, the lodge of sorceresses, the Nilfgaardians, the more beautiful aspects of the world. But only the third game really captures the spirit of the original material, for me it absolutely works as a continuation of the Geralt novels. The dialogues and the humour are spot on, Yennefer and Ciri finally are here, the world is rich, the stories deep, if Sapkowski weren't such a game-despising snob he would be proud of it.

To each his own I guess. But I felt that that part in bold was one of the most interesting and characteristic parts of the game that was reminiscent of the source material. The whole Ciri plot + dumb cliched prophecy is as copy-pasted as they go. Ciri chapters are especially fucking boring, I don't know maybe you were interested in reading about a lesbian 15 year old or something but to me it got boring real fast.

Going by your logic plots of all 3 games are detached from the books. To me and many others the first two books that are compilations of short stories are true Geralt-driven adventures. After gaining some popularity Sapkowski decided to create his own "saga" and to me he fell flat on his face. In one of the books Geralt is almost 90% absent, WTF?!

The second game with its focus on politics is especially grating. That's like Star Wars Phantom Menace - who would want to see freaking Council meetings when you came to see an adventure about Jedi. Geralt is a monster hunter not a bodyguard for hire. Thankfully in the 3rd game the political intrigues are all but absent.
 
It seems we like different things in the books. I enjoyed the first two with their short stories (my favorite being A little Sacrifice), but the story really started to hook me when Ciri was introduced. I just love Ciri, the way she talks and behaves, less her prophecy (you are right, thats neither very original nor especially interesting). The main thing that excited my in the books were the characters and their interactions, in particular the fantastic dialogues (love Dandelion, too). And the political intrigues were another strength and one you don't find in the first game that much.
So it's quite understandable that we prefer different games (to be honest, imo only the third part is a truly great game, the first one is okay, the second one good).
 
It seems we like different things in the books. I enjoyed the first two with their short stories (my favorite being A little Sacrifice), but the story really started to hook me when Ciri was introduced. I just love Ciri, the way she talks and behaves, less her prophecy (you are right, thats neither very original nor especially interesting). The main thing that excited my in the books were the characters and their interactions, in particular the fantastic dialogues (love Dandelion, too). And the political intrigues were another strength and one you don't find in the first game that much.
So it's quite understandable that we prefer different games (to be honest, imo only the third part is a truly great game, the first one is okay, the second one good).

Guess so. To me it's still TW1>TW3>TW2. I'd actually much prefer the 2nd or the 3rd game or the next game (if there will be another Witcher game with Geralt as a protagonist) to be a sort of a prequel and to concentrate on Geralt setting out on the Path for the first time after passing the Trials and finishing his training. That would be a GREAT game. The fates of the world and Ciri's wet dreams don't interest me much.

I've read that at first Ciri's strory was supposed to be told via flashbacks but then some fans or whoever proposed that Ciri be a playable character. So CDPR technically appeased that crowd but in such a half-assed way that it shows. They really should've kept her story in flashbacks.
 
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Definitely yes! My favorite location! The swamps of Velen come nowhere near those big trees that hide elven ruins! : )
 
The Flotsam forest is indeed beautifully crafted ... but TW3 has some really gorgeous environments as well. The lighting is amazing, and I really enjoyed visiting worlds like Tedd Deireadh. There was something really stunning about its desolation. I think they were also tremendously successful at crafting cityscapes in this game. I haven't seen anything on the scale of Novigrad in quite a while, and the city really felt alive. Also love Oxenfurt.

I really wanted to see more of Tedd Deireadh. Shame really....
 
Keeping it short, no I don't think it is.

Flotsam is beautiful in a different way. Draw distance is extremely short, so it lacks the sense of grand scale that gives a lot of points in TW3 their beauty, but the details in every nook are outstanding. That, and the way the map of the area was drawn makes it feel more daunting, especially in your first playthrough when you don't know the lay of the land. It's very easy to get lost, for the woods to devour you and then throw 20 endregas at you.

There are multiple spots I can think of off the top of my head that are far more beautiful. The view from the Kaer Trolde bridge, the view the game throws at you immediately of the mountain pass around Kaer Morhen, some spots around Crookback Bog, numerous vistas in Skellige...
 
I felt restricted in Flotsam Forest, to me the invisible walls were too present. Artisticly it is lovely, but I was glad to leave
 
Pfft. You're as restricted in TW3 with its' "You've reached the edge of the world" messages.

..... Everything has to be restricted at some point. Witcher 2 is a tiny fraction the size of Witcher 3, and flotsam forest is less than a 3rd of Witcher 2. That's the restriction their talking about, not that there's and end. There's a lot less to build when you can only see and approach things from designed direction. Also Witcher 2 has a closer FOV making the larger trees and denser forest seem even more so. Also all those large trees block your view so the draw distance is really quite small. In other words flotsam uses a lot of tricks that simply wouldn't work in a Witcher 3 sized game.
 
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