Loot - too much, too little?

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Tuco

Forum veteran
Loot - too much, too little?

Ok, let me start saying I'm incredibly Impressed with wht CDPR achieved with TW3, so I'm not here to piss on the game.
Now, while the game is outstanding in its own, there are few things that I think it could handle better.

I could write down a long and detailed list of what I would improve, and then try to argue for every single point. Maybe even post it in the feedback thread where it would go with all the other posts of people writing down their own suggestions without paying attention to those posted by others.
And maybe I will, at some point. But I thought the issue mentioned in the title, specifically, is a point that should be extensively discussed in a separate thread.

In short: I have a problem with how TW3 manages "lootable" stuff.
I think the over-abundance of *useful* things you can gather/pick up at every step harms the pacing of the game, doesn't really help to make it feel "richer with content", as it was probably intended, but to make it more busy in a less-than-ideal way.

Just to avoid misunderstanding, let me stress that I'm all for highly interactive scenarios in RPG and I have nothing against the idea of needing to gather materials/reagents for potions, crafting and so on.
That said, I also think the game (well, the future games, at this point, since I don't think it's realistic to expect this to be changed even in the incoming expansions) could be a bit more elegant in the implementation of this concept.

For instance I would be absolutely fine with having far less useful herbs around the map, but making them much more valuable. And in the same way, I'd surely prefer if gathering ingots or pelts used to craft armors and weapons would be a far less frequent but far more rewarding matter when it happens.

Same goes with itemization. Having a large number of different weapons and armors? Good!
Having dozens of them dropping randomly from any enemy or popping out of any crate? It makes getting a new weapon considerably less exciting, to be completely honest, especially when it's so (relatively) easy to complete a Witcher set that in your level range will pretty much make anything else obsolete. Even that (supposedly) amazing relic sword which is handed to you with a very dramatic cutscene... Just to let you down when you check it in your inventory just to learn it's little more than "vendor trash".
Even exploring optional ruins and dungeons would feel a bit more rewarding, if you could get out of them something that can be genuinely useful (dunno, more gems, recipes and valuables -or even better, quest-enabling items- rather than another sub-par sword/armor for the vendor, for instance?

Anyway, I'd like to hear more sensible opinions about this (where "sensible" stands for "Please, give the matter some serious thought and argue for it accordingly, rather than defending what the game does just for the sake of defending it).
 
What difficulty do you play on? I'm just starting out on Death March, and it seems to me like chest and boxes have less loot in them. Maybe it's just me...
I agree about the UI though.
 

Tuco

Forum veteran
I play (and in fact I'm very close to finish the game, for what I can grasp) on Death March as well... But I don't think difficulty plays really a significant role in this discussion.
 
The item bloat is considerable in this game, true... more so then in previous titles. While giving every humanoid enemy a weapon and every barrel some beer to loot may add to the realistic feel of the game world, most of those items are useless beyond their market value.

Best option to remedy that would be a) reduce loot and b) make the loot that is there more useful... that would also include revisiting some of the items and crafting, of course.
 
They need to reduce the amount of lootables to artificially increase value in items and make the game less tedious. You can provide yourself with 100% of the materials you need just by looting everything, and you'll have so many crowns by the end it won't even matter. Game needs an economy.
 

Tuco

Forum veteran
Best option to remedy that would be a) reduce loot and b) make the loot that is there more useful... that would also include revisiting some of the items and crafting, of course.
Yes, you put it quite shortly, but that's exactly what I was arguing for. They say that "sometimes less is more" and I think this may very well be one of these cases. Finding too much stuff leads to two distinct problems:
- First, it trivializes the importance of every single finding
- Second, it breaks your pace, forcing (well, no, not forcing, let's say "strongly encouraging") you to stop every two steps.

- ...And, SURPRISE! Third, just as a bonus, it just contributes to reinforce the annoyance with inventory management that many people are highlighting around the web.
 
Yeah, i loot every container possible in the world, and items are just something i rarely look twice at. Most of the items are not even better than what's been looted before, but vendor items as it has been said. This really isn't that surprising to me, because i expected them to fall into this trap with their thoughts on items before release.
 
They don't have to reduce the look. Just stop looting ALL and only take what you need.

That's what it eventually comes to, but that also means that potentially good loot get's overlooked... checking loot is basically the same as picking it up, it's the same amount of afford. The only option to counter that would be sparkling loot for stuff that's useful, like magic gear, rare crafting materials or diagrams.
 

Tuco

Forum veteran
They don't have to reduce the look. Just stop looting ALL and only take what you need.


This never was about "what I loot", it's about making loot rewarding, useful and enjoyable rather than busywork.
 

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I am a loot whore i admit... At the end of my last playthrough i had 160 meteorite ingots and Had so many Crafting components from farming it lagged whenever i entered the tab in my inventory... Yes it was that bad...

This game desperately needs an item storage chest.
 
Yeah, playing on death march. I agree.

I find really cool swords all the time, then I kill a thug with an axe that is better.

They should have saved the relic weapons for higher levels exclusively in my mind.
 
I regret getting the saddlebag upgrades. I'm only level 15 so far...might just unequip those. I think it would of given me more inventory micro-managing decisions, what to loot and what not to loot.

My biggest concern is the sheer amount of alcohol that is dropped. It devalues food/drink as a vitality regeneration item. I would make a hardcore toggle and have meditation require 5 bottles of booze at the rate i'm picking these up. I never have to buy any of that stuff, there's just so much of it out there.
 
The real problem is not about the "loot" itself. It is more about its placement. A good loot, even a lot, is good if it is placed in some undiscovered location, better if quest related. But, going into a peasant house, looting useless crap just for the sake of doing, without a proper crime system, isn't that good.
A solution for that is..make not accessible the peasant houses.
 
The real problem is not about the "loot" itself. It is more about its placement. A good loot, even a lot, is good if it is placed in some undiscovered location, better if quest related. But, going into a peasant house, looting useless crap just for the sake of doing, without a proper crime system, isn't that good.
A solution for that is..make not accessible the peasant houses.

Ya, a couple village guards to look after the peasant houses would of been a tremendous addition to the game and would keep the player from looting everything and actually contributing to the economy...buying food/alcohol/etc.

I like when games starve me of resource, it gives me incentive to keep moving and searching so I can survive. When I got 10k in gold and full inventory of materials....it kind of sucks the fun out of that survival feeling.
 
I strongly disagree with the less frequent more valuable loot model, coming from the reference elder scrolls online.

They have this instead of skyrim/witcher 3 abundance mode, and its far far worse. Without a sense of surplus you can ignore, the world feels 1) Empty 2) The content you do find seems more like a game, an easter egg hunt, than a believeable world.

Since we don't have problems with crap like competitive progression, economies etc, i really enjoy something more real.
 
I strongly disagree with the less frequent more valuable loot model, coming from the reference elder scrolls online.

They have this instead of skyrim/witcher 3 abundance mode, and its far far worse. Without a sense of surplus you can ignore, the world feels 1) Empty 2) The content you do find seems more like a game, an easter egg hunt, than a believeable world.

Since we don't have problems with crap like competitive progression, economies etc, i really enjoy something more real.

No.
For 2 reasons.
1) Junk items doesn't add a living feels to the world.
2) Junk items breaks the entire economic system.
 

Tuco

Forum veteran
I strongly disagree with the less frequent more valuable loot model, coming from the reference elder scrolls online.
I actually was thinking more of things like Gothic, as reference.
EDIT: or, going with quite a different vibe, another good example would be Baldur's Gate 2 and its "epic loot". That was the kind of stuff you'd find one or two items in the biggest dungeons, at most, but when you got a Carsomyr you knew you had your hands on something special.

I don't think MMOs fit at all.
And Skyrim is another game I would label as ABSOLUTELY AWFUL when it comes to loot placement (and scaling), as we are on it.

The real problem is not about the "loot" itself. It is more about its placement. A good loot, even a lot, is good if it is placed in some undiscovered location, better if quest related. But, going into a peasant house, looting useless crap just for the sake of doing, without a proper crime system, isn't that good.
A solution for that is..make not accessible the peasant houses.
Barring access to homes and such would sound as a "solution" far worse than the problem itself.
I don't think it would be necessary at all, but yes, a simple-yet-effective stealth/crime system like the one used in Gothic could work wonders in these kind of RPGs.
Not even just to prevent you from picking up everything, but also because it would be a potential backdoor for a lot more diversity in quest design, sometime even when snaking/stealing isn't the main point of the quest (the Godfather-inspired bull quest in Risen 1 comes to mind).

Anyway, for those appealing to "realism", it should be pointed that games are abstract systems anyway.
A more limited (but more relevant) selection of lootable stuff in the scenario wouldn't really harm "realism" as make the "abstract simulation of a medieval adventurer" a bit more focused and better paced.
I mean, if we are going to appeal to realism at all costs, Geralt should be able to root out even common grass under his feet... But obviously the game feels far more focused when he limits "herb gathering" to "special ingredients relevant to his Witcher alchemy".
What I would suggest is more stuff like, dunno, making herbs three times more rare, bur required in lower number and three times more valuable too?
 
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This is an open world game so it has to be designed based on a minimalist playthrough. If you just did the bare minimum what loot would you acquire and what loot would you need? As with ALL open world game i have played you can always loot so much gear its insane the closer to a completionest you play.

Open world games assume you wont complete the majority of content in a single playthrough and so are designed to have lots of loot so if you are a minimalist you can complete the game without feeling forced to do content you don't want to. This means you as the player have a choice in how you play. the concequence of said choice is that you will have much more loot than you need and it is up to you to self regulate, IF excess loot impacts your game play.
 
Looting in this game is so annoying. I feel paranoid if I miss out on a loot but there are so much loot everywhere in this world, it just insane. I spend so much time looting instead of playing the game. Never really had to loot much in W2.
 
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