No big surprise but nevertheless a bit sad.... I've expected them to cut back consequences after they announced Witcher 3 to be open world with huge seamless regions. That's what you get when you decide to go open world. You trade in storytelling possibilities, tension, pacing and especially consequences for some more exploration...
I think they will pull it off ,they'll combine well the storytelling and the open world and of course branching storylines are super possible in an open world context.I don't think the open world is to blame,they just wanted to do something more mainstream in the witcher 3 thus neglecting certain aspects such as wildly diverging storylines and politics and going open world.Or maybe the branching would take too much time since they had to fill the whole world with interesting side quests which i imagine is a lot of work.So the open world could be blamed.Nevertheless they would eventually go mainstream and they need to sell and i wholeheartedly support that need the open world was an eventuality.I am glad that it's done by CD PROJEKT we may witness something revolutionary by the combination of open world and storytelling in the witcher 3
By state of the world I meant and they epxlained that this village might burn/ or not based on your decisions and so on(in some interreviews). About those quests that can parish they talked in that 35 minute video in Novigrad part. I believe you(and we all) will get enough ingame consequences of our choices. I mean it would be wierd if CDPR would change this policy into just tiny changes. I bet they just thought you won´t get totally different act depending on your choices just this village will burn or this city will fall to Nilfgaard based on your decisions(just example what we should expect).
Basically, they meant no branching stories in the context of the W2 comparison, so that means no branching chapters or full locations, branching stories are still there.
Which is awesome, I've always disliked greatly how one third of TW2 is completely unplayable until you make a second playthrough, which hurts the game especially because its a rather short one and rushed at the end.
TW2 for the scale of events and themes it was prepping up for, should've had at least 4 full chapters to feel complete, especially at the pace the story was going, and instead it had 3, that played like just 2.
But anyway point is, in the open world, they wont just deny you a chapter or location for the entire playthrough.
Which is awesome, I've always disliked greatly how one third of TW2 is completely unplayable until you make a second playthrough, which hurts the game especially because its a rather short one and rushed at the end.
TW2 for the scale of events and themes it was prepping up for, should've had at least 4 full chapters to feel complete, especially at the pace the story was going, and instead it had 3, that played like just 2.
But anyway point is, in the open world, they wont just deny you a chapter or location for the entire playthrough.
You’re missing the point, it’s just that it won’t be like 2 different games, does not mean things can’t be very different.
I think that this clarifies well: open world environment relates much better to a single sotyline than two separate. I think that this is only a plus. Maybe you don't have a game to play twice but a game twice as long. Nevertheless the huge relevance choices that CDP always gave hasn't to be impacted by this factor alone. In addiction to that, I think it's easier to write a better and more detailed single story rather than separate it in two branches.
So I think some worries are unnecessary. I think it's fine and anyways it never has been our choice to be done.. leave them devs some work O0
oh that makes sense.i hate having underlined words in my texts it must be some kind of mental condition but i hate I would like to change that if i could, the witcher is a legitimate word goddammit i don't want no red lines under the witcher except if it's the bad guy's blood under geralt's boots.
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What people can't seem to understand is that in order to have meaningful choices you need to have "locked" content ,so you shouldn't complain about "locked" content.That would be the equivalent of complaining in real life that having sex with a girl is "locked" because you killed her mother before that girl was born.
Also i think you're doing the witcher 2 a disservice by calling its final chapter rushed.It did not have that many side quests and it's main story was shorter but that does not make it rushed.
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So you don't mind having a feature ditched since there will be another completely different feature?That's like saying i don't mind doing away with the signs since geralt's armpits are now shaveable.
I wouldn't call it features. Maybe just an other design choice for TW3. And a better one imo.
The posts you quoted both explicitly referred to TW2, and were relevant. Please don't use strawman arguments in order to create a dispute where none exists.
It was cut short in the initial release, you may want to read this article:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-06-seeing-red-the-story-of-cd-projekt
I liked the way TW2 branched. It was a bold design decision that added a lot of replay value. I understand if they don't want to make TW3 branch that much, but I still want smaller scale branching, as was promised by CDPR in this thread. To me, RPGs are about decisions, and those decisions are only profound if they exclude other possibilities.
One thing I should stress though: having the option to do or not do a quest is not a form of branching. I should have that option most of the time, but it's not much of a decision on its own.
One thing I should stress though: having the option to do or not do a quest is not a form of branching. I should have that option most of the time, but it's not much of a decision on its own.
Well said. They talked about it in some of the interviews how some quests are time sensitive.
Due to the open nature of the world, if someone asks you to do something urgent but you get too distracted and wonder off far away, that should count as a choice too and the game should react to it. I don't know how they handle this in the game, hopefully they handle it well. Life shouldn't stop for NPC's just because they're waiting for you do to something, and the quest is in your quest log for half the game.
Yup. TW2 was amazing, especially when you played it the second time and discovered how much you just didn't KNOW from the first playthrough. But I can totally understand why that particular approach wouldn't work so well on TW3.
I would hope that one of the key things is (often) that you don't find out for a long time what the consequences are for any decision, and that sometimes you don't find out until you've finished the game and go and read the wiki to see what you missed. This was one of the strengths in both of the earlier games, and really helped with replay value. You should be able to go back to an earlier savegame and see what would have been different, but you should be discouraged from doing that until you've finished based on your current decision.
I'd phrase that differently. They trade in certain storytelling possibilities, certain tension, certain pacing - for other storytelling possibilities, etc. Not sure if this is what you meant; I get the impression from your post that according to you, the more linear a story is \ the less a story branches, the less meaningful it is to the player. The less compelling it is.
I feel that some of the best stories in games are linear and involve no significant player choice. It closes off some routes for the devs, but opens up others - the ability to tell their story, consistently, without interruptions and without "what if"s that might not be that interesting.
Not that I think TW3 will be linear.
I couldn't find the interview, but I remember that in a recent one Jose (I think) was asked about timed quests, and he answered that while there might be a few, in general they don't want to make the player feel rushed and so we'll be able to go through it at our own pace.
Agreed. One of the things I loved about the branching narratives was how it changed your perspective on things., such as with...
...the dragon.
Oh great, another of these topics. They said that there will be no completely different chapters like in The Witcher 2 when they announced TW3, but only now some people awake and start whi... I mean complaining about that. It was already explained that it's not about taking features out, but using open world as a tool to improve story's nonlinearity. Thanks to that you can always go back to the places you already visited and see with your own eyes a long term consequences of your decisions. Separate chapters would be extremely restricting in this regard and that allows them to make story longer, as they don't have to cut it into bigger pieces.
I'm glad that there are not 2 branches like in TW2, it was quite nice but I liked the TW1 style better. More branches mean more work and that means less content. As we can see in TW2 the "2 completely different" paths were only questing in one of the two corners of the map, seperated from the other corner but you visit it during the main quest. I don't say that TW2 was bad but I only see a lot of difficulties with creating "different" stories. In my oppinion it's better to focus on one main story and put more effort in showing consequences of different decisions in a single world and not like "you can't see it because you decided the other way".
The branching in W2 worked because of how the game and the levels were structured and it was definitely a great way to tell a story from 2 vastly different perspectives.
I loved it, but it doesn't mean that it would translate in the same way to on open world game.
I'm sure that there will be scenarios that will play out differently in W3 based on the decisions the player makes.
Maybe something similar to final quests in Act 3 of W2, but maybe on a slightly bigger scale, who knows, but I'm sure that there will be such situations.
So yeah, some people are overreacting a bit.
I loved it, but it doesn't mean that it would translate in the same way to on open world game.
I'm sure that there will be scenarios that will play out differently in W3 based on the decisions the player makes.
Maybe something similar to final quests in Act 3 of W2, but maybe on a slightly bigger scale, who knows, but I'm sure that there will be such situations.
So yeah, some people are overreacting a bit.