But who the heck is talking about lack of bigger cosequences, because I certainly did not heard anything about it.
I talk about it. And I also delivered arguments for that based on rational thinking and experiences with other games. Just read my post.
They just said that there will be no completely different paths through half of the game like with the Vernon and Iorweth choice, which also didn't happened in The Witcher 1, so you can't call it "changing the DNA of the Witcher franchise" as it just happened in a one game so far.
True, but Witcher 2 was meant as an evolution of Witcher 1. Witcher 3 instead seems like a more or less new direction.
They also said that open world is serving the story, not other way around, as they want to give you a possibility to go back to previous locations and see how your choices changed them.
I don't care about what they say. That's marketing and not worth a single dime without any actual proof. I believe it when I see it and not a second earlier. What you (and CDPR) say sounds nice in theory. The problem is that making that possible is a lot harder than it first seems. That's actually the strength of a hub-based approach. It's much easier to change small hubs based on previous actions than changing a whole seamless world. In the end, it's a matter of workload and effort.
It was already confirmed we can still affect the political side of the story, which also means a huge different consequences for the world (as even choosing neutrality will matter).
Just being able to affect the political side of the story doesn't mean that it's implemented in a realistic and meaningful way. You can also change the political landscape in Skyrim. You can decide which party wins the civil war. That sounds great on paper but in Skyrim the consequences are just poorly implemented. The only actual consequence of it is that you personally know what you've done, that it's written in your journal and that some NPCs give you a certain one-liner based on that. That's it. The open world itself almost doesn't change at all, at least not on any level which I wouldn't even hardly call realistic and meaningful. It's great that CDPR wants to improve on that. But the thing is: the problem is systemic and not just a failure of Bethesda. It's the DNA of a seamless open-world approach to make it incredibly difficult and costly to implement meaningful and realistic consequences.
Their main target is combining open world with a deep, nonlinear story and you think they would suddenly drop it just like that.
I don't think that. I think they drop their former approach to deliver meaningful and realistic consequences. You can still have a nice story with great choices. But in the end, CDPR are just game developers, no magicians. Their vision was never small (actually the opposite) and just because you want to do something doesn't mean it's possible or you actually achieve it to the extend you wanted at the beginning...
I mean we suppose to have 36 different endings and even over 200 if you count all the smaller consequences. Much more then The Witcher 2, yet you are claiming they simplify it for the sake of exploration. Nothing seems to hint at that aside of your own paranoia.
You compare apples to oranges. Skyrim has 1000 different endings in theory but not even one is implemented in a meaningful and realistic way. Don't get me wrong, I expect CDPR to make some fine endings which incorporate the results of your decisions and endings. But the problem is that this only applies to the end of the game (aka the end of the main questline) because that is one of the rare "stable" moment for the devs in which they have full control over the progression of the game and its current states. In the end making different endings based on a catalogue of statistics and story decisions isn't really hard. It's just work and requires a good writer. But the problem with consquences is that there is a huge chunk between start and ending of the game. You seem to be satisfied with having some different endings of the end of the game. But I care about the 100 hours of gametime or more in between as well. Consequences to me mean that the world changes according to my actions and not just at a predefined moment at the very end but "on the fly". The act structure (or a hub-based approach) gives you strong tools to alter the game based on the actions of the player BEFORE he gets to the end of the game but also in between. The changing paths in Witcher 2 was the best example for that. Based on your actions in the first act and the first hub you got to see a completely different hub and storyline than with different decisions. That was a realistic and meaningful consequence while you play. It altered the way you've played the game and not just changed the epilogue video you get to see at the end of the game. That's something very different if you ask me. That also has nothing to do with simplfying anything. It's not that I suspect CDPR that they don't want to have great consequences while people still play the game. It's just that the basic design they choose for the game means that it is very hard to impossible to achieve that. No game is a jack-of-all-trades I fear. If you want to change your gemeplay approach you are at risk to give up something for it. That's how game design and development works.
I understand that you just misinterpreting term "lack of story branches" as something more sinister then it really is, but they really just talk about lack of completely different acts you had in The Witcher 2, which makes sense, as there is no need to make this kind of restrictions in open world game. And it's not even a news, as they said that when they first announced the game. All the other choices and consequences we know from the previous games will appear in this game just as we remember them, just on a more direct scale. Trust me.[/QUOTE]
That's demagogic. The Witcher "DNA" consists of two games. One had branching narratives. The other didn't. What's 180° here?
Fine, let's only compare it to Witcher 2 if you don't see Witcher 2 as a "natural" evolution of Witcher 1.
They imo want to change the DNA of Witcher 2 of at least are ready/forced to give up some of its parts for different things like a seamless open world and exploration.
We don't know the measure of consequences, beyond there not being different paths that lock down whole regions (or assuming so). There could yet still be meaningful consequences. The only way to argue there certainly won't be is by defining only TW2's way as meaningful.
No, I disagreee. The real problem here is scale, not the branching approach. Simply said: the bigger your game, region, world, the more difficult it gets to include meaningful and realistic consequences, espeicially if you give players a lot of freedom in their own progression. There is a reason why most story-driven games have a (kind of) linear progression or at least a very guided design. Exploration and sandbox gameplay and from a design perspective the antithesis to a story-driven approach. Sure, CDPR want to combine both elements. I just fear that this combination has its limits and that a real hub-based open world approach would have been a much better fit to what CDPR planned to do for Witcher 3 since the beginning (based on Witcher 2). That's all.