Yep, thats how I would describe it
I intended that as more of a mocking tone... but ::
Yep, thats how I would describe it
I intended that as more of a mocking tone... but ::
Just wanted to point out that (most likely) not everything (especially regarding the flora) is 'handcrafted' or placed by hand but that tools like SpeedTree are doing the bulk of the work here instead. Hence the presumed possibility of CDPR utilising SpeedTree (or whatever automatism) to retrospectively populate the world with herbal plant life if the necessity should arise.SpeedTree is made up of many parts, developers have a lot of freedom in how they leverage the technology. In any case, I'm not even sure how the discussion got here. Whether they are using SpeedTree to "randomly" generate the assets or not is pretty much irrelevant, eitherway there is additional work involved -- by the people individually placing them or by the folks that need to make "corrections" afterward. Your original post talked about them wasting development time to "get rid of them".
Well, I guess it's all those factors and details to be aware of (and CDPR's seemingly deepened aversion for fetching things just for the sake of fetching things) that they (most likely) won't revert back to the alchemy systems of either The Witcher 1 or The Witcher 2 (or something in between those two). Even if it means cutting back on the immersion and complexity that were (more or less) provided by the classic systems, and ignoring the apparent importance (considering the poll, which, let's be realistic here means jack shit, unfortunately) of those old systems to the overall gaming experience for a lot of people.But how many herbs? How many different varieties in each region? How much variation across regions? If you emulate the TW2 system, you're going to need a minimum of nine substances, for the TW1 system you need three times that. Each one has to be made available in plants and monsters for every kind of ecosystem, from ice fields to marshland.
So how do you design it? If they make the plants easy to find, there's no challenge in it. If they restrict them to certain locations and force you to travel to top up, it's just another kind of repetitive fetch quest. And they're clearly pleased with the way they've designed the environment in a way that works - you can't just throw in a few thousand herbs and keep that level of planned design.
The more I think about it, the more I feel that there's nothing inherently wonderful about the potion system from TW1 and TW2. It was just a mechanic that worked for those games, but if it conflicts with other visions that they have, then it can be dropped.
This might be too much of a botany-oriented question, but, when you were looking at this vegetation, were you just looking at these paintings and photographs like you mentioned, or did you actually take a look at specific plants and say “Okay, these belong in this ecosystem,” and things like that?
Absolutely! Absolutely! We have a guy, an artist, who did the vegetation for The Witcher II, and he’s responsible for solely focusing on the vegetation in The Witcher III. He’s a guru when it comes to botany—I mean, the man’s amazing. He knows exactly what we need, how it’s planted, when and where it grows, what time of the year it grows, what eats it.
When we told him we wanted sunflowers, he’d tell us things like “Okay, then take that away, it wouldn’t grow there… these two things wouldn’t cross-breed.” He’d say, “Okay, this bush only grows in cold climates, so we’re going to put them on these coastal islands, ones with more of a Nordic influence [tall cliffs and snow].” There’s a specific kind of leaf that grows in areas with hard winds, so, we’d look for bushes…I can’t remember the name, but there’s a reddish-purple bush that grows low and by the coast.
Basically, we look at the conditions and ask [ourselves], what makes sense here?
Birches in the inland, pines on the cliffs. We also look at the materials in the area and ask, all right, what do these people have access to, what would they build their buildings out of?
@Pajkes - calm down and keep the discussion civil, or walk away from it. Your choice.
Can you elaborate how exactly I was not civil cause I used ZERO offensive and curse words and I didn't attack or name anyone particular in my last posts in this topic.If you disagree with my opinion (and it's obvious you do) than say so and don't hide behind false accusations how I was rude cause if I were than you would have quoted part of my posts which are supposedly 'offensive'.
I can understand why they're doing it, it's now a gigantic open world with proper vegetation placement etc so maybe ingredients are hard to come by, I can imagine it being quite the chore to go ingredient hunting everytime just to create that 1 swallow potion you need since it's no longer a small area where you know what to find where like in TW2.
Need to see how it actually works though but not really bothered by it so far.
Or adding bunch of herb merchants in important/convienient places (or maybe just ~1-2 in each area reeeealy close to FT point so in-need you will FT there, get stuff in less than 3 minutes and FT back.Making sure there's a sufficient quantity of ingredients to make a dozen potions placed around signpost and fast travel checkpoints would also help avoiding the need to go searching for that one missing ingredient every time.
Thanks for @Telcontar this.That tea-bag analogy for the new system is very poor since we are talking about infinite auto-refills, presumably without any ingredients. I would actually be fine with it if it worked like real tea-bags.
Herbs and other alchemical ingredients could have repetitive usages, with a degradation property so that every time you meditate you wear the material out in order to auto-refill your stock. So when you finally use it up and the ingredients perish, there would be no more auto-refills and you would need to gather fresh ones. Of course, an option to enable/disable which consumable you want auto-refilled, and using which particular ingredients would be needed for maximum player control. And like diluted tea-bags in real life, they could take it a step further by have diminishing yields for each use, so that you would have a trade off of not having to go around and gather stuff, for weaker versions of the consumables. You can then have skills in the alchemy development tree which gives the ingredients greater durability, which would make sense as your alchemy processes become more efficient with higher expertise.
I would also like to see the return of alcohols as potion bases (as well as consumables), so that the strength of these also affect the strength of the potions. Alcohols could also work with a degradation mechanic or just have a set number of uses per bottle.
I would be perfectly fine with a system like this, especially since the whole thing would actually make logical sense. However, I don't think this is what they're doing. They seem to be shooting for a simple, infinite auto-refilling system without any hassle whatsoever. If that is the case, the gross simplification and the fact that it doesn't make sense would seriously put me off. I did like the two tier potion system mentioned in the interview. That sounds interesting.
This I actually could get behind as well, but as mentioned by several others before, this solution also would need the necessary ingredients to be placed in the environment, since there wouldn't always be a merchant or herbalist around for Geralt to stock up on things again.I had a little doubt because the auto refil the potions, and I belive that I woted for the TW1 system, but as I thought about it, I started to understand why they trying out this solution. I can totally understand @BlackWolf500 about the role playing stuff, because I do the same thing with the first two games. It is part the ritual before a bigger battle or just regular questing. But how it would work out an open world game? It would all depends on the herbs and the monsters population. In the first two games they have to spawn them every corner, due to the size of the map, in an open world game would be much harder and take way more time if we don't count the merchants. But if the CDPR decide to go with the auto refill potion mechanic I would expect some copmensation in other mechanic which add more depth of the game but in a different place. I could live with that, not to mention that the game will be moddable.
But if I would able choose one mechanic I would choose this one, because it would be the "golden path".
Thanks for @Telcontar this.That tea-bag analogy for the new system is very poor since we are talking about infinite auto-refills, presumably without any ingredients. I would actually be fine with it if it worked like real tea-bags.
Herbs and other alchemical ingredients could have repetitive usages, with a degradation property so that every time you meditate you wear the material out in order to auto-refill your stock. So when you finally use it up and the ingredients perish, there would be no more auto-refills and you would need to gather fresh ones. Of course, an option to enable/disable which consumable you want auto-refilled, and using which particular ingredients would be needed for maximum player control. And like diluted tea-bags in real life, they could take it a step further by have diminishing yields for each use, so that you would have a trade off of not having to go around and gather stuff, for weaker versions of the consumables. You can then have skills in the alchemy development tree which gives the ingredients greater durability, which would make sense as your alchemy processes become more efficient with higher expertise.
I would also like to see the return of alcohols as potion bases (as well as consumables), so that the strength of these also affect the strength of the potions. Alcohols could also work with a degradation mechanic or just have a set number of uses per bottle.
I would be perfectly fine with a system like this, especially since the whole thing would actually make logical sense. However, I don't think this is what they're doing. They seem to be shooting for a simple, infinite auto-refilling system without any hassle whatsoever. If that is the case, the gross simplification and the fact that it doesn't make sense would seriously put me off. I did like the two tier potion system mentioned in the interview. That sounds interesting.
But how many herbs? How many different varieties in each region? How much variation across regions? If you emulate the TW2 system, you're going to need a minimum of nine substances, for the TW1 system you need three times that. Each one has to be made available in plants and monsters for every kind of ecosystem, from ice fields to marshland.
So how do you design it? If they make the plants easy to find, there's no challenge in it. If they restrict them to certain locations and force you to travel to top up, it's just another kind of repetitive fetch quest. And they're clearly pleased with the way they've designed the environment in a way that works - you can't just throw in a few thousand herbs and keep that level of planned design.
Perhaps this snippet from an interview with Jonas Mattson might shed some light on the auto-refill debate. They are taking flora and material placement very seriously, and this could be connected to the auto-refill feature (less stuff and more realistic environments vs ingredients spam all over the map):
source
EDIT: Could a mod please relocate this post to the alchemy thread -- posted here by mistake! Apologies.
I had a little doubt because the auto refil the potions, and I belive that I woted for the TW1 system, but as I thought about it, I started to understand why they trying out this solution. I can totally understand @BlackWolf500 about the role playing stuff, because I do the same thing with the first two games. It is part the ritual before a bigger battle or just regular questing. But how it would work out an open world game? It would all depends on the herbs and the monsters population. In the first two games they have to spawn them every corner, due to the size of the map, in an open world game would be much harder and take way more time if we don't count the merchants. But if the CDPR decide to go with the auto refill potion mechanic I would expect some copmensation in other mechanic which add more depth of the game but in a different place. I could live with that, not to mention that the game will be moddable.
But if I would able choose one mechanic I would choose this one, because it would be the "golden path".
That tea-bag analogy for the new system is very poor since we are talking about infinite auto-refills, presumably without any ingredients. I would actually be fine with it if it worked like real tea-bags.
Herbs and other alchemical ingredients could have repetitive usages, with a degradation property so that every time you meditate you wear the material out in order to auto-refill your stock. So when you finally use it up and the ingredients perish, there would be no more auto-refills and you would need to gather fresh ones. Of course, an option to enable/disable which consumable you want auto-refilled, and using which particular ingredients would be needed for maximum player control. And like diluted tea-bags in real life, they could take it a step further by have diminishing yields for each use, so that you would have a trade off of not having to go around and gather stuff, for weaker versions of the consumables. You can then have skills in the alchemy development tree which gives the ingredients greater durability, which would make sense as your alchemy processes become more efficient with higher expertise.
I would also like to see the return of alcohols as potion bases (as well as consumables), so that the strength of these also affect the strength of the potions. Alcohols could also work with a degradation mechanic or just have a set number of uses per bottle.
I would be perfectly fine with a system like this, especially since the whole thing would actually make logical sense. However, I don't think this is what they're doing. They seem to be shooting for a simple, infinite auto-refilling system without any hassle whatsoever. If that is the case, the gross simplification and the fact that it doesn't make sense would seriously put me off. I did like the two tier potion system mentioned in the interview. That sounds interesting.
Well, they're TESTING it, maybe under so much pressure they changed idea
Got this idea from a Skyrim mod. The problem cdpr said was that player stored their potions because they were afraid to waste it or wanted to save it for the hard battle that never came.
Now what that mod did was degrading the effectiveness of the potion over time. For example after one hour since the creation of the potion it loses 10% of it's effectiveness, after a day 50% or so, etc.
Opinions?