I will never say that is bullshit or it reminds me another dev companies because it's not my way of reinforce my reviews. I've not plat yet the game, I don't know how it works. But I guess that it seems easy to confuse a whole system of alchemist with some little variation that I assume will not affect any immersion.
As far as I could understand, alchemy and the system to work with it, will remain very important. Far as I know CDPR has not eliminated the process of creating potions but has facilitated the process of reducing the time in a few potions and overcome to devote to more complicated formulas for their ingredients and their power.
If the basic swallow Level 1 is very easy to create why repeat the entire process of creation, when that same time can be used to create another higher with the same process but different ingredients?
But that is NOT the POINT.
The point is ALL potions, no matter if upgraded or normal are refilled automatically when you meditate as long as you have alcohol in your inventory.
But that has a few effects:
1. Unless they have 300 types of different potions with different effects you will be done with having to brew potions an collect herbs very quickly, you will spend almost no time using alchemy at all since you only have to make the whole thing 1 time and then you can just buy alcohol regularly and let it auto-refill
2. It breaks immersion. If I make a potion out of specific herbs, I can not just go ahead and after the first time making it start making the potion out of thin air. If I do not have the necessary herb I should not be able to make the damn POTION
3. There are better ways to reduce the hoarding and the fact that the process or collecting ingredients and brewing potions is tedious, as for example maing potions have multiple uses, enabling Geralt to "auto-refill" potions in meditation with LESS herbs than he would normally need, enabling "thinning out" a potion, meaning creating more uses for a potion by "auto-refilling" the potion if you have 1 or 2 uses left which means you will get more uses of said potion buit the potions will loose a part of their effectivity (like a tea gets weaker if you fill it up with water again a few times), or by making herb plants give you more herbs for each plant you loot, which means you have to go gathering herbs less in general so you have enough supplies
Not to speak of the fact that whenever you kill a monster you get ingredients for possible alchemy uses. And we KNOW monster-looting is a part of TW3. Hell, I would even be okay if you could enable/disable the auto-refill or if only LOW-LEVEL potions would auto-refill and upgraded potions would need ingredients EVERY TIME.
Auto-refill - however you put it - is just LAZY, not for gamers but by the developers. Giving an OPTION for auto-refill, sure why not, I'm game. But making it auto-refill no matter what does not only break immersion but does also completely negate the existence of an alchemy system in the first place. Might as well just find the potions as loot or use them like buffs. We do not need an alchemy and potion-brewing system if we only have to go in there 30 times in the whole game because we only have to brew potions if we make a new potion we never made before. It also negates the existence of plants and herbs existing in the world. For WHAT? They are only needed 1 time anyway, why are they around then???
And for those who argument that it is tedious work, that "clicking a button" means nothing and is not "deeper". Not true. This time I CALL Bullsh*t.
Because to be honest, you might as well see "why is clicking a button in combat deeper than having the character attack automatically?" "Why do I buy things, can't Geralt just restock automatically?" "Interacting with objects in the environment? Why doesn't my character do that automatically?"
I mean sure, let's just make it an MMO. Potions turn to buffs, combat system is going to be an MMO style one, etc, etc
I know, completely exaggerated example here, but what I try to say is, if we start letting things be done automatically and see the game as significantly better and don't see a difference in meaning, immersion and depth of systems here, where do we stop?
Alchemy was never about being particularly skilled or clever, or about having to go around and search for herbs for hours, no one ever did that neither in TW1 nor in TW2. It was about preparing for battle, being tactical with your decisions, managing resources (because some potions SHARED ingredients meaning you might have had to decide "Do I make potion A or B in this case? A is more powerful, on the other hand, if I make B then I have enough ingredients to make potion C as well, that might be the better choice". It was tactical. What is my playstyle? What helps best? How can I get the most out of the resources I have here. The gathering was there for immersions sake and to create the "problem" of having to manage your resources. Hell in TW1 it was even more tactical, encouraging you to also look at the secondary substances the potions had in order to get the most out of it. You could combine potions in a way that a secondary substance helped you reduce toxicity in a way that you could take more potions than normally, or that not only your endurance but ALSO your vitality had a boost (for the price of more toxicity). It was a TACTICAL TOOL which you used to make fights easier, but at the same time you had to pick your fights wisely and take the potions when needed, because you might not have been able to create more or toxicity might prevent you from taking more potions when you actually NEEDED them more. Things like that.
It was not a button press, it was tactical resource and asset management.
And it was great.
With the auto-refill not only the gathering (which created the necessity for the tactical aspect of brewing potions and having to decide to brew one potion over the other sometimes, resource management) but also the brewing itself (primary substances, secondary substances, toxicity management, asset management, tactical playstyle-related decisions, etc.) are eliminated. You do not have to worry about the resources you need to brew a potion, you do not need to choose one potion over the other because you'll just have them all, you will not have to worry about toxicity since you will be limited to take a max of 2 uses of a potion in a combat situation anyway. Also you'll probably either need to meditate a lot to get rid of toxicity just to be able to take another potion that only lasts for 1 minute or (the other scenario) you will have toxicity effects last only for 1 or 2 minutes which will make the whole thing very redundant.
Tell me it is NOT that way, because it IS. You might not care, you might find gathering herbs tedious or be annoyed by the fact you have the brew a potion (simply click a button) every time, but in the end the fact remains that having all potions on autp-refill and only last 1 - 2 minutes will eliminate almost every tactical element that was in the system before and there would have been LOTS of different way to make the potion/alchemy system in a way that would reduce the amount of time spend on gathering herbs, reduce the amount of times you'd need to manually refill potions, hell even eliminate manually refilling potions altogether (as an option) by giving the player the option to enable auto-refill for potions he knows he needs every time, which would auto-refill as long as all ingredients are there in an order set by the player (A list where you go like "Auto-Refilling:" then you have a list of all your potions and you "activate" the auto-refill and give the potion a priority).
I'm sorry, no matter how it will "feel" in the end or if the "upgraded potion" system is good in the end, it doesn't change the nature of the new auto-refilling feature and the consequences it will have on the alchemy/potion system and IMO there is just no excuse why they couldn't have chosen an alternative or at least made a compromise somewhere in the middle.
My opinion obviously.