Hello everybody. I am about to finish my 2nd playthrough at 325 hours atm. and wanted to give some feedback in hope, the game developpers might readit and hopefully take it into account.
tl;dr:
Technical issues of people using a 770 GTX card make it hard to play this game in a continous and immersive way
Xp are not enough, the overall xp curve needs a balance. Maybe make highest level witcher gear available at lvl 30. Easy fix. But still not satisfying as there won't be any content to do except a few contratcs and state of reason quest
The longer and more you play thorugh this game youwill notice its problems, especially on death march difficulty
Overall best game I ever played ignoring the problems above. I cannot wait for the expansions,which at some point was announced to be another 25 hours (at least) of gameplay or so I heard. But still, forcing me to buy a new graphic card when all games I own are looking gorgeous seems like coproate bullshit to me. A more detailed feedback follows below.
Game crashes... nuff said. Okay, jokes aside, I play on a GTX 770, which is a middle field but even Shadows of Mordor runs perfectly fine at the card's limit and looks gorgeous I might at.
The Witcher 3 on the other hand...not at all. I really do not know whether it is the gamesettings (although I tinkered with them for so long now, I think they aren't the problem, and yes I tried with low settings or YouTube advices for instance, to no avail) or just bad software. Please do something. I did all I could to solve this problem, but a game crashing constantly and even worse, a story driven game crashing when you have to have to listen and watch for a long time is impacted heavily by this, which caused hours of work simply wasted.
It was annoying to a level where I really considered selling this game on ebay or something, because the cycle of loading screens, annoying intro videos you couldn't skip and restarting whole fights plus backtracking scenarios where frustrating at best.
So, a verdict for this game by the technical issues I encountered along with general gameplay nuissances in this genre like constantly being bumping into obstacles and being stopped by seemingly only pixels of fences, clumsy horse handling, climbing over fences and low obstacles instead of being able to jump over them at full speed, sensitivity of running vs. walking mode etc. pp. is a clear fail.
I am sorry but the gameplay is crude and so inaccurate while many tasks in this game are relying so heavily on being precise and having a good timing. I know it is realistic but I am playing a game, not reality simulator.
This game did not lose anything if you addressed some convinience issues:
- camera maybe fixed on Geralts back always for instance, target lock and unhinched camera got me killed more often than bad play skills. Along with that I really want to have more radius when using the camera to search and enjoy the environment around me. I want to see the carvings on the armor and swords, want to see the skin details of human faces, monsters etc. Zoom in/out option is missing totally. Why?
- weird automatic targeting behavior. Geralt should be attacking every monster closest to his position automatically not the closest active hp bar visible.
- the target lock needs to be able to do as soon as a hp bar is shown. But you can't and have to be too close. This game seems to deliberatly put obstacles in my way so I won't dare to beat it as easily as it could be done or succeed with a more cautious strategy than running towards it till it attacks then trying to prance around it till I got enough time for target lock.
- Skellige got too many, way way too many, smuggler's hideouts, war bounties etc. On deathmarch I had a really hard time to actually reach lvl. 34, I did on the 1st playthrough but only after beating the game and with literally nothing left to do but looting the sunken chests on Skelliga. What's the point? Money has always been short in The Witcher but in Witcher 3 you have enough. For instance, I always managed to win the card tournament and earned 4,5k crowns. On my first playthrough I owned about 15k crowns at the end with still more sunken loot to be gathered. Maybe substract 5k or 6k caused by mispurchases (don't know if that is a word). If you have some management and just buy recepies for potions and cococtions you are planning to use and not just buy everything (like I did anyways but I guess you see my point), you will have even more money.
This is a gameplay perspective frome me, playing the 2nd time now, on deathmarch only, keep that in mind, please, I did not try any lower difficulty. I guess many things won't even appear on lower difficulty settings but death march is hard enough without intentionally difficult combat handling and annoyingly inaccurate movement behaviors.
Regarding earning xp and using highest level witcher gear you simply don't get enough xp in this game as someone else has pointed out at the first page of this thread already. So, scratch 50% of sunken loot and replace it with more areas to explore, specifically, abandoned sites which grant 120 to 170 xp, or increase xp gained by destroying monster nests.
- Level requirements overall. Travelling to Skellige is a level 16 storyquest. You exceed this by far if you do everything at recommended level in Novigrad and Velen. I tested it and noticed that you are level 20-22, not doing something more than 5 levels below or above its recommendation. This needs to be balanced. I wasted too much xp after entering Skelliga and starting there.
Anything to make it possible to use highest level gear before the boss fight and hopefully way before, not just when entering the last quest. A good time would be Battle of Kaer Morhen, in my opinion, but generally I think we should have access to this gear way before.
Okay, so, monsters: too many Drowners, Sirenes and derivates, too few Succubus, Demons, Fauns and such. Come on, you made a game for an adult audience so go all the way. And way too few Doppler incidents.
For example the Hime was so creepy (and shocking, goddamn you) and I really loved to have more creatures like this one (contracts even). The Hime story is my favorite at the moment.
Gwent: not anyway deep enough as it could be, I don't have all cards at the moment, even after beating the game (although more likely due to the bug which makes some NPCs not providing new card rewards after beating them) and I really wished they would give you more freedom for building a deck (or maybe there is, I don't know, I always kept the cards while following the little sidequest with Zoltan). But don't get me wrong, I LOVE!!! this mini game and I am eager to try areal TCG of it if they onsider publishing it at all. I just think it should be bigger and more established maybe in the expansion? I am looking forward to it
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Okay, so this was a little rant about this game and it covers the most negative things I encountered for myself. Everything else is amazing and needs no further compliments (395 hours total, while you might substract a big number cause of crashes, glitches and such, still a solid 200+ hour of gameplay speaks of it own despite the negatives mentioned above).
Design of this world is amazing, the details are higher than I ever expected. The story is thrilling and caught me from the very beginning. The characters are well written and deeper than you might have thought and grow even more so conmsidering the different dialogue options you can choose. Awesome.
Though I really wanted Geralt to be less manipulated by Yens behavior. Her arrogance and bossing around (along with Keira Metz...god this woman so deserved my 1st playthrough's decision) I simply couldn't stand and the fact that Yen always thanks with sex or dubious compliments simply should not ave cut it all the time. Then again, I was playing Geralt and not a character gen version of myself. I got along to get Ciri but ultimatley, I couldn't be sympathetic with Yen (even less with Keira and Philippa Eilhart). Those 3 needed to burn on a pyre....I get carried away.