TW3 General Feedback [SPOILERS]

+

TW3 General Feedback [SPOILERS]

  • Yes

    Votes: 643 74.2%
  • No

    Votes: 61 7.0%
  • I wish this was a Sard poll

    Votes: 27 3.1%
  • I don't get the "Sard poll" joke

    Votes: 98 11.3%
  • I don't vote on polls

    Votes: 8 0.9%
  • "I don't vote on polls". Genius, Reptile, just genius.

    Votes: 8 0.9%
  • Sometimes, we do things we regret. On a related note, how's it going today?

    Votes: 22 2.5%

  • Total voters
    867
New to Witcher series - my gripes.

As someone new to the Witcher series there are several things I've come to despise in The Witcher 3.

1. Why am I limited to 8 save slots? I have an external 2 TB drive attached to my Xbox One and you're telling me I can only have 8 save slots? The Elder Scrolls Oblivion and Skyrim, Two Worlds 1 and 2, Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4, to name a few, have no limit to the amount of saves one can have. What is so different about The Witcher 3?

2. The crafting system is ridiculous. Why must I PAY to create components to make my weapon, then PAY again to create that weapon? I seem to recall paying over 1200 to create a weapon. There's no satisfaction to crafting because I feel like I'm buying that weapon. Why don't you get rid of the damn crafting system and just let me buy the weapon outright from any blacksmith?

Furthermore, selling the that newly crafted weapon to the same craftsman nets a loss. I recently observed after paying 520 to make weapon ( not to mention what I had to pay for crafting components), the same vendor payed me 504 for it.

Now I understand why people use glitches to accumulate money. If I knew what I knew now, I would have used the various money glitches.

3. Death March - level 9 human is able to inflict significant damage to my level 36 character who is wearing Ursine Mastercrafted armor. I'm talking one to two hits takes about 1/10 of my health bar.

4. The amount of time it takes to load a saved game is 70 seconds. This is absolutely ABSURD.



Thanks.
 
1. No limit here so it must be a console thing? I honestly don't know why. Maybe someone from CD Projekt could give an explanation.

2. I think it said it in the crafting tutorial. Something like "smiths need to eat too!"? Basically it's not you who forge new weapons and armor, it's the artisans, and they need money to craft because it's their job. I recall having to buy crafting components in the beginning for a silver sword and in the end for some high-end Witcher gear, that's it. I find all the crafting items I need when exploring. Basically I have a Geralt with tens of thousands of Crowns because finding stuff and then selling it will net you insane amount of money to just keep around because there's nothing to spend them on, unless you have the expansion pack which all the gold will go to runecrafting.

3. Probably because it's on Death March? I do see your concern though. Personally I like the way levels are treated better in TW2.

4. 70 seconds to load is due to the hardware. On PC it's much faster, especially if you have a Solid State Drive. Is it something that they could improve? probably, but keep in mind that the game world is huge.
 
1. Really? Only 8? I just glanced through my save folder (PC) and there's roughly 1600 saves there.

Does X1 have some sort of cloud saving feature? If so it would make sense for the devs to limit the number of save files you're able to create.

2 & 3. The crafting makes sense since the Craftsman is doing all the work so needs to get paid. Geralt is a monster hunter. A swordsmaster. Not a blacksmith/Craftsman. Also, I don't find the fact that selling a weapon nets a loss at a vendor a flaw since by the end of the game I was swimming in crowns anyway. There are tons of other ways to make money in the game.

And Death March is brutal. Nuff said.

4. You could try and buy an SSD. I'm running the game from a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO and it loads the game in like 10 seconds. But that's on PC. No experience on consoles. Would probably improve them, but no idea how much. Might not be worth it.
 
Last edited:
There is only 8 save slots in PS4 too. I think it would be cool to have 15, but this is fine too. Where do you need more? I have kept two saves from my previous game and I can use 6 now. I think you can manage with this just fine if you save wisely.
 
It is an odd limitation, though, a Witcher 3 save file is typically only about 2.5-3 MB, and for example about 3 times smaller than a Skyrim save.
 
Last edited:
My PS4 save files show 16,78 MB :question:


Edit: And wasn't there some problems with Skyrim if you had too many save files?
 
May contain SPOILERS (Okay it contains spoilers)

So, the Witcher 3 : Wild Hunt ...
I am a fan of the two previous games and of the books. So I had high expectations for this game and was counting the days until the release. This may have also lead to my final verdict. I hoped for a worthy continuation of Witcher 2 and an epic final of Geralts saga with a closure to the plots from the books. Maybe the best game of all time. But what I got was "just" a good game.
CDPR did a lot of things right. I had many hours of fun. But at the end I felt disappointment about the way several things were handled.

At first the positive things:

- The graphics are beautiful. My computer may be a bit too old to get the maximum but I was still impressed. It may not be my GOTY, but it is at least the best looking game of the Year. And all the details. Superd handled

- Music: Brilliant

- The high amount of Side-Quest all with a little story attached. Nothing like give me 10 drowner tongues (not that this was bad in Witcher 1, but if every monster hunt in this game would have been like that, I would have probably skipped them after some time)

- Ciri, Yennefer, Dijkstra, Keira, Emhyr, Roach,... So many characters from the books for the first time in the games

- Living villages and cities. Okay, we had that before, but not at such a large scale

- Fighting system was improved in my opinion, compared to Witcher 2. And the throwing daggers were luckily replaced by the crossbow (even if it is overpowered under water)

- Gwint: Best Minigame ever

- The bloody Baron and his quest. Aside from the main story of HoS the best quest in the game

- Keiras Quest/A towerful of mice

- Skellige Helping Hjalmar and Cerys

- Battle of Kaer Morhen (Although your friends don't really make a difference)

- Hearts of Stone !!!


Middlings:

- I missed the alchemy from the previous games a bit. It was great to upgrade the potions and oils, but still I think that potions are restocked after meditations and that you can drink them and eat the whole time during fights, without a eating or drinking animation like in Witcher 1, makes things too easy. And in Witcher 2 you had the feeling that you are preparing yourself for a fight or a hunt.

- Latest after surpassing level 15 the fighting was way to easy. Through the handling of alchemy and food it was possible to beat enemies 10 level higher than yourself. If you got hit just eat something, retreat a bit, and than attack again. In the late game it was not even necessary to use alchemy at all. Quen was enough. Maybe quen is also a bit overpowered. Luckily they increased the difficulty in HoS.

- The skill tree had also advantages and disadvantages. It was a nice idea to limit the number of perks you can use at the same time. But I had the feeling that several perks were of very limited use. I am thinking that the skill tree in Witcher 2 was still better


Things I was disappointed about:

- The save game import from Witcher 2 was pointless aside from Letho. Witcher 1 is completely ignored, Adda and Yaevinn are completely forgotten, Kalkstein is killed offscreen, Sigfried got only mentioned in HoS and the Order of the Flamming Rose has only a short cameo in a sidequest. And Thaler is always alive (Not that I would have killed him). But also Witcher 2 is nearly completely ignored. The differences through our decisions in Witcher 2 are probably one hour of content. Half of it Letho. Henselt is always dead, Stennis never mentioned, Sakia and Iorveth do not appear, Natalis is always missing, Radovid is always a crazy Witchhunter,... . You cannot even ask the people you meet: "Hey Zoltan, what happend to Vergen", "Lady LaValette, what happend to Anais and Arjan, both are not in the game".
I know that it is impossible to make a completly different game depending on you choices, but at least some small quests for important characters, some extra dialogues about others and Iorveth and Saskia should be in the game.

- The politics: At the beginning I thought just Redania against Nilfgaard? Okay, that is not much but hopefully good written and maybe there is a third party (hoped for Lodge or Scoia'tael/Saskia). I had no problem with making Nilfgaard more human, but turning Redania in a bunch of rassistic, pyromanic witchhunters and jerks? There should also be some counterparts, some nice people but no. Radovid is no longer the stern but the mad. And we are not even given a real reason why he changed from a rassistic and power hungry but also cunning and diplomatic king into the guy who wants to burn all mages and talks nonsense. It could have been easy to give his character more depth, but it looks like CDPR wanted him that way. He is supported by Caleb Menge, a guy you always want to kill, and Whoreson Junior who is a serial killer. Really? Just give them a marker with EVIL on it to make it more obvious. The only whitchhunter who is not deeply dislikeable is the guy from the baron quest line. But I think he just had not enough screen time.
Also to decide the outcome of the war through one Quest...
I was disappointed by this design as it no longer shows us two evils, but a big EVIL and not so bad guys. Probably all in preperation for the Empress Ending

- Reason of State: The whole Third Northern-Nilfgaardian War is decided through one Quest. If you break Dijkstras leg (something you cannot expact from the textoption shown) you loose that option and Radovid wins automatically. I think that was the only prerequirement. Aside from the fact that the war is decided by just one quest it is poorly written. The option help to kill Radovid or not is, aside from Roleplaying aspects, as Witcher normally try to avoid politics, not a real choice. Radovid is portrayed as such a bad person, that you don't have any second thoughts about killing him. Afterwards you have to decide between let Dijkstra kill your friends or you killing Dijkstra. Roche and Dijkstra are here out of character. Roche trusting Emhyrs proposal is very strange, even if Roche is desperate. Emhyr broke the agreement with Letho and the truce with Foltest during the 2. War. And there is nothing to stop him from taking controll over Temeria again after he conquered the rest of the north. And Dijkstra cannot wait for five minutes to attack Roche after Geralt is gone.
Also the choice between Dijkstra and Roche is very one sided. Roche lied to you, but he saved your live just a few minutes before and he helped you in Kaer Morhen. And that is only in this game. So Dijkstra is threatening Broche, Ves and Thaler and wants to build a Northern Empire with himself in control. It looks like he is just hungry for power. So, again no difficult decision. It could have been lesser evil choice, but it was badly presented and the ending screens show, Nilfgaard wins = everyone is happy, no bad consequences mentioned.

-In this game we need to rescue or help nearly every Lodge member remaining. Saving Phillipa, Margarita and Fringilla from capture, saving Keira from her own stupidity (but this story line was very good) and helping ex-members Yen and Triss. I hoped for a bigger role.

- The Wild Hunt was poorly written. Nearly no screen time, a lot of missing explanations (why are they no longer spectres, where is the time and space travelling ship coming from,...) and Eredin and his generals have only one liners as dialogues. I know that they are kidnapping children, are elven racists, want to kill every human, feel superior to every one, need Ciri/her child to invade other worlds. So yes, they are evil. But you can have evil characters or stereotypes. And the wild hunt was definitly a sterotype. They are not interesting. There is no reason to fear them. And in the previous Witcher games we had antagonists like Jacques de Aldersberg and Letho. I don't think that need to say more...

- The White frost was unneccessary and completely against the lore. An Ice Age that threatens the world in 2000 years or so is turned in something that freezes the whole multiverse, a magical being that can only be stopped by one - Ciri. I am definitly no fan of ignoring the books. In the previous games it were thinks like changing triss haircolour, making radovid some years older (he is three years younger than Ciri) and Adda a bit younger and other minor things. But ignoring the whole story about Ciris child and turning Ciri and the White Frost into something both are not for a badly explained shocker at the ending??? In my opinion this was not a good choice.

- No optional bossfight against Avallach. In the other games was always an optional bossfight.
How did he betray Geralt and Eredin? Nobody knows. I always thought that he must have a plan for his personal gain, but no, it is just the White Frost and he is a nice guy who wants to help Ciri. By the way, would Emhyr not also have used Ciri to defeat the White Frost? Why are they against each other?

- Most of the things above make me sad, but I really hate how CDPR dealt the relationship between Emhyr and Ciri. Emhyr killed her mother and is reponsible for the death of her grandmother and the whole population of Cintra City. I think some of them were also important to her. He wanted to impregnate her (okay, he got soft at the end, but that doesn't change what he did and planned. It just shows that he has still a tiny bit humanity inside). This is completely ignored. For an unknown reason nearly everybody knows now that Ciri is his daughter. Also everybody forgot about FakeCiri, so nobody askes: "Your wife is called Cirilla of Cintra, and you have also a daughter of the same name???"
Instead of using this history to make him a character who is trying to redeem for what he has done to Ciri as a reason to search for and help her, the history is ignored and he wants to make her empress.
Charles Dance wasted for not even ten minutes of dialoge.
Sure the history of the characters is difficult and in this case disturbing. But ignoring one of the two biggest WTF OH MY GOD moments in the books for an ending which feels completely out of character for Ciri is questionable in my opinion.

- Choices and Consequences: A lot of choices in this game, but most of the consequences are the same. The main story is also always nearly the same. Okay, Witcher 2 was superb in this, and in Witcher 1 you got at least help from different people in the epilogue, but here. The Baron is either dead or gone, in both cases he vanishes from the game. Menge always dies, Rittersporn is always freed the same way. In Skellige you can at least decide who will become king, but this does also not lead to much differences in the game. It is unimportant who comes to Kaer Morhen for help, aside from Keira, Vesimir always dies and aside from Lambert no one is in danger. The five choices for Ciri could have been described better and are sometimes confusing. But this is another debatte, I think I have already written way too much.

As mentioned above Witcher 3 is a good game, but it has also a lot of flaws. I would still give it 7,5/10 for all work and time CDPR invested in this game. And for Hearts of Stones. It would be unfair to say that it is a bad game because disliked the last part, which was rushed probably due to lack of time. I had a lot of fun with it and it entertained me for a long time. But in the end I felt disappointed. Maybe some of the things I mentioned above could be changed with an Enhanced Edition. CDPR may have said that an EE is currently not planned, but until they say "no, there will be never an EE, we want to do Cyberpunk now, only Cyberpunk and nothing else" I have still hope =)
 
Last edited:
New to the forum and first thought about Witcher 3.

I haven't played though the game, but it is an extraordinary game, as what I anticipated ever since E3 2014 trailers.

Just set aside story, gameplay, graphic, my only less content thought about Witcher 3 is the monsters, or bestiary. A little different action between subspecies would make every single type of monster memorable. Say Ekimmara and Katakan, griffin and cockatrice, archgriffin and basillisk, they have no difference other then their skins. However, forktail can attack with tail and sprint with horn on the head compared to wywern, rotfiend self-explodes while drowner clearly can't, even as simple as happy can walk on the ground while siren can't, these are all cool features.
I can't expect each monster species can be designed as awesome as foglet (too awesome that it is my favorite), but one different action should be reasonable.

Moreover, gwent monsters do not match bestiary, which gives me a little disappointment. Vampires alliance is awesome that I anticipate contact about every type of vampire still I cleared every notice board on Skellige. Also missing frightener despite the beautiful art on the gwent card.

Lastly, a question, does Ulfhedinn actually appear in the game?

Above is just my thought about the game. Generally bugs are the only shortcoming of it, as they are for every sandbox game.

I look forward to seeing Ciri as next protagonist of the Witcher game series. Female character features as protagonist could be as interesting as it is challenging for CDPR. Knowing many may disapprove, I only state my own opinion.
 
What kills The Witcher 3 for me...

I feel like I always have to be looking in that Witcher Vision mode thing, every quest I do just involves going to a location and using it to find some clue. I just don't think it is good game design and that things like these were first implemented in games as a fix for people not being able to find what to do. The problem is you have to use it, the game itself just isn't designed to let you find the stuff for yourself, you're told to go to a location and use it to find some random bit of crap to pick up.

I just hate it, it kills my immersion and basically ensures every quest just has one mechanic of just doing that. I don't want all these vision things, I want to be looking at the game and taking in the world, instead I'm looking at the floor constantly in that vision mode. It's like what killed games such as Bioshock for me, all I ever find myself doing is looking at the floor and looting.... why is there so much loot any ways? It's all pointless, you could have just given me recharging health a skill system that lets me unlock stuff through just playing, not money and let me focus on the game and not the bullshit.

Again another example is with EverQuest 2, when that was in beta and first released you'd have these dialogue options, you have to read it all to get a clue to where your quest is and you worked it all out. This made quests so fun as they were all mini puzzles essentially, but then WoW came out and suddenly every MMO had to copy this boring waypoint system. It just made it so every quest was just running from point to to b doing a checklist.

I just hate it and hope in future games cd projekt can get rid of it and focus on keeping the player immersed in the world. The Elder Scrolls games used to do this amazingly, now they've turned into bullshit loot games that have all these hand holding mechanics. However even in Oblivion I remember reading quest dialogue that would give you puzzles to work out, one example was having to work out that it wants you to go to this fountain at a certain time of day because some text would light up to give you your next clue. Stuff like that keeps you immersed in the game, however in The Witcher 3 you'd just use the Witcher Vision and it ruins it all...
 
There's an ini file tweak to make the visual effect less like a drunk epileptic. Makes it more bearable.

In gameplay.ini set MotionSicknessFocusMode=true
 
That's not at all what he's arguing about, and I completely agree with him.

It makes me think, why the HELL would the devs design such a detailed world where even the fucking erosion of land was taken into account, when this streamlined feature ruins it all? You seriously have to go out of your way to take in all of the work that CDProjekt has done to make this world.
Everything is hand made, down to the textures. Every single road has a story, and daily life of others is always taken into account. Almost every item placed in this world has a reason, from the boards placed over inclines to the scaffolding being used to hold up building falling apart. Where there isn't human life, you can see how nature has terraformed the land over hundreds of years, and foliage is placed accordingly on inclines.

Now where do you spend the majority of time? In a fucking zoomed in colorless filter, looking for red. It's a downright disgrace to the level designers, a serious shot in the foot.
 
Last edited:
That's not at all what he's arguing about, and I completely agree with him.

It makes me think, why the HELL would the devs design such a detailed world where even the fucking erosion of land was taken into account, when this streamlined feature ruins it all? You seriously have to go out of your way to take in all of the work that CDProjekt has done to make this world.
Everything is hand made, down to the textures. Every single road has a story, and daily life of others is always taken into account. Almost every item placed in this world has a reason, from the boards placed over inclines to the scaffolding being used to hold up building falling apart. Where there isn't human life, you can see how nature has terraformed the land over hundreds of years, and foliage is placed accordingly on inclines.

Now where do you spend the majority of time? In a fucking zoomed in colorless filter, looking for red. It's a downright disgrace to the level designers, a serious shot in the foot.

I'd add camera distance/angle/fov to that, really limits the way we can appreciate the scenery, it's designed to be ready for combat any moment but really OOC cam shouldn't have been set with combat in mind this much. Thankfully mods' been made for it tho.
 
you can try looking for clues without witcher vision :p although on some terrain quests would take weeks then

I tried it once in a monster contract and it worked pretty well, but most of the time you have to using your witcher senses to have been able to examine clues along the way.
When it worked it was very immersive. It's like when i'm driving my car and want sometimes to have a manual gear to enjoy the drive. dunno if it makes sense, lol...
 
My problem with this mechanic is that it turns every single quest in the game into a tiresome routine of "CLICK THE WITCHER SENSE KEY TO WIN", whereas in previous installments you had to actually think and explore.
This game was just not designed for us who want an actual challenge in the quest design
 
Last edited:
The Witcher sense mechanic could be interesting if there was a greater possibility for the player to fail or make a mistake. Currently only two quests in the game allow that,
Carnal Sins and the Herbalist quest
in Hearts of Stone

As mentioned here, it's really strange that CDPR spent so much time working on the tiniest of detail for the world, then decided to make all that effort worth little by over-relying on the Witcher sense, and moving the camera further away. It's quite odd, almost as if they've forgotten how to make quests without it. :p I hope we see less Witcher sense in Blood & Wine.

TW1 and TW2 were fine without Witcher sense. Witcher sense in TW3 could have been nice had it been used less, and had a greater margin for error.
 
Top Bottom