TW3 is 20-30% bigger than Skyrim

[archaven.84]

Well nice article about the monster hunting. Really nice addition that Geralt has to first investigate, study, read book, monster trekking and luring as well as better and effective ways in killing said monster contracts.

But again.. such a huge world.. how many types of different monsters can you have? 40? 50? 60? Is that really that many in Witcher's bestiary? OR what i'm stressing here is .. yeah you completed the Vampire quest. So is it a one time off thing? Or there gonna be 30s, 40s, or unlimited Vampire contracts? So you be repeating the same process of investigating, studying, buy X item for trekking, buy y item for luring and z item for killing. Now that's what open-world is about.

 

[Maerd.298]

According to the GI article, the monster hunting is going to involve more preparation activities.

So first you need to activate your "witcher senses" to do a little investigation, look for clues, which are either scattered around or you hear Geralt talking to himself about what he thinks might have happened. It is used to narrow down a list of potential culprits, so eventually you are left with only one monster being the cause of trouble.

Then, you search for books to know more about the monster, the potions you should use or his weak points. You might skip that and just go in "swords blazing", but you will be underpowered. Proper preparation might for example teach you some kind of special move, that will insta-kill the monster if executed properly during the fight.

You also have to consider the monster's habits or other factors that will make him weaker/stronger. For example, you will have a hard time fighting a werewolf during full moon, as it will make him more powerful.

While it sounds good at the first glance it can be just a different type of the cookie-cutter. For example:

For the 35th time Geralt approaches similarly looking cave (a bit randomized features by the level generator) and for the 22nd time he observes the corpses in front of it. For the 22nd time Geralt mumbles the comment that this is a monster type X or a monster type Y and that he needs to go read some books in the city for the 29th time. But he's very bored because he did that already 22 times and the fun part of it disappeared somewhere around the 6th similar quest. Besides, he has an ubersword because he managed to get to the high level area before he supposed to be there because due to such a large landmass devs made huge amount of bugs and missed several key points to prevent that. So he says "Plow the books" and massacre everyone in the cave without any problems or bothering to investigate.

I mean it IS possible make complex 30 quests for monster investigations but the game is coming next year 2014, not in the 2024...

 

[gregski]

While it sounds good at the first glance it can be just a different type of the cookie-cutter. For example:

For the 35th time Geralt approaches similarly looking cave (a bit randomized features by the level generator) and for the 22nd time he observes the corpses in front of it. For the 22nd time Geralt mumbles the comment that this is a monster type X or a monster type Y and that he needs to go read some books in the city for the 29th time. But he's very bored because he did that already 22 times and the fun part of it disappeared somewhere around the 6th similar quest. Besides, he has an ubersword because he managed to get to the high level area before he supposed to be there because due to such a large landmass devs made huge amount of bugs and missed several key points to prevent that. So he says "Plow the books" and massacre everyone in the cave without any problems or bothering to investigate. />/>/>

I mean it IS possible make complex 30 quests for monster investigations but the game is coming next year 2014, not in the 2024...

Please direct your concerns to all those people that complained that Witcher 2 has too little monster hunting.

Cause I have a solution to what you described - make a very limited number of long, complex, deep monster hunting missions. Let's say 10. But then, this forum will be flooded with whining "oh I want it to be more like Witcher 1, moar monster hunting, moar monster types, moar moar moar". Well, more in quantity, less in quality, so people should make up their minds what they want. But the devs can be sure of one thing, that they will never satisfy everyone.

 

[Kallelinski]

According to the GI article, the monster hunting is going to involve more preparation activities.

So first you need to activate your "witcher senses" to do a little investigation, look for clues, which are either scattered around or you hear Geralt talking to himself about what he thinks might have happened. It is used to narrow down a list of potential culprits, so eventually you are left with only one monster being the cause of trouble.

Then, you search for books to know more about the monster, the potions you should use or his weak points. You might skip that and just go in "swords blazing", but you will be underpowered. Proper preparation might for example teach you some kind of special move, that will insta-kill the monster if executed properly during the fight.

You also have to consider the monster's habits or other factors that will make him weaker/stronger. For example, you will have a hard time fighting a werewolf during full moon, as it will make him more powerful.

If that is true, it will be an utopia for fans and a dystopia for casuals. A fan would be totally excited to learn more about the world and the monsters, a casual would just wonder what he has to do.

 

[Maerd.298]

Please direct your concerns to all those people that complained that Witcher 2 has too little monster hunting.

Cause I have a solution to what you described - make a very limited number of long, complex, deep monster hunting missions. Let's say 10. But then, this forum will be flooded with whining "oh I want it to be more like Witcher 1, moar monster hunting, moar monster types, moar moar moar". Well, more in quantity, less in quality, so people should make up their minds what they want. But the devs can be sure of one thing, that they will never satisfy everyone.

I like the solution and the solution for people who want "moar" is a game designer with strong critical thinking skill... But they already started to follow the "moar" route by announcing the size of the world as "larger than Skyrim", which in turn make a dilemma: do you fill it with boring quests or leave it empty. Filling it with complex quests requires a lot of time. Then, testing it is another beast of its own.

 

[gregski]

I like the solution and the solution for people who want "moar" is a game designer with strong critical thinking skill... But they already started to follow the "moar" route by announcing the size of the world as "larger than Skyrim", which in turn make a dilemma: do you fill it with boring quests or leave it empty. Filling it with complex quests requires a lot of time. Then, testing it is another beast of its own.

In my opinion mentioning Skyrim and comparing to it is not the best move by CDPR's marketing.

They are throwing an anchor here, putting themselves in the opponent's ring corner. Now everyone is going to have this Skyrim comparison in mind and perceive the game through Skyrim lenses. Hell, I even saw comments already saying "these screens look too much/to little like Skyrim".

 

[draconis184]

Cut them some slack. They never said TW3 was going to be LIKE Skyrim. They mentioned Skyrim just once. And that is to give fans the idea of their world. Hell, they could just say TW3 is going to be about 19-21 km2 in size, but then again, that doesn't give us as much perspective as 20-30% larger than "the game everybody knows and is talking about right now".

 

[archaven.84]

Cut them some slack. They never said TW3 was going to be LIKE Skyrim. They mentioned Skyrim just once. And that is to give fans the idea of their world. Hell, they could just say TW3 is going to be about 19-21 km2 in size, but then again, that doesn't give us as much perspective as 20-30% larger than "the game everybody knows and is talking about right now".

It could be the 20-30% larger than Skyrim is a marketing hype (sure Witcher need more casual fans. selling 10M copies of TW3 is CDPR dream). With the game coming out on 2014 and they have very little time (double the crew does not mean double or quadruple the productivity). Right now the features are truly over ambitious but i think basically CAN be done with the Skyrim cookie-cutter technique.

 

[Randomdrowner2015]

Hopefully the "open areas" are not noticeably scaled. The reason why TES games are so overly bloated with (unfortunately generic) ruins, camps, caves etc, is that a whole country is compressed to a 16 square mile area.

Hopefully the areas in w3 are of "natural sizes".

 

[edk]

Hopefully the areas in w3 are of "natural sizes".

That's what I hope for as well. It is much better to have a realistically, proportionate big world rather than for example towns being 5 minutes away from each other with monsters and bandits coexisting just 30 meters away.

 

[xwlr]

About that monster hunting thing, they could make it so that there are like 10-15 very complex, lots of preparations whole length quests, and then there are other randomly generated smaller monster tracks to fill the game.

I think it's okay to have a little repetative content if it is balanced out, because obviously the game won't be played forever, and you know, if there are enough unique content to make the spine of the game, some random generation can fill the background without becoming too overused.

Just something like finding a clue, a very short investigation to the monster camp (cave or whatever) and one special potion/oil that is needed to match the monster's specific combat style can make an interesting and randomly generatable quest.

And it should be in balanced quantities, so not one in every corner. So while there are technically infinite of these quests, you would only complete like 20-30 of these during the 100 hour gameplay, and mixed up with the 'one time unique' quests these wouldn't look too boring.

So you know, filling an area with content doesn't mean you need to prepare the game world for infinite lengths of playing.


Without random content the game could become like FarCry 3 after you capture all enemy outposts and end up with an island where there is very realistically nothing to do. Ok you can hunt zombie-tigers that need a whole clip of AK to die, but that won't keep the game going.

The question is: How big is the role that random generated content plays in the game?

In Skyrim, the caves and heirloom quests, so the Skyrim random content obviously had too much place.

 

[username_3547489]

I would love it if TW3 covers the entire world map.

One of my peeves about TW2 was getting a world map but only covering a few pin-dots on it.

 

[Agent_Blue]

Read somewhere that TW3 is going to be 20-30% bigger than Skyrim. In my honest opinion it's just way, way over ambitious. Not to sound negative.. with such a big world it could be a big empty shell with very little stuff to do or even alot of cookie cutter un-interesting sidequests. I have no doubt on the main plot and CDPR strengths in main story-telling but i'm very much interested in spending countless hours (probably 100 hundred?) immersing myself to the game world.

But if there are tonnes of un-interesting and repetive cookie cutter sidequests then taking it open-world will pretty much going backward in my opinion. I'm really interested to know what's developer view and how they could make the game interesting every bit without player feeling bored and also on whether have they consider about the cookie cutter quests.

Thanks for reading.

I Beg to differ.

Having bought and played Skyrim for more than 100 hours, I do have to say it felt overcrowded. You simply can't walk around without bumping into a ruin, a cave, a dungeon. There's no need or incentive to explore, as everything is in plain sight, readily available around the corner. It's not unusual for Points of Interest to be no further than a minute walk apart. It feels crammed to the core - and artificially so. There's not enough "white space" around in which to dilute POIs, so to speak. This oversaturation is, of course, the natural corollary of a game world which has been scaled down back to console-digestible proportions.

On the other hand, what excites me about the WItcher 3 screenshots we've been show thus far is precisely that there seems to be a lot of empty space in between Points of Interest, which, in itself, is a good omen. It lends meaning to exploration and discovery. In Skyrim, you simply keep bumping into POIs, of which there are far too many, in the sense that they're just minor variants of each other. It gets repetitive rather quickly.

So this abundance of white space that, apparently, TW3 screens show actually bodes well for an expansive, immersive, meaningful open world game. It frees devs from the perceived necessity of having to fill up the world and along the way indulge in the kind of repetitiveness that plagues Skyrim.

I have high expectation of this game. As for now, from what I've seen and read, It's a day 1 purchase. For real.

 

[Maerd.298]

I would love it if TW3 covers the entire world map.

One of my peeves about TW2 was getting a world map but only covering a few pin-dots on it.

When I was a kid, after watching Star Wars I wanted a Star Wars RPG game (that time there were none of those, btw) that include the whole galaxy to explore. That's right, billions of stars with thousands of inhabited planets but by some reason no devs picked up my genius idea. I wonder why...

 

[Agent_Blue]

When I was a kid, after watching Star Wars I wanted a Star Wars RPG game (that time there were none of those, btw) that include the whole galaxy to explore. That's right, billions of stars with thousands of inhabited planets but by some reason no devs picked up my genius idea. I wonder why... />/>/>/>

Plus, exploration, actually having to find places, needs to be part of the challenge. And in order for it to be a challenge there has to be a significant amount of "white space" in between points of interest. Some have to be secluded. Others hidden away. In a sentence, the exact opposite of Skyrim's approach.

 

[faz432]

People had the same concerns about the ambitious nature of TW2, I have no concerns at all when it comes to CDPR delivering.

 

[Agent_Blue]

They claim in the Game Informer article that "a point of interest will always be in sight." That means that there won't be vast, empty areas with nothing to do. That's ... just astonishingly ambitious.

Then again, a company who could make a gem like TW1 with a very small team the first time they make a game probably can work miracles now that they have two games' worth of experience and a larger team. />/>

Yes, That quote is disturbing. I'm not quite sure what to makemof it. Either:

A ) Points of Interest are all visible, i. e., none secluded, none hidden, none covered, blocked or otherwise passable-by. That would be most unfortunate. Skyrim has this and it's terrible. Probably one of its worst flaws.

B ) Points of Interest are clearly marked on your map/hud. Again, Skyrim wenbt down this path and crashed miserably.

Make some POIs secluded, others hidden, secret, blocked, disguised, etc. Secrecy is the cornerstone of adventure. Don't take that away.

 

[knightrobby]

One thing that boggles my mind is that they also said there will be no loading times. In a world larger than Skyrim? How is this possible? Oh yeah...next-gen!

I personally can't wait. The screenshots are freaking amazing. It will be an amazing game. I am sure other big RPG games are shaking in their boots about now...

 

[dueldogg]

I understand what you're worried about, but i dont understand why do you connect the quality of the quest creativity and/or writing with the size of the playable space.

If this is about resources and time, im sure they wouldnt even do it if they didnt think they could.
On the other hand RED have already shown us that with a smaller team and less money they can make amazing games and not just in quality of work bu also in quantity, building a whole new engine that can beat BF3 and Crysis 2 in graphics after having released one game is beyond what anybody could've expected.

And now, having much more popularity, sales from TW2, a team DOUBLE the size, the base of the engine done, i think its perfectly doable.

Hmmm, let's say they started working on TW2 right after they released TW1 in 2007. TW2 was released in 2012. So it took ~5 years to make TW2. Now they say that they are creating a new engine and the game is going to be 30 times bigger than TW2 with a lot upgrades and stuff. So it would take them 30 times longer to create a game like that. The group is twice bigger now, so it takes 15 times longer. Ok let's say they have gained a lot of experience, but it's still something about 10 TIMES longer. And last but not least, they are going to release the game for all 3 (2 of them will be totally new) platforms simultaneously (when at first they released TW2 just on PC).
So let's be realistic. Either this game is not coming in the near future, or it will be just an empty open world game with only few sidequests.

 

[Agent_Blue]

Hmmm, let's say they started working on TW2 right after they released TW1 in 2007. TW2 was released in 2012. So it took ~5 years to make TW2. Now they say that they are creating a new engine and the game is going to be 30 times bigger than TW2 with a lot upgrades and stuff. So it would take them 30 times longer to create a game like that. The group is twice bigger now, so it takes 15 times longer. Ok let's say they have gained a lot of experience, but it's still something about 10 TIMES longer. And last but not least, they are going to release the game for all 3 (2 of them will be totally new) platforms simultaneously (when at first they released TW2 just on PC).
So let's be realistic. Either this game is not coming in the near future, or it will be just an empty open world game with only few sidequests.

I'm surprised yours is the first comment I read on the matter. I've dwelled on the matter and based on the scares available hints, here's my take:

Look at the screenshots. There seems to be a lot of "white space", which, in my book, is a good thing. White space holds POIs together, lends scale and expressiveness.

Now, obviously, white space takes up considerably less time to design than Points of Interest. The POI/White Space ratio needs to hit the sweet spot. On one extreme, we have Skyrim, overcrowded, oversaturated with mostly repetitive POIs. We could, on the other end of the spectrum, have an empty world.

Look at the screenshots. I believe they may have hit the sweet spot.